Exhibitions of the Week: China in High Fashion at the Met, the Art of Mannequin Design at the MAD

China: Through the Looking Glass (Until September 7 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

If you're on the Metropolitan Museum mailing list, you may already know that China: Through the Looking Glass has enjoyed an extended run and will be enjoying extended hours. On September 4 and 5, visitors will have the chance to revel in this sprawling, showy, and frankly not-to-be-missed exhibition until midnight. Then begins the work of disassembling it all; nobody at the Met will be reveling in that. Through the Looking Glass was the museum's summer blockbuster of an exhibition, an exercise in opulent and excessive staging (three floors, 140 clothing items, dozens of projection screens) devoted to an opulent and excessive subject (the intersection of Chinese culture and Western high fashion). Figuring out where it begins and ends isn't even worth attempting, since the organizers have planted mannequins and installations well outside the primary exhibition space, throughout the Met's Asian galleries.

The core of Through the Looking Glass is a single three-level area, lighted in red and yellow and decked out (true to title) with plenty of mirrors. From there, the show branches out and populates dozens of smaller exhibition spaces; in several cases, works and settings familiar to longtime Met museumgoers have simply been left in place and paired off with garments that share -- or, more often, appropriate -- their colors and forms. A room of blue and white porcelain, for instance, hosts Alexander McQueen's 2011-2012 porcelain-laden evening dress, while a gallery hung with calligraphy sports calligraphy-spangled silk gowns by Coco Chanel and Christian Dior. The groupings make easy sense, but some of the items don't -- the elaborately unwearable Dior spring/summer 2003 collection, Valentino Garavani's equally unwearable hats. Instead of reining the show in, the resources of the Met-affiliated Costume Institute and the assistance of filmmaker Wong Kar Wai (often a model of strategic restraint) have helped color, form, and high-cost eccentricity to break loose. Which is fine: some of the thin-boddiced, tight-collared dresses on display are paragons of judicious and enviably sharp design, proving that Through the Looking Glass can give patient and attentive visitors a lot to admire.

Or a lot to criticize. With those motif-by-motif positionings and set-pieces, Through the Looking Glass is formatted in such a way that a directed and coherent historical narrative of any sort is impossible to discern -- though for hard-to-seduce visitors, the criticisms may only begin here. There are some installations -- a bamboo forest of fluorescent white light tubes, populated by mannequins in black samurai-inspired garb -- that are intriguing but, well, what is the point exactly? There are enormous political blind spots: for the curators, the Mao suit is deployed mostly as an upbeat fashion statement, not as a sign of an unpleasant regime and a nonsense governing philosophy. There are too many excerpts from action movies. There is too much walking involved. But finally, there is the fact that a show this unabashedly in touch with its own extravagances resists and diminishes criticism, as a well-constructed blockbuster, in any medium, will. Set aside a few hours, or one of those final-run late nights, and be entertained into gleeful disorientation.

Ralph Pucci: Art of the Mannequin (Until October 25 at the Museum of Arts and Design)

Mannequins aren't merely mannequins for Ralph Pucci: they're more like statues that are created to sell clothes. Anatomy, celebrity portraiture, purposeful collaboration, and commercially risky spates of experimentation have all been crucial elements of how Pucci runs his thriving mannequin business -- which is headquartered in a forty-eight thousand square-foot Manhattan facility. And all of it began with the kind of willful divergence that is a mark of great art, daring business, and sometimes both. In the late 1970s, Pucci decided to depart from the then-popular highly static, highly feminine mannequin style to create "action mannequins": "they were diving, they were jogging, they were standing on their hands" is how Pucci describes them. Action has been central to the Pucci aesthetic ever since, and Ralph Pucci: Art of the Mannequin presents a lively scene if you show up on the right night -- visitors pointing and chatting and picking out their favorite Pucci creations, sometimes in the company of the man himself. After all, his facility is only a cab ride away.

True to Pucci's ideas, the Museum of Arts and Design installation features the molds and tools of a mannequin studio in one room (think sculptor's workshop) and a row of mannequins in a another (think sculptural pantheon). All entries are distinctive, yet some were foredoomed to never really sell. The influences on these mannequins range from Marilyn Monroe to Alberto Giacometti to Egyptian artifacts to Amadeo Modigliani; generally, the flights of near-abstraction and cartoon whimsy are the most problematic, unable to settle satisfyingly into either art or commerce. Pucci is better at re-working methods that worked the first time anyway, as is evidenced by the striding, glancing, and meditating female mannequins on display. Action becomes quiet gesture, sometimes fashionable grace. Though it may be hard to argue these a place in a traditional pantheon of sculpture, these mannequins have more than earned their places in pantheons of money and couture the world over, and now in one of New York's most inviting museums.