PHOTO: MFIT / CFDA
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Surprised that a fashion show should turn up in an art museum? Don’t be, as haute couture strides into the spotlight at the Boca Raton Museum of Art
ART OF FASHION BY DAVE WIECZOREK
NORMA KAMALI, black parachute cloth and feather jacket, skirt and turban, 2011, on display as part of IMPACT: 50 Years of the CFDA, opening Jan. 29 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.
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here’s a pivotal moment in the movie The Devil Wears Prada when a sniveling Andy confides to her colleague Nigel that she doesn’t think she’ll survive as personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the ruthless editor of Runway magazine. Nigel tells Andy to quit her whimpering and appreciate their rarefied world: “Don’t you know that you are working at the place that published some of the greatest artists of the century? Halston, Lagerfeld, de la Renta. And what they did, what they created, was greater than art because you live your life in it.” Nowhere does art imitate life and life imitate art more than in the world of fashion. Love it or hate it, everyone from 19th-century critic and essayist William Hazlitt to French designer Coco Chanel to Gossip Girl Blair Waldorf feels compelled to express an opinion about fashion. “[Fashion] is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath,” wrote Hazlitt, “tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.” Whether compliment or insult, it’s hard to tell. Where Coco stood was more obvious, if no less abstract. “Fashion,” she said, “is in the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” Leave it to the Gossip Girl – apropos to our times – to positively apotheosize fashion, declaring: “Fashion is the most powerful art there is. It’s movement, design and architecture all in one. It shows the world who we are and who we’d like to be.” Truer words from a fictional character were never spoken, if we are also to
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