Who gets to be American?
Exhibition: In America: A Lexicon of Fashion
Location: The Met, NYC
Open: 211018-220905
There’s evidence that this exhibit was put together as a response to the political climate of the US as of 2020 and attempts to tackle the age old questions of who and what is “American”?
Curator Andrew Bolton was inspired by a project started by Adeline Harris Sears (1938-1931) back in 1856. She mailed small pieces of white silk to a range of famed people, asking them to sign the fabric and send it back to her so that she could create a “patchwork portrait of mid-nineteenth-century America.” The quilt, which usually resides in the Met’s American Wing, was moved to be the opening piece of the show and was in my personal opinion, the very best thing on display. Bolton used this quilt as a metaphor of America: “all woven and held together by a common thread.”
Bolton (note: who was born and educated in the UK) gathered a range of pieces from sportswear to contemporary fashion, all from American-born designers, 40% of whom are people of color, making a blanket statement (see what I did there?) of the diversity and inclusivity America is supposedly known for.
Each piece is simultaneously appointed a word or emotion representative of the piece itself. The words are a nice sedative, evoking a portion of the Plutchik Wheel I imagine doesn’t get as much show in a typical therapy session: joy, belonging, comfort, delight.
The ensembles themselves lacked the drama and awe of previous exhibits and reflect a subdued collection of pieces that while obviously well designed, were exceedingly… practical and not very expressive at all.
So maybe, while not necessarily inspiring, Bolton nails the truth of the state of our country on its head with a clear message of “stay in your box, don’t be dramatic, and be what we tell you you ought to be.” My mind is thrown back to an essay I wrote when I was in Junior High: an examination of whether the US was a wonderful melting pot of cultures or a salad bowl of neighborhoods, of people too afraid or ashamed to interact outside of their communities, much like the mesh boxes that isolate each piece of the exhibit, windowed with cold, sterile light, reminiscent of the Barbie doll and mirroring our country’s long controversy over what she represents, also.
So the questions remain. I’m not wholly convinced I saw an accurate representation of who is American or even what America actually represents, nor was there a clear statement as to what the “common thread” that really binds us all together was.
So much more could have been said.