BWW Reviews: Fashion Institute's ELEGANCE IN AN AGE OF CRISIS Mixes Restraint and Ravishment

The parallels between the 1930s and the 2010s may begin with politics--the Great Depression then, the Great Recession now--but they certainly don't end there. Think menswear. Right now, the only suits worth buying have trim contours and understated details, and good luck to any designer (looking at your recent collection, Michael Kors...) who tries to drag us back to the floppy, drapey, dopey fits of yesteryear. The techniques that got us to this moment evolved in the 1930s; 1920s suiting wasn't big and billowy, but the taut, athletic cut we prize today wasn't perfected until FDR was in office. Such correspondences don't end here, either. Where high-end women's fashion is concerned, bodice-hugging cuts, resplendent yet loosely structured skirts, and interesting patterns in one or two tones seem to be winning the day. Look at this year's Academy Awards, then look at photos of the 1934 Oscars--and watch fashion history repeat itself.

I'm not alone in these judgments by any means. According to the organizers of Elegance in an Age of Crisis: Fashions of the 1930s, the Depression era is widely viewed as "the period in which truly modern clothing was created. Fashion broke free of Edwardian restriction and celebrated the natural human form." Because of this, walking through the latest offering from the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology is closer to window shopping than to a gallery visit: the clothes aren't merely worth admiring, they're worth wanting. I'd gladly exchange one of my kidneys for a lambent green smoking jacket on display, and plenty of female visitors would probably give more than that for a black rayon dress printed with diagonal dashes of white orchids.

To be sure, these are idiosyncratic fashion choices, for all their charms. Yes, lambent green. And yes, rayon. But curators Patricia Mears and G. Bruce Boyer enchant such garments. The main display is in a lofty gallery, the mannequins set up in loose clusters that recall a cocktail party, the whole room tricked out with veils and pillars of diaphanous fabric that transform it into a ghost Hollywood or a style Heaven. Though Elegance in an Age of Crisis has its excesses and pretensions, it is impossible to resist. It's as confident as the men and women who wore, and occasionally designed, the goods on display.

As you might have guessed, the focus of Elegance in an Age of Crisis is fashion at the highest end. Even the bathing suits are luxuriant (see: the Munchen women's ensemble, with its jaunty orange-and-navy design) or dandyish (see: the MacGregor men's getup, with a robe decorated with male watersportsmen and divers). Elsewhere in the 1930s, fashion was growing more subtle and, in important ways, growing up. And the folks at the FIT Museum seem to intuit this; as you enter Elegance in an Age of Crisis, you will be greeted by art deco wall signs--except that here, the over-the-top golds and blacks of 1920s art deco have been replaced by silvers and blues, colors appropriate to an era of less lavish, more resourceful elegance.

In an enlightening catalog essay, Boyer describes the sartorial breakthroughs that brought menswear to a new point of both dynamism and understatement. English tailoring saw the invention of a more trim, structured cut during this era. Saville Row master tailor Frederick Scholte and his shaped, organic torsos were responsible for this technical shift, and the Prince of Wales (who stayed loyal to Scholte's version of suiting well beyond the 1930s) was responsible for popularizing it. Italian tailoring was itself transformed by Gennaro Rubinacci, a Neapolitan clothier and patron of the arts who promoted loosely-structured suits--suits that still echoed the body in all its spontaneity, but used methods that couldn't be more different from Scholte's.

Among the most enviable entries in Elegance in an Age of Crisis are garments that combine these innovations with down-to-earth motifs and colors. Outdoorsy shades of khaki and off-white are put to fine use in some of the jackets and overcoats, though it's a three-piece suit--executed in a muted green houndstooth pattern that somebody, anybody needs to revive--that almost steals the show. Elsewhere, celebrity items get the better of the curators. While there aren't enough wardrobe choices from the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor) to give us a real idea of his trendsetting role, there are more than enough of Fred Astaire's shoes--and that more than enough doesn't teach us a whole lot.

The real psychological interest of the show has to do with women's fashion, which was very much the province of male designers until the early 20th century. Thanks to masters such as Coco Chanel, Madeline Vionnet, Augustabernard, and Louiseboulanger, the situation began to change, as Mears explains in her own well-considered catalog essay. Of course, Chanel is the household name, and as Coco Before Chanel has already proven, she's the one with the biopic-ready life. But maybe Vionnet, who took "her extraordinary gifts as a master dressmaker to new, unprecedented heights," is the more captivating technician--the one who best subverted domestic stereotypes, who transmuted homely craft into universal art.

Prepare to be impressed by the vaguely Greco-Roman, thoroughly goddess-like dresses that FIT has rounded up. Prepare, also, to see variations on the aesthetic of athleticism that guides certain men's selections, along with an emphasis on Asian influences that is barely (or not at all?) in evidence in the menswear. The cumulative effect of all these dresses is not motley or mess, but elegance, imagination, and much-appreciated restaint: exactly what a show like this was meant to deliver.

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