Living: Puttin' on the Ritz in Gotham

Two exhibits celebrate the giddy heights of fashion

On one point, anyway, there can be no argument. "La Belle Epoque," the new show of period high fashion organized by Diana Vreeland for New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and underwritten by Pierre Cardin, is an eyeful and a noseful. The eye is ravished by a theatrical assembly of more than 150 women's, men's and children's costumes, representing thousands of yards of fabric coaxed into stunning shape with a skill and diligence that today cannot be had anywhere outside of major surgery. The olfactory nerve, meantime, gets a good working over from L'Heure Bleue, a Guerlain scent that is sprayed every morning throughout the galleries. The senses reel. They are meant to. This is not art—if clothes may be called art at all—meant to be pondered and absorbed. This is curatorial show business of a particularly shrewd order. With the humble addition of a light show and the sale of Pharmaceuticals at the ticket counter, "La Belle Epoque" could be honestly promoted as a real time trip.

Vreeland's ten previous collaborations with the museum's Costume Institute have been both hot tickets and publicity bonanzas, and "La Belle Epoque" shows every sign of being a smash too. The women's gowns of the era, which by Vreeland's chronology developed in the last half of the 19th century and ended on the eve of the first World War, were opulent and imperial. They may have been the most extravagant fashion since the court of the Sun King. Worth, Doucet, Callot Soeurs, Poiret: the great fashion houses are all represented with gowns and dresses that seem to challenge, in some cases even exceed, the outer limits of craftsmanship. Who would have thought it possible for a bodice to be shaped in such a way, or for silk to fall so unhurriedly, like a dove on a light wind? The clothes of this period were an exercise in sensual extravagance, not only of highflying technical virtuosity but of high-flown social aggression. A gown by Worth was more effective than a quip that silenced a rival. Its beauty seemed inviolate: 19th century social armor.

The sensual suffocation of these grand clothes was modified and ventilated for outdoor wear. The looseness of a mohair duster, the easy lines of a woman's blueserge bicycle suit, even a white wool polo coat from Brooks Brothers, all prefigure a less restrictive notion of sophistication. The summer whites of Newport are as dazzling to a contemporary eye as a violet satin costume brocaded in gold and silver, supposedly worn by Sarah Bernhardt.

There is a grandiose theatricality about the entire exhibition that, ultimately, gives the clothing a secondary role. For all the sensory overload—the perfume, rooms decorated (courtesy of Cardin) to look like Maxim's, the Offenbach piped in like a sound track for an ancient travelogue—"La Belle Epoque" is less an evocation of mood or an exhibition of high style than it is an exaltation of swank, of money, of society. In that sense it is about fashion, not clothes, historical re-creation without historical perspective.