May 9, 2014--Schmattas at the Met

Half my family was in the schmatta business. The rag business. Ladies clothes.

Cousin Moritz sold cloth and fur coats from a shabby loft on 36th Street. They were not the best quality, my father took endless pleasure pointing out, but if you knew Moritz, better, if you were related, he sold to you wholesale.

So the buttons fell off after brief usage and they never quite fit right, but there was family pressure to give him the business. (I always suspected that the idiom--give someone the business--was derived from the way he and his bitter rival Uncle Max, his brother-in-law, operated.)

Max made and sold fancy, special-occasion dresses and his female relatives, my mother, her four sisters, and a dozen nieces and cousins, were expected to shop at his broken-down warehouse of a showroom even though the seams on the sleeves tended to unravel even before the bar mitzvah boy could finish half his Haftorah.

It was a shonda, a terrible shame but that's the way things worked in those days.

These days, things work differently. At least some things do when it comes to women's designer clothes.

Now even the Metropolitan Museum of Art is in the schmatta business.

Through its Costume Institute, sorry, I mean its newly-named and endowed Anna (Vogue magazine) Wintour Costume Center contemporary fashion, celebrity, and commerce are pushing aside Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Matisse.

At last week's annual gala (Anna's A-list party) alongside Vermeer's Woman with a Lute we now have schmattas by Oscar de la Renta worn by Sarah Jessica Parker and Rianna in Stella McCartney. Next to Bruegel's Harvesters one finds Nicole Richie decked out in Donna Karan. Beside Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, posing is Lena Dunham in a gown by Giambattista Valli. And preening in front of Henri Matisse's Reclining Odalisque, David Beckham sports the Bronx's Ralph Lauren.

Puzzled by the Met's interest in fancy schmattas, their relationship to the museum's high-culture collection, there were some answers in a New York Times article that cites the thoughts of one of the designers-of-the-moment--Charles James.

He thinks about clothing as sculpture. As "a prop for the performance of living." But it's not the body that's sculpted or even the fabric, but rather, "It's the air that's sculpted, not the silk."

Got it.

And the connection between fancy outfits and the Met is now clear:

Dresses=sculpture; sculpture=art; art=Metropolitan Museum of Art.