The big day is finally here and since we have a previous evening commitment, Gossip Girl, we spent the morning with Marc and Anna and Hamish and Harold and even a model or two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibit itself is spectacular. It opens with life size elephant cut outs and a mannequin wearing Dovima’s Avedon Dior. A hallway of Irving Penns pays tributes to the originals – Suzy Parker, Lisa Fonssagrives, Dorian Leigh and co. There are New Look coats and dresses, Charles James and a Madame Gres. You turn the corner to David Baileys, iconic images of Twiggy and Veruschka wielding her shotgun. Music blares, “Talking ’bout my generation,” and the mannequins wear Cardins, Paco Rabbanne link dresses and a YSL Mondrian. Then it’s onto Lauren Hutton, Rene Russo, Jerry Hall and unreal Helmut Newton photographs before turning the corner to Versace clad models carrying, seriously, broken champagne bottles. Lastly, the supermodels and the 90s in a graffitied room stocked with Marc Jacobs’ Perry Ellis, Ellen Von Unwerth photography and mind-boggling pictures of Kate.
It’s this room, according to the Costume Institute’s Director Harold Koda, that Anna didn’t feel was “quite grunge enough” late Friday night. And so Oscar winning set director, John Meyer, stayed up Friday and into Saturday, tagging the walls with “Daria,” “Twiggy,” “Kate,” etc in army green, silver and black spray paint – it’s the best part of the whole thing.
Marc said he’s, “honored, flattered, thrilled, grateful to have anything to do with this institution,” and called his involvement, twenty years after his first Met, “a dream come true.” And Koda said he was a pleasure to work with – his only demand that “the exhibit be lively.”
We could gush some more, but basically, the exhibition lives up to the standard set by 06′s Anglomania. So go.