Schiaparelli & Prada at the Met: More Elegant Than Revolutionary

Last winter, when I wrote about “Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations,” the joint retrospective that opens on Thursday at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, the show was months from being finished (I was working from documents and photographs.) So I was naturally eager to see the installation, designed by Nathan Crowley, and the “impossible conversation” between Prada and Schiaparelli—a simulated encounter filmed by Baz Luhrmann (Judy Davis, with a shapely head of dark spit curls and a voluptuous Italian accent, camps it up as Schiaparelli, who died in 1973)—and, not least, the clothes.

The press preview was held Monday morning, and Miuccia Prada attended the 11 A.M. briefing in the Sculpture Court. Her outsize charisma belies her petite stature—about five foot one. She wore a beige trouser suit: a high-necked, belted tunic over slim pants cropped at the ankle; a girlish leather tam, in canary yellow, with black streamers; and chunky platform sandals. She also carried a little white clutch.

This ladylike outfit didn’t quite gibe with the epithet that Harold Koda, the curator-in-charge of the Institute, used, aptly, to describe his honorees: “conceptual and esthetic provocateurs.” But it did gibe with my impression of the show: it is more elegant than revolutionary. The curators’ erudite critical framework, and the spirited quotations from both designers which pepper the galleries, are illuminating about the power and history of fashion in a way that the exhibits aren’t. Without Andrew Bolton’s wall notes to remind you how subversive Schiaparelli was, or how singular Prada is, season after season, you troll the galleries in a trance of shop-lust, just thinking stupidly, “I want this!” And there isn’t much that a reasonably confident woman of any age couldn’t wear: most of the ensembles in the category of “Ugly Chic” are artier than they are uncomely, more jolie than laide; those in the category of “Hard Chic” are seductively austere, rather than pugnacious; the evening wear in “The Exotic Body” section lacks the ferocity—a form of opulence—that seethes in the pronouncements of its creators. The transgressive energy that these clothes once possessed on a runway or a body seems to have evaporated like a volatile spirit; what is left is something tamer, but perhaps more palatable: sheer beauty.

Luhrmann’s film was apparently inspired by Louis Malle’s “My Dinner With André.” I couldn’t fathom the stilted sense of disconnection between the two protagonists until I learned that the director had filmed Davis and Prada separately, thousands of miles away, then combined their performances in the editing room. They sit at opposite ends of a lordly banquet table, under a massive chandelier, drinking champagne. (The set, designed by Luhrmann’s wife, Catherine Martin, vaguely evokes the décor of the chateau in Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast.”)

Davis plays Schiaparelli as a diva—flamboyantly Latin, dangerously vivacious, insidiously confiding. She wants to know about Prada’s youth, presuming that it was wild, as hers was. Prada sympathizes with Schiaparelli’s struggles as a young single mother, and she seems embarrassed to admit that she never ran away from home. She emphatically disagrees when “Schiap” argues that couture is an art form—art and fashion, in Prada’s judgment, are discrete domains. But the old pro inevitably upstages the reluctant amateur. Prada looks as demure onscreen as she appeared in person, and just as wary of all the hoopla. Even though she studied mime for five years, at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, she comes across as the bashful audience member who is coaxed into holding a magician’s rabbit. And from time to time, she breaks the fourth wall with a nervous glance toward the camera, as if to say, “Aren’t we done yet?”

Crowley is a poetic minimalist, and his installation is the antithesis to the Baroque splendor of last year’s homage to McQueen. The first gallery is a narrow funnel with a center aisle; the clothes are displayed, on either side, against lacquered walls (red, black, and white) that serve as screens for Luhrmann’s film, and for video projections that magnify couture detail (whimsical buttons, lavish embroideries).

The central gallery has an aquatic shimmer that is slightly disorienting. The walls are mirrored (people kept bumping into them), the light is low, and the clothes are displayed in freestanding Plexiglass caissons—an ingenious conceit for making their exquisite workmanship visible from every angle. Black-and-white photographs of iconic Schiaparelli creations that weren’t available for display are projected behind the mannequins. At first glance, they appear static, but then a feather flutters, so does an eyelid, and disembodied lips on the pocket of a jacket turn red. The effect is enchantingly surreal.

Schiaparelli’s own surrealism, however, was more alarming and committed. I was thrilled to see that her “Tear Dress,” of 1938, her greatest collaboration with Salvador Dali, had made it to New York from London. (It belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum; Koda and Bolton had originally despaired of showing it—they were told it was too fragile to travel. But a tour de force of curatorial diplomacy apparently secured the loan.)

In this grand space, which is cool in both senses, you have the illusion of mingling with the mannequins at a crowded gala**,** like the one staged at the Met on Monday night. Perhaps Crawley was alluding to an anecdote from Schiaparelli’s memoir, “Shocking Life. ” She recalls climbing the mirrored staircase at a party in Soviet Moscow, complaining to a friend that there isn’t a chic woman in sight. Finally she spies one—not recognizing her own reflection.

Photograph by Platon.