The Met gave the Vatican Museum $580,000 to restore some of the works included in the exhibit, and at the end of the show’s stay in New York, the Met told the New York Times that 855,939 people had attended, grossing $2.38 million for the museum. A touring show that originated in New York and later made stops in Chicago and San Francisco, “The Vatican Collections” featured more than 200 works of art borrowed from the Vatican Museum in Rome. Indeed, “Heavenly Bodies” has proven more popular even than “The Vatican Collections,” an exhibit from the spring of 1983 that is now the museum’s fourth most popular. It was also about Catholicism, a proven hook for Met visitors. “Heavenly Bodies” didn’t only stand to win because it’s a fashion exhibit. Besides, looking at art can feel intimidating - What does it mean? What am I supposed to be getting out of this? - but with clothing, you can always defer to the classic question: Would I wear this? A dress on display at the Met in “China: Through the Looking Glass.” George Pimentel/Getty Images “We take a greater ownership of it.”īellios also points out that as the public conversation about identity grows louder, so does our fluency in fashion as a form of self-presentation, furthering the accessibility of fashion in a museum context. “We get to have input and feelings and reactions to what’s on the runway, so we’re involved in fashion in a greater way,” says Caroline Bellios, an adjunct professor of fashion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Magazines and newspapers used to relate what happened at fashion shows to consumers now anyone can watch them by live stream, catch the photos on Instagram minutes later, and tell the designer exactly what they think of his or her work in the comments section. ![]() ![]() Though museum collections have long housed clothing and accessories, the appeal of specialized fashion exhibits has sharpened thanks to digital media’s democratization of the fashion industry. Visitors to the Met’s “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” exhibit in 2011. Since then, “Savage Beauty” has since been displaced by the Costume Institute’s “ China: Through The Looking Glass” (2015) and “ Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” (2017), now the museum’s sixth- and eighth-most-visited shows. “Savage Beauty,” a theatrical, unearthly retrospective that took place in the wake of McQueen dying by suicide in 2010, saw 661,509 visitors in a little over three months, making it one of the 10 most popular Met exhibits ever at the time. On top of that, the overtly commercial nature of fashion - versus the less acknowledged but very real commercialism of art - leads some people to dismiss fashion as an art form.īut with the runaway success of “ Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” in 2011, fashion exhibits started becoming reliable traffic drivers for the Met. ![]() The First Monday in May, a documentary about the making of the Met Gala, the Costume Institute’s annual fundraiser, begins with Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton, Met trustee (and Vogue editor) Anna Wintour, then-Met director Thomas Campbell, and former Costume Institute curator Harold Koda all explaining why fashion has historically been treated as a second-class discipline within the museum: because it’s known as a decorative art and not a “real” art (like painting, sculpture, or architecture), because it’s still considered women’s domain and therefore frivolous, because the department is literally located in a basement. This final figure cements fashion’s dominance at the nation’s best-known art institution. All told, 1,659,647 people turned out for the Costume Institute’s dramatic depiction of Catholic fashion, according to a release from the museum. The show closed out its five-month run as the museum’s most popular show of all time, beating out 1978’s “Treasures of Tutankhamun” for the top spot. In early May, all eyes were on the opening of a new exhibit from the Met’s Costume Institute, “ Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which showed potential to draw record crowds to the museum and provide it with a major source of income at a moment of financial uncertainty. ![]() At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, fashion reigns supreme.
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