One of the first big media tests of this New Austerity era we’re in will come Monday night at the Metropolitan Museum gala for the Costume Institute tied in with the opening of the new exhibit “Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion.”
Always one of the major celebrity/society happenings, the evening is put together by Vogue magazine and produces a blizzard of publicity shots showing movie, TV and fashion world stars looking their best in the most expensive clothes on earth.
In recent years, the shows have been preserved in book form by Yale University Press in gorgeous over-sized volumes that are as much fun to read as they are to look at.
“Model as Muse” is one of the best books in the series because it is so personality-driven and features a wide array of pictures by some of the most important photographers of the modern era — from Irving Penn to Richard Avedon to Steven Meisel.
There is a deeply nostalgic appeal to the book, too, in the shots of such great models of yesteryear as Suzy Parker, who went on to appear in several notable films of the 1950s (she’s a riot as a bad stage actress in the 1959 camp classic “The Best of Everything”).
A good portion of the book is devoted to the pop cultural revolution of the 1960s in which the formal dress of earlier eras was discarded as even the mature folks in fashion tried to keep up with the “Youthquake.”
Art historian and fashion writer Kohle Yohannon shows how key models such as Parker and Kate Moss have influenced fashion as well as worn it.
Moss has been able to parlay her status as a trendsetter into big bucks by signing on with the British Topshop chain for an affordable line of clothes in limited editions that fly off the shelves whenever they are made available (the first American outpost of Topshop in lower Manhattan has been doing sensational business since it opened earlier this month with an appearance by Moss that had crowds lining up around the block).
Yohannon traces the history of models from the anonymity of the pre-World War II era through the current “supermodel” era with figures like Moss and Gisele Bundchen generating almost as much press attention as movie stars.
Moss is co-chairing Monday night’s gala with Vogue editor Anna Wintour and pop star and fashion entrepreneur Justin Timberlake.
In the book, Moss provides an amusingly down-to-earth job description for the women in her line of work:
“If you can make a really bad dress look good, then you’re a good model.”
