I had carefully doped out in advance that a Wednesday morning at 10:30 a.m. would be a good time to take this in. The exhibition opened last week with great hoopla and hundreds of celebrities attending in full fashionista regalia, so there was a lot of publicity, and I was trying to come up with a time that would not be overwhelmingly crowded, since that takes all the fun out of it and you can't see anything. I chose well; when Corine and I got there, you could actually see the museum steps. In other words, they were not so mobbed with people that you couldn't see the granite. (By the time we left, this was not the case.)
I didn't know much about the designer Charles James, other than that he began hitting his stride in his career in the glamour era of the 1920's-30's. The previous night, hoping that I would look at the clothes and find them ugly and overrated, so that I wouldn't have to get on the bus - and possibly fight the museum crowds - when I was really supposed to be packing for our move, I'd looked up images of his clothes on the Internet. Both luckily and unluckily for me, it took about 2 seconds to realize that I would be an absolute fool to pass up the opportunity to see these remarkable pieces of art. I'm never sorry for the things I've done; I'm always sorry for the things I didn't do. So - I decided to do it.
I love going places with Corine, although I should tell you right now that she has been a New Yorker her entire life and sometimes I feel like she knows everybody in town, and that everybody in town knows Corine. I have yet to go anywhere with her without having somebody bear down upon us with outstretched arms, squealing, "Co-RIIIIINNNNE!" It's like being Madonna's un-famous best friend. This day was no exception; we got on the bus, and there, exquisitely dressed in a smart green suit, sat a lady whose mouth and eyes popped open in the shock of recognition I have come to expect when I go someplace with Corine, and the cries of, "Oh, my God, I just can't be-lieve it!" commenced. As I say - I kinda love it. Corine used to be a school principal, and the lady in green had been one of her teachers; I have also seen Corine swarmed by great big "children" in their thirties who still address her as "Miss" and can't wait to let her know that they are doing well in their lives and that their families are going to be so excited that they ran into her! There are also her political friends; her opera friends; her theater friends; her ballet friends; the people she went to India with; the people she traveled through China with; her former neighbors; her current neighbors; her...well, you get the idea. What I'm saying is, the lady is popular.
We didn't quite know what to expect of the exhibition, although I'd seen some of the images online. The "architecture" of the garments was much discussed in all the reviews, which sounded a trifle forbidding... I was uneasily picturing Gary Beach as Roger De Bris in The Producers, dressed up as the Chrysler Building.
This was a misconception akin to attending a W.H. Auden poetry reading expecting to hear Ogden Nash.
What these clothes had that struck me instantly was structure. Now, when I write poetry, I am a form poet. I love taking an established form and playing with it, riffing on it, turning it on its head, and seeing what changes I can make within that basic structure and still have it be recognizably that particular form, but making it my own by whatever I layer over the skeleton. This is what Charles James does with couture. He takes the basic structure of, say, an evening gown, breaks it down into components, and then reassembles it with such delicate skill that you'd swear it had sprung forth whole from the earth - a fantastic, exotic blossom that was never created by human hands.
The exhibition is weirdly divided into two different wings AND two different floors of the museum. We started with the ball gowns, because that's where the guard directed us. There are a dozen, all of them ravishing, all of them different. It would be hard to pick a favorite. Three in particular stand out in memory. I have tried in vain to post individual images, and shall have to settle for advising you to Google Charles James Images, if you are so inclined.
One gown consists of a slim sheath that would be a conventional form-hugging décolleté evening gown, save for what James does with artful draping. Indeed, artful draping and folding are this designer's signature - he is the origami master of couture. The lines that construct each garment are clean and distinctive; the folds are the breaks in those immaculate lines that add interest and mystery. The ivory silk of gown itself descends in narrow, V-shaped ruching to the instep, leaving not the slightest doubt as to the perfect contours of the body within it. Behind the outline of the body is an extravagant, outrageously over-the-top pouffe of dull-gold gauze that extends to the sides and out behind the wearer - a cross between the train of a nineteenth century ballgown and a peacock's tail.
Another is an equally form-fitting gown of a dark, severe grey - a hue fit for a battleship, fitting the mannequin as sleekly as a helmet - that terminates, shockingly, in a foot-high pannier, standing stiffly out a good two feet to either side, that seems, as the curator describes it, as if Marie Antoinette had accidentally dropped her signature fashion statement to mid-calf level.
"Why are all the beautiful gowns made for skinny women?" Corine murmured as we approached yet another beauty - this one described as a "cloverleaf," meaning that the skirt flared out gracefully at the base into four looped formations that stood out at least a yard apiece from the feet of the wearer. Above the heavy honey-colored taffeta of the cloverleaves ascended a fantastic black-embroidered trompe-l'œil skirt on ivory silk that simulated enormous and intricate lace flowers and whose pattern rose above the slender waistline like a pair of hands clasped about the ball-goer's midriff.
"Because," I replied, "these gowns are actually flowers - great, impressionistic blooms - and the body that is required to wear them is merely the stalk. Stalks are always frail in comparison with the flowers - the stalks are only there in order to support the blossom."
I glanced at the text accompanying the gown, and whatever faint tinge of esteem I might ever have harbored for tabloid king William Randolph Hearst (it was already at zero) plummeted into the abyss and was extinguished forevermore. There, exquisitely photographed in the cloverleaf gown, was Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, and all I could think of was, "If that's Mrs. Hearst, what on earth was the man playing footsie with Marion Davies for?" Here, indeed, was one of those women out of legend that Truman Capote had been wont to call his swans.
The second part of the exhibition was on the other side of the museum - as one of the guards cryptically informed us, "You have to make a left, and then go through Egypt." It was a little aggravating, and something of a hike, but I promise you, it is worth the trouble. Not only are the clothes astonishing, but it is here that the sketches, letters, notes, and quotations of the master are to be found. It was here that I whipped out my cell phone, under the beady eye of another guard who was about to bark, "No pictures, no pictures!" only to wilt when she realized I was using my Notepad app to copy some of the texts instead.
Make the grain do the work, was the first bit of advice etched onto the glass panel surrounding Charles James' creations, and I nodded in appreciation - I have always found it smarter, when creating, to go with the flow, rather than struggle against it, if harmony and a sense of serene luxury are the aim. The very first time I took a bookbinding class, I was asked to hold up my paper, see which way it "wanted" to crease, and to understand that this defined my paper's grain and would therefore dictate the construction of my book.
I smiled over Charles James' "Wish List" of celebrities he had not dressed, but would have liked to - Maria Callas, whom he compared to a Stradivarius violin; Mick Jagger, the "sexy bastard"; and Audrey Hepburn, whom in a flash of inspiration he dubbed a "wisp of iron." Next to it hung a rant to his staff as to what was expected of them if they were to fill the maître's incredibly perfectionistic standards of excellence, and railing because they failed to put for the degree of effort he relentlessly demanded of himself.
But the quotation that spoke to me on the most profound level was that in which he addressed the rapture of the act of creation:
I have sometimes spent 12 hours working on one seam; utterly entranced, and not hungry or tired till finally it had, as of its own will, found the perfect place where it should be placed.
And in my mind, the words of W.B. Yeats echoed and resounded, as I realized that Charles James, too, was a poet:
Adam's Curse
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
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