Volume 49, Number 3 · February 28, 2002
Absolutely Fabulous
By Anne Hollander
Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed
Catalog of the exhibition by Harold Koda
an exhibition at the Costume Institute,the Metropolitan Museum of Art,December 6, 2001–March 17, 2002.Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 168 pp., $40.00
You could say that Western fashion arose in the late Middle Ages to be the enemy of beauty in clothing. Many people seemed to think so from the beginning. Since the late fourteenth century, new modes in the European dress of both sexes were the target of disapproval and derision, even outrage and hatred, in the writings of satirists and the clergy, usually for their new way of transforming the shapes of male and female bodies. During the period there was a new emphasis on ebb and flow, thesis and antithesis, progress and nostalgia—which had its expression in things like remarkable shoes with six-inch-long pointed toes, which soon shifted into equally remarkable shoes with eight-inch-wide square toes, or sloping narrow shoulders above flowing cloak-like sleeves, which soon hunched up into massive broad shoulders with sleeves like bolsters.
Review, 4182 words
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