When it comes to fashion, we tend to celebrate male designers. Whether it’s Claudia Schiffer crediting Karl Lagerfeld for her success, Thierry Mugler’s PR-fueled friendship with Kim Kardashian or Naomi Campbell’s long-standing relationship with Azzedine Alaïa, men have always dressed women.
We’re no strangers to this, so it’s incredibly refreshing to see many of the overlooked women designers of our time at The Costume Institute’s fall 2023 exhibition, “Women Dressing Women” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It celebrates the creativity and artistic legacy of women—and boy, is that overdue.
Women designers like Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Miuccia Prada, Jeanne Lanvin, and Vivienne Westwood are celebrated alongside women-led fashion houses like No Sesso and Collina Strada. The exhibition runs from December 7 through March 3, 2024, highlighting eighty pieces from the 20th Century onward that, according to Met director Max Hollein, will spotlight “historically underappreciated voices” and elevate women who “continue to be the lifeblood of the global fashion industry we see today.”
Upon descending a white staircase, the first three works in the show set the tone for the exhibition: three pieces of black eveningwear from three European designers. It showcases pieces from House of Vionnet, which was run by French designer Madeleine Vionnet, a two-piece from Italian designer Elsa........