By SUZY MENKES
NEW YORK — With noble heads held high and plain, determined faces, the women are on the march. They come from dead center, from the left and the right, an enfolding army in hazy black-and-white film footage, with a single message painted on a banner: Mr. President — How long must women wait for liberty? >
This frisson of emotion is followed by a foot-tapping surge of freedom: figures in shimmy dresses with bobbed and crimped hair twinkling with crystals, jazz music and a graphic cityscape overhead.
“American Women: Fashioning a National Identity” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum is the story of how the heiresses to robber baron fortunes, dressed in bustled European ball gowns, morphed into sparky, sporty Gibson girls. Having won the battle for suffrage and planted the seeds of feminism, they matured from flapper to screen siren. Stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth, camping it up in old movies, make this a show with a Hollywood ending.
Except that a final, digitalized room brings the story into the 21st century, with rotating projections of influential women from Serena Williams to Michelle Obama.
“What was compelling was not the women — but their collective identities,” said Andrew Bolton, the exhibition’s curator. His task was to display historic pieces from 1890-1940 that the Met has received from the Brooklyn Museum, founded half a century earlier than the Costume Institute. Brooklyn is staging a parallel show of its master works.
The gala, set for Monday night and to be led by Anna Wintour of Vogue, Oprah Winfrey and Patrick Robinson, a chief of design at Gap, the event’s major sponsor, was intended as an action-packed, celebrity-filled event. From the hot air balloon suggesting a madcap sporty world to the yellow tulips spilling from white jugs on tables with wicker chairs, this was down-home simplicity (give or take the white piano destined to accompany the hip performer Lady Gaga.)
Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art:Part of the “American Women: Fashioning a National Identity” at at New York’s Metropolitan Museum.
