Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

MORE THAN JUST PRETTY FACES

Ideas of beauty have changed considerably over the last 60 years. This at least is the idea behind "The Model as Muse", a diverting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Molly Young investigates ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Models are fascinating for two reasons: they are beautiful and they are beautiful in a way specific to the moment when they become famous. This explains why Kate Moss could never have appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1979, and why Christie Brinkley was nowhere near a Calvin Klein ad in 1993.

"The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion", an exhibition organised by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and sponsored by Marc Jacobs), features photographs and works of haute couture dating from 1947 to 1997. The aim is to demonstrate the way “a truly stellar model can sum up the attitude of her time–becoming not only a muse to designers or photographers, but a muse to a generation," explains Harold Koda, the institute's head curator.

As the curatorial notes put it, models are those "whose elegant poses and gestures" evoke the attitudes of the day. The show makes clear that this is partly something a model can control and partly something she is simply, ineffably, born with. In a sense, all top models are naturals.

The exhibition opens with an odd, three-dimensional homage to Richard Avedon's iconic 1955 photo of the model Dovima in a Christian Dior gown amid a group of shackled elephants. (A concurrent show of his work is now on at the International Centre of Photography.) The museum's version features the same Dior gown on a faceless mannequin in a freakish wig, flanked by cardboard elephants on a platform littered with hay. The effect is something like what might appear atop a wedding cake for Elizabeth Taylor.

Things pick up in the next gallery, which begins with Irving Penn's 1947 photograph "Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period", a stunning record of what feminine beauty used to look like. The women––including Helen Bennett, Lisa Fonssagrives and Dorian Leigh––have captivating faces, all-knowing eyes and arched brows. Their hair is brushed and pinned into simple updos with strict parts. Shoulders are a point of erotic emphasis, and facial expressions tend toward the imperious and the inscrutable. The models do not project vulnerability. They appear to have interesting personalities. They look––what is it?––sophisticated, old, and rather unlike the adolescents currently gracing the pages of Vogue.

When was the last time you saw a model with knowing eyes? It can make a gal nostalgic. Yet nothing's perfect. "They're all white and they're all skinny," a woman gripes as she passes the photograph. This is also true.

A hall decked with fashion photographs from the 1940s and 1950s is followed by a room lined with couture gowns, a pattern repeated for each decade the exhibition covers. But as the photographs reach the 1960s, the models appear to age in reverse. Swanlike ladies morph into knock-kneed, vacant-eyed waifs, such as Twiggy, Penelope Tree and Jean Shrimpton. Youth trumps maturity, replete with girlish freckles and a sense of glam blankness.

A photograph of Peggy Moffitt in Rudi Gernreich's boob-flashingly impractical swimsuit sets the tone for the main 1960s gallery, which features a light show and The Who's "My Generation" on repeat. The kooky sartorial experiments of the 1960s, including futuristic metal dresses and geometric fabric patterns, required a certain breed of alien-looking and stony-faced model. Despite all the funny-looking clothes, fashion photographs from the era are oddly lacking in humour. Studying the photos, one wonders if this might be a result of the models themselves. Have you ever seen a picture of Twiggy smiling? They are rare, and for good reason. She looks much prettier in a sulk.

Women become more forceful in the 1970s. Enter Jerry Hall, Patti Hanson, Rene Russo, Beverly Johnson and Lauren Hutton. The androgynous chic of the previous years morphs into a look that is at once hyper-masculine and exceedingly feminine, which is to say highly sexualised. The 1970s is all lewd red lipstick, hungry eyes and sweaty skin. A 1975 Helmet Newton photograph features Lisa Taylor with legs akimbo, slyly licking her chops as a faceless half-nude hunk awaits her summons. It's an emblematic photograph. Models also posed with raw meat and wolves, adapted manly wide-legged stances, and wore dresses that resembled loungewear. Decadence and languor was in; fragile dewiness was out.

The exhibit somewhat squishes the 1980s and 1990s together, sensibly as it turns out. A 1992 Patrick Demarchelier photograph of ten top models (including Naomi, Cindy, Christy, Claudia) is a fitting contrast to the exhibit's opening image by Irving Penn. Where Penn's women are demure––promising that the best was yet to come––Demarchelier's models wear their beauty like a string bikini. Their hair is fluffy and long. Their lips plump and their lashes thick; their cleavage casts an impressive shadow. This is the age of the branded supermodel, and the moment when the Met's claims about a model's influence really start to make sense. For the first time in model history, surnames are widely unnecessary.

As the 1990s progress, depictions of beauty become more familiar, less exotic, and therefore less interesting. It's a bit like scanning a weathered fashion magazine. It is harder to see how the models represent an idealised aesthetic when this aesthetic hasn't yet been embalmed. To contemporary eyes, Gisele doesn't represent an idea of beauty; she's just beautiful.

While the "Model as Muse" posits a direct line of influence from model to designer, it doesn't exactly illustrate how this works. Designers themselves have never been very good at articulating their influences, mostly because the concept of influence is fuzzy, nonlinear and largely unconscious. This is what makes a great designer great: the ability to produce garments that seem distinctly of-the-moment without being obviously derivative or over-literal.

To suggest that Jerry Hall was directly responsible for the body-conscious jersey disco-gown trend is like saying that Pamela Anderson is responsible for all the breast implants that came after her inaugural pair. It's possible that each woman had something to do with her respective trend, but more likely she was just in the right place at the right time, somehow looked right with the product, and happened to be widely photographed.

Still, the Met show can be applauded. An exhibit full of models makes for a pleasing diversion from Byzantine belt buckles and fleshy baptismal infants. It's not often that you can spend 45 minutes in a museum feeling alternately titillated and wowed by fellow mortals––not for what they've done, no less, but simply for the fact of their being.
 

"The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion" runs until August 9th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
 

Picture credit: Peter Lindbergh (German, b. 1944), Naomi Campbell in Geoffrey Beene, Vogue, June 1990, Courtesy of Peter Lindbergh; Loomis Dean (American, 1917–2005), Cabine of Christian Dior, 1957, Courtesy of Time Life Pictures / Getty Images; Bert Stern (American, b. 1929), Twiggy in Yves Saint Laurent, Vogue, March 15, 1967, Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

(Molly Young is a writer living in New York. Her last piece for More Intelligent Life was about Tyra Banks's unusual brand of feminism.)