ROBERTA SMITH ESSAY

Real women don’t wear couture. Lacking the budgets or the bodies for it, they just watch. At best, they dress for short-term success, not posterity. That is, they don’t buy or commission lavish and costly garments from reigning design geniuses that they plan to wear a few times during the evening hours, fastidiously maintain and finally bequeath to a museum.

Which brings us to the often delirious yet discomforting unreality of most museum exhibitions devoted to high fashion. These shows almost invariably chronicle the lifestyles and shifting, usually unattainable ideals of femininity of the leisure class. But they also reflect larger, historical trends in taste, mores and wealth, while encapsulating the technical innovations, artistic sensibilities and fantasies that perpetually trickle down to the less expensive, more utilitarian designs most women wear.

Now two outstanding examples of high-fashion exhibitions, mounted collaboratively, can be seen at major New York museums in different boroughs. “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity” is the annual, extravaganza of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even if this year’s version doesn’t quite live up to its title, it is full of evening attire that ranges in date from the late Gilded Age to midcentury Hollywood. The show is enhanced by hand-painted murals designed by Nathan Crowley and the extravagant wigs of Julien d’Ys.

The Brooklyn Museum’s “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection” is rife with what are justifiably being called “masterworks,” which have not been exhibited for decades, if ever. The collection includes deep holdings (even drawings) of genuine geniuses like the French shoe designer Steven Arpad and especially the inimitable Charles James, whose astounding “Diamond” evening dress is one of the show’s high points. But it is also rich in accessories, idiosyncrasies and objects steeped in history.

Here you’ll find the hat fashioned from green velvet drapes and heavy gold fringe by the impoverished post-war Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) in “Gone With the Wind.” There is also the black silk twill gown that Queen Victoria wore in a famous 1896 family photograph, reproduced here. Among the dresses once worn by sylphs like Ava Gardner, the art collector Dominique de Menil or the socialite and major Charles James patron Millicent Rogers, Victoria’s is a shock. The mannequin is so short, wide and top-heavy that you may first think that it is seated.

The Brooklyn Museum’s show may end up saying more about the “national identity” of the American woman. For one thing, it ventures closer to the present and includes relatively modest postwar designs by Americans like Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin. For another, many of the clothes belonged to interesting women.

Yet the Brooklyn show also offers its garments as art objects. An elaborately tucked and scalloped gown designed by Charles Frederick Worth in the late 1860s for the Empress Eugenie is made entirely of lavender silk taffeta. It looks like a fancy maquette of itself . Equally striking is a Balenciaga dress from 1945 whose bands of black lace and white organza are dotted with paillettes in four sizes. The artistry of fashion is most alive in a row of nine floorlength ball gowns from the 1940s and ‘50s by Charles James.

The Met show is one long, atmospheric swoon. Its more than 80 gowns and ensembles are cosseted in circular galleries, where the murals evoke period settings. You begin to focus on the details. The mostly beaded and embroidered motifs on the cascading skirts of the evening gowns by Worth in the Astor ballroom are all derived or distilled from nature. The fabrics of the columnar chemise gowns by Poiret, Callot Soeurs and Liberty & Company, worn by the bohemian guests in Tiffany’s studio, are incredibly but discreetly rich in color, texture and pattern .

In the “Flapper” room, the chemise persists, but hemlines rise precipitously. Thin silks and chiffons prevail, encrusted with beads and sequins . The gowns in the Hollywood section (“Screen Sirens: the 1930s”) are by Madame Gres, Vionnet and Lanvin, as well as James. They are marvelous, but they get very distracting competition from the snippets of famous sirens on film - Katharine Hepburn, Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, Rita Hayworth and Garbo.

The final circular gallery is an animated mosaic of pictures of scores of American women, spanning most of the 20th century. It cuts through divisions of class and race the way the exhibition does not, and it is very transfixing . But it has a caffeinating effect, and points the mind back toward reality and the city outside.