When Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton planned their newest exhibit for The Met, they knew they wanted to bring “a noisy public together with an opportunity.” They wanted to give all of those blabby critics that stroll through the Met a forum where they can critique the works to (hopefully) open up a world-wide discussion about fashion. In short, they wanted us to blog.
And in the coming days, we’ll see if people go for it. The exhibit, blog.mode: addressing fashion, opens to the public tomorrow. You can see what Harold calls “a sampling of the range of the museum’s collection” which he hopes will “provoke commentary” for everyone who goes.
The inspiration for blog.mode was, unsurprisingly, the rise of the fashion blog (that means us!)- visitors can blog their reaction to the show on site, or from wherever.
Harold and Andrew decided that “it’s a blog moment,” inspired by the lengthy commenters on Cathy Horyn’s blog, On The Runway, and by those on The Sartorialist- “People would analyze based on contemporary aesthetics, and we thought, if they could apply those thoughts to historic dress, we could really open up the dialogue.”
We suggest checking it out for yourself, even if you don’t plan on blogging about it- a few of the stand-out pieces include one of Dior’s New Look dresses, a theater gown worn by Paul Poiret’s wife and a rare model from Chanel’s Russian Collection of 1922.
Koda and Bolton plan to turn some of the worthier comments into entries in a book about the exhibition, so load a Thesaurus onto your iPhone and start hashing out your fashion theses.

American dress, 1830-35

Paul Poiret, 1913

Left, Elsa Schiaparelli, 1939; Right, Coco Chanel, 1922 (from Russian Collection.)

Gilbert Adrian with print by Salvador Dali, 1947

Christian Dior, 1947

Rodarte, 2006-07

Olivier Theyskens for Nina Ricci, 2007

Visitors posting their reactions at the blog bar.