May 9, 2019--Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala

Rubbing elbows with Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Picasso were Demi Moore, Chris Rock, and Miley Cyrus. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute gala organized and hosted by Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour.

Lady Gaga and Titian, Katy Perry and Manet? Together at the Temple of Dendur, munching finger food and getting sloshed with champaign? 

If Titian and his artist friends had stayed home (which they should have) it would have been like an evening at the GRAMMYs or the Golden Globes (thus the champaign reference).

How much money could the Met have netted from the affair that would have (perhaps) justified selling themselves out to the highest bidder? I could even have gotten excited if Met benefactors Charles and David Koch (the rightwing Koch Brothers) had written a check to cover the yield.

Take a look at Lady Gaga sprawled on the steps of the Met who shed three layers of clothes before she got to her costume--bra, panties, panty hose, and six-inch heels.

And then check out Katy Perry who came as a big cheeseburger.

It's good to be in Maine and away from all this ridiculousness. 

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.