Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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20 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 Death Becomes Her S urprisingly, and surprisingly not surprising, the recent fall costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art refashioned appreciation for mourning garments, a form of dress that no longer dominates world traditions. In "Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire," visitors noticeably crowded around the soberly dressed mannequins housed in the confining space of the basement gallery. The gallery has recently been renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Wintour is the celebrity editor-in-chief of Vogue and the museum's chair for its annual fundraising gala, since 1995. Attendees seemingly took as long to experience this unusual and smaller thematic display as the earlier expansive main floor blockbuster in the spring for couturier Charles James. Perhaps some necessary self-reflection and identification took place, as its subject is one that touches us all. This exhibition dealt not in bursts of color and iconoclastic design but rather the important subtleties of black and gray, the shadow colors that honor life's end and our final rite of passage. Just as the Charles James exhibition illuminated a portion of cultural history through fashion during the twentieth century, so did this display of clothing from the Victorian and Edwardian periods. For most of history, death struck humans early and often. Rituals developed over the world, and every culture has its way of marking the life cycles from which we all partake. Birth, marriage and death rituals purposely concentrate our minds on the significance of transiting the arc of life and memorialize the universality of human experience. costume arts Carolyn L. E. Benesh