“Dress Up,” an exhibition of fashion and costume jewelry just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, exults in extravagance while embracing illusion. There’s a clue in the title, and more in the content: Costume — or more bluntly, fake — jewelry, fashioned from plastic, tin, rhinestone, and whatever non-precious else, is for the most part made to deceive — an aspirational mimic, removed from the real thing. Extend the metaphor, and one could argue it’s what any of us does, every day, not only by pulling on clothes, but by any means of projecting a version of ourselves out into the world. A quote from Ru Paul on the wall sums it up nicely: “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” That’s what “Dress Up” is about.
The show grew from a gift from Torontonian Carole Tanenbaum, who gave the MFA her substantial costume jewelry collection in 2018. Plans to build an exhibition around it started soon after, , the MFA’s jewelry curator told me; but like a lot of things, the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 bumped it into limbo. The MFA added a new curator of fashion arts, , in 2021; tyson and Stoehrer worked together to conceive a more expansive frame for the Tanenbaum gift to include never-before-shown pieces from the museum’s fashion collection, and “Dress Up,” with its more than 150 distinct bits, was born.
True to concept, the show begins with a theatrical gesture: Three lithe female mannequins stand just inside the entry, on a broad black plinth that’s unmistakably a stage. Against a storm-gray wall, slim right-angled black bars frame each from behind, a graphic visual strategy that amps up the performative air.
On the left, a frock of liquid gold by designer Bob Mackie drapes one of the mannequins, cascading from its closed neckline down to tight wrist cuffs, and to the floor; on the right is a shimmery midriff-baring silver-toned gown by Alexander McQueen. Commanding center stage is Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Big In Japan ensemble,” from 2019, an all-silk affair in organza and damask, tied up with a big, thick bow. On its breast perches a lush fabric brooch (of sorts) by Lexington, Mass.-based artist Mariko Kusumoto, whom Gaultier commissioned to adorn his Spring collection for Paris Fashion Week, 2019. The sculptural quality of Kusumoto’s piece — tufts of gauzy fabric fashioned in blossom-like forms, with satiny bits looking much like abstracted butterflies perched nearby — complete the ensemble so thoroughly that after seeing it with, it would feel unfinished without. Even I, a fashion layman, know that with Gaultier, that’s quite a feat.
Here’s part of the point, I think, of “Dress Up:” Gestures both large and small, extravagant and not, complete the deception fashion performs not just on the runway, but in our daily lives. The show turns to a quote on the wall by the late Kate Spade, a designer of among the best-known handbags in history, to point out that “playing dress-up begins at five, and never truly ends.” With whatever tools we have — or can afford — we’re projecting ourselves into public as we’d like to be seen, and not always as we are.
“Dress Up,” inevitably, name checks the icons of fashion history — Halston, Pucci, Chanel. A chapter of the exhibition called “More is More” catalogs greatest-hit partnerships of the ‘60s and ‘70s: The luxe drape of an Emilio Pucci print silk caftan, an icon of sun-drenched Amalfi coast lounging, paired with glass-and-brass necklace and earrings of frequent collaborator Coppola e Toppo; a sleek full-length Halston gown in red silk jersey gracefully finished with a gilded bamboo clutch by one of the designer’s besties, Elsa Peretti. There’s also a passage on the little black dress, an elegantly blank canvas that has invited endless accessorizing for decades, and pop music historians won’t want to miss a pair of gowns worn on stage by Mission Hill’s own , complete with microphone pouches sewn into the back.
But these moments feel like crowd-pleasing amid more potent fare. One section touches on fashion as a personal political statement. A photograph by Danielle Simone of the hip hop/dance/drag duo the is equal parts critique and aspiration. Gender-fluid artists who meld classical dance with hip-hop and fashion, the Dragon Sisters live in a hoped-for world of unfettered expression of self; in Simone’s picture, they’re draped in flowing gowns made from a half-dozen American flags by the designer Timothy Westbrook; the complaint, about the ongoing struggle LGBTQ+ people have had for equal rights in the US, is clear. Nearby, the red AIDS awareness ribbon, an elegant symbol of support for people living with HIV, sits in a frame, an evocation of how a person’s politics can be worn quite literally pinned to his or her chest.
Nearby, the show explores cultural representation as meatier purpose for fashion in a world always leaning towards more mass-produced sameness. Wampanoag jewelry-maker Tiffany Vanderhoop shows work alongside her mother, the Haida weaver Evelyn Vanderhoop, making clear garb and adornment can serve purposes deeper than aesthetics. Evelyn’s Raven’s Tail robe, intricately woven of wool, sea otter fur, cedar, shell, and copper, had to be danced into the collection in a ceremony by Evelyn herself. In the graphic scheme of one set of her earrings, Tiffany builds simple faces with eyes staring wide. “All My Ancestors Are Watching,” she calls them, an eternal vigilance of accessorizing.
“Dress Up” is at its best when reaching for deeper narratives around excess and artifice; in a section called “Shopping,” Jessica Craig Martin’s photograph of a bag-laden shopper in the hard glare of artificial light is a portrait of apex conspicuous consumption. The show also cares how it came to this: In a vitrine, photos of “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw are pinned above two pair of her signature Manolo Blahniks, a brand that entered the vernacular through the pop cultural conduit of the show so thoroughly that they’ve become the Kleenex of high-fashion footwear.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Branding — artifice at its most shameless — is a big part of how we got to a world that’s so fast, cheap, and of control. But cheap had to come first, and the roots of fast fashion — mass-produced sameness, the product of inexpensive labor and material — might partly have grown from Providence, Rhode Island.
“Dress Up” contains a fascinating history lesson about the city’s role as the costume jewelry capital of the country, if not the world. Companies like the Rice Weiner Co. employed hundreds of European immigrants trained in jewelry-making to mass produce luxe-looking items with bargain-bin materials, touching off a boom of affordable, high-style knock-offs, which should sound familiar, even now.
In a chapter the show calls “The Theater of Everyday Life,” finely-made brooches, cuffs, bracelets, and necklaces shimmer behind glass, their glittery sheen masking cheap alloys and glass gems — the dawn of the democratization of glam. But whatever your means, illusion is the point. Part of dressing up is looking like you’re not.