Fashion: Gilding the Lily

The first thing the first couple did after committing the first sin was to get dressed. Thus Adam and Eve started the world of fashion, and styles have been changing ever since.

Fashion’s permutations and combinations have fascinated the frivolous and the furrow-browed; the shirring of a sleeve or the fall of a hemline has borne the burden of some heavy-duty thinking. Psychologists have explored man’s ambivalence about clothes, noting that he uses them on the one hand to cover the body’s naughty nakedness, and on the other hand to draw attention to it.

Historians, for their part, like to interpret fashion as a reflection of world events. Thus women’s clothes in the Middle Ages blossomed with a new luxuriance of embroidered accessories under the influence of the loot brought back from the Crusades. The French Revolution temporarily reduced women from elaborate confections to simpler citizens. And the emancipation of women after World War I changed them almost overnight from being “all bosoms and bottoms,” as Mrs. Patrick Campbell once wisecracked, to flat-chested, flat-hipped, shingle-headed imitations of little boys.

Sociologists stress the function of clothes as uniforms by which each individual indicates his level in a structured society. This hangs on today in terms such as “white collar” and “blue collar,” though technology is rapidly making them obsolete. The machine, argue some, is promoting democracy by blurring the difference between rich and poor, since only a knowing eye can detect the difference between a Dior original and a copy. In fact, on a good-looking poor girl, the copy often looks better than the original on a rich matron. Some sociologists also find hope for international peace and understanding in the fact that men and women from all over the world are increasingly shucking their native costumes for lounge suits and little nothings.

Elegance & Splendor. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts could illustrate many of these theses from its superb collection of some 2,000 costumes, one of the finest in the world. It was assembled during the past 80-odd years by a number of donors, but the best of the clothes were given by a dedicated spinster, the late Elizabeth Day McCormick of Chicago (granddaughter of Reaper Tycoon Cyrus McCormick), who ranged Europe and the U.S., skimping on taxis and her own clothes, to buy a total of some 20,000 costumes, pieces of embroidery, books and prints, all of which she left to the museum.

The cream of the museum’s total collection is currently on view in a stunning exhibit designed to demonstrate not the psychological, not the historical, or the sociological interpretation of women’s fashion, but the view of clothes as one of the fine arts.

Titled “She Walks in Splendor,” and covering the years 1550-1950, the exhibition was assembled, in the words of Textiles Curator Adolph S. Cavallo, to demonstrate visual beauty, which “in the world of the costume artist becomes a quality that can best be described as elegance or splendor.”

Curator Cavallo is fascinated by the affinities between the clothes and the architecture of the same period. He is not concerned with analogues of shape—stovepipe hats and railroad smokestacks, skyscrapers and sack dresses—but the way a period’s characteristic modes of thought and feeling similarly influence the look of a building, or a table, or a woman.

“For example,” he writes, “mid-18th century interiors, and some exteriors, showed a tendency to conceal structure with overlaid flowing ornament which deceived the eye in quite the same way that an overornamented, spuriously structured dress of that period also did. Much building in the 19th century suffered from a kind of romantic eclecticism that brought on a gush of half-baked period revivals, and the history of 19th century costume shows quite the same dependence on the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the rococo period, Catherine de Medici and James II. In the architecture of our own time, the compulsion to expose structure to view, to suppress applied ornament and emphasize texture, to express class through refinements of structure—these modes of thought are just as evident in women’s clothing. The creators of the unpatterned, severely structured, richly textured dresses of our own era inevitably think in a way that also produced the United Nations Building.”

For the Hounds of Spring. The modern compulsion “to expose structure to view” is so well demonstrated in the fashions for spring now being shown on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue that next spring had better be a warm one. Versions of Dior’s diving neckline (TIME, Sept. 13) abound. Girls who, for one reason or another, cannot get away with that vertiginous plunge have the option to swoop the skin in back. By day, fashion follows the mid-century’s other architectural foible—concealing the awkward infrastructure with artificially streamlined simplicity. The result: straight-up-and-down suits with that covered-up, curtain-wall look.