BWW Reviews: Fashion Institute Chronicles Women's Attire with EXPOSED: A HISTORY OF LINGERIE

Before you head into Exposed: A History of Lingerie--the latest marquee exhibition from the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology--spend a few minutes with the row of mannequins in the Museum lobby. Strictly speaking, these aren't part of the exhibition, though they certainly are decked out in lingerie. Silky rose and gold fabrics, diaphanous trains, green straps, black tracery--these are undergarments designed with a combination of experimental brio and unfaltering attention to detail, and designed by recent FIT students, no less. Specimens like this suggest that lingerie is continuing to change, grow, take on new personality; even more importantly, they suggest that it is enough of a creative medium and enough of sign of the times to evolve in meaningful ways.

Of course, some museumgoers will never be reconciled to this premise or this material. Exposed: A History of Lingerie is exactly the kind of offering that raises the hackles of art history purists: you may know a couple of these characters, the ones who believe that "real art" is limited to painting and sculpture and a select few photographs by Walker Evans and Jeff Wall. Ah, how wrong those folks are. The great virtue of Exposed is that it shows the artistic impulse at work in an area that can appear as "non-artistic" as car design or skyscraper architecture--but that, like those other fields, offers room for aesthetic prowess.

Organized by FIT associate curator Colleen Hill, the showcase begins in the late 18th century and reaches all the way to the present, taking its visitors from the era of corsets to an era that views corsets as a form of patriarchy-inflicted torture. The emphasis, as is often the case with FIT shows, is on the high end: the peignoirs and dressing gowns from centuries past are studies of flouncy, shimmery opulence, and those corsets are decked out in silks and laces of all colors. With the onset of the 20th century, many of these fashions disappeared. By the end of the First World War, corsets were a thing of the past and bras and slips had become essential items in lingerie design.

Styles that are immediately recognizable even to visitors only loosely acquainted with women's fashion start to emerge once Hill's show enters the 1950s. These items are easier to judge too--from the sexy (a 1988 black lace bustier) to the silly (a 1960 leopard-print bra and panty girdle), from the dated (a high-waisted, green lace 1990 number from Victoria's Secret) to the ever-desirable (a clean-contoured 1977 sheer nylon ensemble). No, you can't lavish the same item-by-item contemplation on these that you would on paintings or sculptures. But you will probably notice--and contemplate, in a broad and leisurely way--a few of the trends that are built into the history of lingerie, such as the tendency of formerly bedroom-and-boudoir styles to emerge as sanctioned on-the-street fashions as time passes.

So make sure you have a little fun with Exposed; along with exhibitions like Multiple Exposures: Photography and Jewelry at the Museum of Art and Design, Killer Heels at the Brooklyn Museum, or just about anything at the Museum of Sex, it just might be one of the most cheerful and approachable displays of culture you see this year. Yet looked at from a more serious angle, it is also an apt follow-up to the last exhibition that graced the Museum at FIT, Elegance in an Age of Crisis: Fashions of the 1930s. Exposed is not nearly grandiose as that earlier offering, but the lingerie items now on view continue the mission begun by the ravishing gowns and tuxedos that had their turn in Elegance: to demonstrate how the way we dress, and the way we think, became modern.

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