- 3 hours ago
Director: Nina LjetiDirectors of Photography: Michael Lopez, Henry GillEditor: Evan Allan Senior Producer: Bety DerejeProducer: Rashida JosiahAssociate Producers: Anisa Kennar, Justine Ramirez, Lea DonenbergCamera Operator: Chanthila Phaophanit Assistant Camera: Kahdeem Prosper Jefferson, Gordan WongGaffers: Billy Voermann, Mary KalecinskaSwing: Alex FrischmanAudio: Mariya Chulichkova, Joanna Hunt Set Designers: Ilana Portney, Dana KerenProduction Assistants: Quinton Johnson, Myles HaywoodRunners: Edie Chesters, Rachel Ademidun Groomer for Andrew Bolton: Shin ArimaMakeup Artist for Sinéad Burke and Alex Consani: Ai YokomizoHairstylist for Sinéad Burke and Alex Consani: Sonny MolinaMakeup Artist for Misty Copeland: Victor HenaoHairstylist for Misty Copeland: Nai'vasha GraceMakeup Artist for Aariana Philip: Meadow Soleil CloudMakeup Artist for Gwendoline Christie: Daniel KolaricHairstylist for Gwendoline Christie: Joe KellyHair & Makeup Artist for Aimee Mullins: Stèfan Jemeel Production Coordinator: Tanía JonesProduction Manager: Kristen HelmickSenior Production Manager: Venita Singh-WarnerLine Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors Assistant Editors: Andy Morell, Fynn LithgowSenior Motion Graphics Designer: Samuel FullerPost Production Coordinator: Holly FrewSupervising Editor: Kameron KeyPost Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch Entertainment Director: Sergio KletnoyGlobal Talent Casting Directors: Ignacio Murillo, Morgan SenesiExecutive Producer: Rahel GebreyesSenior Director, Digital Video: Romy van den BroekeSenior Director, Programming: Linda GittlesonVP, Video Programming: Thespena Guatieri Florist: London Blooming HausPhotography By Paul WestlakeImages Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Special Thanks: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:01Fashion is the first thing we see about each other, so it's incredibly powerful.
00:07Fashion can tell a story. At its best, it expands what the body can be.
00:12There are just so many ways in which the human body takes form.
00:16How then does that impact what we layer on top of it?
00:19No longer can we debate the idea that fashion is art.
00:23Fashion has always been art.
00:27The pressure!
00:35We're in the costume center. At the moment, we're using it as a way to store our mannequins
00:40and dress some of the pieces for the exhibition, but these are actually our traditional galleries.
00:45But not anymore.
00:46Not anymore, yeah. It's so exciting. We're now moving upstairs into the lights.
00:50The Met collects many things. Paintings, sculpture, textiles, arms and armor, but especially also fashion.
00:57And we want to make sure that it's understood that fashion is a fantastic form of art.
01:03To do that, we want to make sure that the galleries devoted to that would be centrally located.
01:08The Great Hall is one of the most recognizable interiors in New York City.
01:13Our galleries come directly off of that space.
01:17We sort of started by taking a deep dive into the museum building itself.
01:21Looking at old drawings, understanding the way it came together.
01:23But it's actually not one building. It's 20-something buildings that have grown and shifted over time.
01:35The title of the show is called Costume Art. It has two connotations. One, it references our history.
01:40So before we were founded in 1946 as a curatorial department at the Met, we were known as the Museum
01:47of Costume Art.
01:47And it was an independent entity, but also a statement about the status of fashion itself.
01:53I think that when you walk around the museum, you see these wonderful examples of the dress body,
01:58but it's just a representation of the dress body.
02:00I think where fashion has the edge over art is the fact that it's about our lived embodied experience.
02:07So I very much wanted the exhibition to focus on that distinction between the representation of the dress body
02:12and also fashion as this living art form in which it expresses very complex ideas about identity.
02:21I think it's been interesting working with different curators.
02:25We've done shows in the past where we've collaborated with specific departments.
02:28We've never done a show before where we were collaborating with every single department in the museum.
02:31And Naveena was actually the first person I spoke to.
02:34The Met is an amazing place that can tell global stories because it has the ingredients.
02:39It has everything at its fingertips.
02:42We have a wonderful painting from the 18th century from one of the courts of India from Hyderabad,
02:47which shows a woman in a very transparent muslin.
02:50It's so light, it's so fine that the body looks almost nude under it.
02:54In every case, Andrew has found a response in contemporary fashion to these pieces,
02:59and that's what's making them come alive.
03:02So I wanted to start off the exhibition with the art historical distinction between the naked and the nude.
03:07The naked is really about one's lived vulnerability,
03:11whereas the nude is a sort of mediated construction that's often posed or aestheticized.
03:18In any time and place, the naked body is never naked.
03:21It's always dressed and the cultural ideals of a particular moment in time.
03:25And then you go into the main part of the exhibition and it's separated into two main galleries.
03:30One is focusing on sort of diversity of bodily being.
03:33And we start off with the classical body in that section,
03:36because I wanted to look at and start off with a body that has often been valorized.
03:41It's a body that has always been reified both in art and also within fashion.
03:49And then we progress to a section called the abstract body,
03:52which is in a way the opposite of the classical body,
03:55where we have many women's bodies that are contorted and distorted through undergarments like the corset,
04:01the crinoline, the pannier and the bustle.
04:03Even though they seem radically opposite of the natural body,
04:07they're both about achieving an ideal of beauty.
04:11So opposite the abstract body, we focus on something we call the reclaimed body.
04:16And the reclaimed body mainly feature female designers who do the opposite,
04:20who use understructures, padding, bindings to challenge these normative conventions of beauty.
04:26So it's the opposite of what the abstract body is about.
04:29The reclaimed body is sort of introducing three other body types
04:32and reclaiming these bodies within both art and culture.
04:35The pregnant body, the corpulent body and the disabled body.
04:38So that's the first half of the exhibition.
04:40And the second half, it's all about universality and commonalities,
04:43everything we all share. So skin, the anatomy, blood,
04:46but also our experiences of life like ageing and death or mortality.
04:51So we have bodily diversity in one gallery and body universality in the other.
04:56Then we end with something I'm calling the epidermal body,
04:59which in a way is the largest and most salient organ.
05:02We all have skin, but all of our skin tones and textures are very different.
05:06So it brings them together and in a way ends with a celebration of plurality and the pluralistic body.
05:15I think in the past, you know, in my previous exhibitions, whenever we talk about diversity,
05:21I've always integrated it within our exhibitions.
05:24But I do think we're, particularly now, I don't think we're at a place where we normalise diversity.
05:29It has become otherised and you see it reflected in fashion.
05:34What's special about costume art is that the question it asks is,
05:38is fashion already art or does it become art through embodiment?
05:42I have dwarfism. I have a physical apparent disability.
05:47Fashion has always been incredibly important to me because it's a vocabulary.
05:51It's an armour. And that's still, I think, how many people use clothes,
05:55whether or not they make that conscious decision.
05:57So to be able to put that in place in this exhibition with the explicit inclusion of different kinds of
06:03bodies,
06:03putting them on pedestals, what it will mean very physically when people come into this exhibition
06:09is that for the first time they will look at bodies that maybe they have overlooked
06:13with a sense of awe and wonder because they are looking up.
06:17I spend my life looking up.
06:19So I'm really intrigued and curious about what that change will mean for others within that space.
06:27I think for me, like, the body obviously means something very specifically to me as a trans woman.
06:32I think that it has always kind of been a point of conversation for others,
06:36but I think to reclaim that and really find what makes me feel beautiful as an individual
06:40and makes me feel supported and loved and able as an individual is quite special.
06:45For me, it means express things and show the strength that I have in my body,
06:49show the muscles that I have, show the ass that I'm hopefully going to have on the Mecca of the
06:54day,
06:54but, like, all of these different things.
06:55I can't tell you how much it means to me to be a part of this.
06:58Like, I feel like disability and disabled people in the world overall
07:04is the most, like, underrepresented, underserved population.
07:08As we can see, I have quadripedic cerebral palsy.
07:10I am visibly disabled and I use a wheelchair.
07:13And so to be recognized in the arts in this kind of way and fashion in this way
07:17is so deeply touching and meaningful.
07:20As a performer and as an artist, my body is my instrument.
07:23And I often say that it's my first costume.
07:27Like, the skin I'm in and the body that I have as a dancer,
07:30it's what we're working with.
07:32Two of the things I love most in the world, costume and art,
07:36the way our body can be changed and subverted,
07:40the way our form can alter and inform our mental state,
07:45is something so divine to me.
07:52You know, the show is really focusing on the body
07:54and really focusing on the idea of one's lived embodied experience.
07:58We felt it was very important to actually include mannequins based on real men and women,
08:03particularly in the corpulent body and the disabled body sections.
08:07Andrew had written me to ask if I would be a mannequin in this show.
08:11And the outfit that was made for me was already going to be in the show.
08:14It was important to me that it actually be on my body,
08:17specifically my body now.
08:18You go into this room that has about a hundred SLR cameras positioned.
08:24And even just thinking about getting my body made into a mannequin
08:27was an incredibly vulnerable process.
08:31I was in the middle of this thing.
08:33I was sitting right here and then around me were like thousands of cameras
08:35just scanning me and taking pictures of me to make the model.
08:38And it was really awesome.
08:40I felt like I was in like a 90s futuristic anime.
08:43They sent them off to Italy where they would be converted into a 3D scan and then carved.
08:54I always find within exhibitions,
08:56one of the challenges is how do we sort of bridge the gap between the art you're looking at,
09:02the artworks you're looking at and the visitors.
09:04So I'd always sort of thought about the idea of using a mirrored face
09:07as a way of diminishing that gap between the visitor and the artwork.
09:11I came across the work of Summer Hajaji,
09:14an extraordinary artist who had used polished steel faces.
09:18And what was so interesting about them is because they're made out of polished steel rather than mirror,
09:24there's a depth to them.
09:25It's like your reflection in a wishing well or a pool.
09:28It's not a sort of mirror, mirror idea.
09:31It's slightly distorted.
09:32And I think that how we all see ourselves in the mirror is always slightly distorted.
09:36It's never true.
09:38I love and also think the polished faces are really funny,
09:41which, you know, I'm really glad Andrew's not sitting beside me
09:44because he would probably shake his shoulders at me.
09:48I'm really interested to see what people take from it.
09:50It's very interesting.
09:51I love that idea that they chose to do that.
09:53I feel like it speaks to a lot.
09:55They're going to see themselves reflected in me and I'm going to see myself reflected in them.
10:08I think one of the ambitions for the show is we're not trying to sort of like reverse a hierarchy.
10:12That's always existed within art museums where fashion's at the bottom rung of the ladder.
10:16It's more about focusing on equitability.
10:19So the idea of equitability between objects, whether it's art or fashion,
10:23but also inequitability of bodies, whether it's the classical body or the disabled body.
10:28There is a risk that if you don't honour them in this way,
10:32people moving through the space go through it passively without noting that it is different.
10:37But also for those who live in those bodies,
10:40to see their bodies singled out with respect, grace, admiration,
10:46and with psychological safety at the heart of it, what can that be a catalyst for?
10:50When you have the opportunity to work with a range of body types,
10:54you're going to get an incredible range of results.
10:58And I think that's something that's important about seeing more diversity in fashion.
11:04You know, and I think about it so connected to, you know,
11:06the way I talk about the importance of having more diversity in classical dance,
11:10that when you see different body types exploring the same type of movement,
11:15it's going to look completely different.
11:17It's really amazing for someone like me to be there,
11:21but also like there's a lot of really amazing women and men and everything in between
11:24who are a part of it.
11:25And I think that that's really special and really unique.
11:27And I hope that I serve for all of us.
11:30The pressure!
11:30The emphasis on the individual, what it is that makes us unique, what it is that makes us different.
11:40It is about seeing those moments, seeing those pockets of individuality and highlighting their beauty.
11:49I think it's so important that there is representation and equity and diversity and inclusivity again,
11:55when the world as it's standing in our social political climate is trying so hard to like destroy that.
12:01It's so important more than ever to uplift these communities of people who are going through so much and who
12:07are being persecuted so much.
12:08Fashion listens to the market.
12:11So when the market's demanding to reflect what actually is, frankly, in our society, fashion will follow suit.
12:25The show hopefully will resonate and hopefully will foster ideas of empathy and compassion towards each other.
12:30It's going to open up a conversation about the beauty in us as human beings.
12:36There are so many stories to tell.
12:38Hopefully it will mean that when we start to look at fashion as an art form, it isn't just about
12:42new, it isn't just about now.
12:44It is about the voyage that we all go on through our lives.
12:47I'm personally so tired of being an other.
12:50I'm tired of being an other.
12:51Even though I am black and disabled and trans, I'm still Ariana Rose Phillip.
12:56And I'm still a musician and an artist and a model.
12:59I'm just like you.
Comments