Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion from the Kyoto Costume Institute

High fashion can be great art, but it usually isn’t. When you watch models on the runway, walking in that manner that suggests horses prancing in the circus and wearing designs that, dripping with self-reverence, are in fact unintentionally comic, you can be forgiven for preferring Vermeer.

There are designers whose work at least approaches the thoughtfulness, heart, and soulful depth that real art always possesses. The Frenchman Paul Poiret, recently the subject of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one twentieth century example. His work is always surprising in its color, choice of materials, and tasteful intensity.

Fashion really is a business, something Poiret himself well understood. It should remain in its own territory and not bother with any attempt to make itself more important than it is. From time to time, couturier designers simply insist upon themselves as “fine artists,” though, and exhibitions of their work have been showing up in major museums recently with frequency.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is currently showing “Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion from the Kyoto Costume Institute,” through January 6, 2008. This amazing Japanese institution, founded in 1978, has a fashion collection from the last few hundred years the likes of which I have seen only at the Metropolitan Museum itself.

 

 Dress (1998) by Yohji Yamamoto. Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
A very complete survey of the Kyoto Costume Institute’s holdings can be found in the two-volume Fashion: A History from the 18th to the 20th century, published by Taschen. The design, the photography, and especially the selection of items being shown is exceptional in these books, and you can find things here that may even qualify as fine art.

 Sweater and skirt (1995) by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons Noir. Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
The show at the Asian Art Museum does not reach that level of quality. Most problematic is the feeling I got that few of the pieces on view were at all well finished.

Like so much of the culture of these YouTube times, the clothes appear to have been dashed off, both on the drawing board and in the manufacture. Wear it once and throw it away.

There is not a lot of beauty in these clothes, and I can think of few of the pieces in the show that would look good on any woman anywhere. They look bad on the mannequins. Being walked around in at some grand reception somewhere they would fare even worse.

Article Author: Terence Clarke

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts.

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