When celebrities take to the Met Gala red carpet on May 2, there will likely be no shortage of corset boning and bustles.
That’s because the dress code for this year’s event, hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, is “Gilded Glamour and White Tie,” referencing the lavish era of American fashion in the last decades of the 19th century, when industrialization rapidly amplified the country’s wealth gap.
“It is very embellished, very exaggerated, very structured,” fashion historian and curator Kate Strasdin said of Gilded Age style in a video interview. “It feels so upholstered compared to the way that we think about dress now.”
An evening dress and ball gown from House of Worth, the first French couture salon to set up shop and influence American fashion from overseas. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Gilded Age was a 30-year period during which industrialists and real estate magnates saw their fortunes ascend to staggering heights thanks to the rapid expansion of trains, factories, and urban centers. Famous family names including Frick, Astor, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt shaped the country’s infrastructure, and the socialites of the era, including Caroline Schermerhorn Astor and Alva Vanderbilt, ruled New York society.
Corsets have been cropping up on red carpets over the past year, laying the groundwork for the Met Gala. Credit: Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Status symbols
During the Gilded Age, you were what you wore, as Strasdin noted it was the period when branding from fashion houses was a novel concept. Many American women at the time bought their status-securing dresses from Paris from the pioneers of haute couture: Charles Worth, Jacques Doucet, Paul Poiret and Madame Jeanne Paquin, the latter of whom showed her innovative modern designs at the 1900s World Fair.
According to Strasdin, American dressmakers wouldn’t have their moment until World War I disrupted the supply of European goods to the US.
“American women are having to actually travel there, so that’s the first sign of enormous wealth — to actually get yourself there for the fittings,” she said. “So then it became like Instagram influencers now — (the women would) come back with dresses that people knew they’d bought in Paris.”
Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt in her “Electric Light” gown (left) and Alva Vanderbilt in her costume of a “Venetian Renaissance Lady” at the Vanderbilt Ball (right). Credit: José María Mora (2)
“The gown itself (had) all sorts of embellishments that were designed to catch the light,” Strasdin said. “And then she had an electric torch that was really cutting edge at the time. It’s gone down in history as one of the iconic garments of the period.”
Corset wars
But even as the fashion pendulum swung towards formal and elaborate, the underground Aesthetic Movement began encouraging women to dispose of their corsets in the 1870s, kicking back against industrial-age societal conventions. Its female bohemian members donned loose-fitting “artistic” dresses in public that were considered shocking for their association with undergarments. (The male Aesthetes, like Oscar Wilde, were also looked down upon for their so-called feminized sartorial statements.)
HBO’s Gilded Age Credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO
Though the movement didn’t change public dress codes widely for women, the silhouettes did somewhat catch on in the private homes of wealthy women. Enter the romantic leisurewear staple the “tea gown” — an elaborate precursor to 2020’s viral “nap dress” — though, according to Strasdin, many tea gowns still hid “a robust boned bodice” underneath the fabric. Several of such gowns from Adelaide Frick, the wife of industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick, reside at The Frick in Pittsburgh, which houses a number of Gilded Age designs.
“It’s very much a period that gives us a lot to experiment with, and lots to draw from and lots to play,” she said.
HBO’s Gilded Age Credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO
This year’s Met Gala attendees may not replicate the exact styles from a century and a half ago, but Strasdin finds the theme appropriate for its resonances today, including the impact of wealthy socialites (who make their fortunes off internet clout rather than steel factories) to the modernization of fashion houses.
“It’ll be great to see a nod to all the embellishment…and a celebration of that kind of exaggeration,” she said. “And the whole exuberance of color and shape.”
“And maybe some crazy hats.”
Top image: A still image from Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film “The Age of Innocence,” set during the Gilded Age.
Source: www.cnn.com