Descending into the Metropolitan Museum’s Anna Wintour Costume Center these days feels a bit like entering some particularly glamorous catacombs. Greeted by the echo of vaguely funereal music (Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem Op. 48,” to be precise), visitors pass a mural of a grey-leafed weeping willow on their way down into the dimly lit hall, where they face the series of dramatic Victorian-era dresses that make up the centerpiece of “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire.” The Costume Institute’s first fall exhibition in seven years, “Death Becomes Her” explores the fashionable side of mortality with approximately 30 ensembles from 1815 to 1915, including a dress worn by Queen Alexandra in mourning of Queen Victoria.
As expected given the subject matter, the color palette of the show is overwhelmingly black — in crapes and velvets, sleek veils and puffed gigot sleeves — with a few welcome splashes of grey and purple to honor the later tradition of “half-mourning” attire. To round out the gloomy aesthetic, topical quotes are projected on all four walls in ghostly white (e.g., “She seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction”; or “The eyes that survive the bitterness of tears succumb to the poisonous rasping of crape”). Meanwhile, the adjacent gallery hosts a collection of death-centric prints and photographs, as well as other vintage bereavement accessories like hats and parasols.
As museum shows go, fashion exhibitions have high potential to rack up pop culture cachet — and especially, in this case, some interest from the despondent, black-lipstick-sporting set. It’s clear that this demographic is at least somewhat on the museum’s radar: In addition to the usual exhibition catalogue and postcards, this show’s makeshift gift shop offers a selection of goth-friendly tchotchkes, from chunky black jewelry to a special edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” (A personal favorite: the “Mystifying Mints,” with tops designed to look like Ouija boards.)
Still, it’s not all vague morbidity and black lace here. As with other exhibitions of its ilk, “Death Becomes Her” does well to foreground fashion’s inherent sociopolitical significance — in this case, the uncertain role of independent women in the 19th century. Indeed, this is where the title’s double entendre takes effect — because really, in so exceedingly patriarchal an age, what was to become of a widow? According to Charles Dana Gibson’s 1900 satirical illustration series for Life magazine, she’s a not-so-subtly sexual figure, at once outcast and sought after by her former social circles — in one panel, the young widow gets “indignation and sympathy over a scurrilous attitude” from a frumpy-looking “Mrs. Babbles,” while in another, she sits disinterested, surrounded by rapt suit-clad men. As the exhibition demonstrates, flashy mourning attire was as much a way to publicly prove devotion to one’s late spouse as it was to announce oneself as newly single: “Don’t you see,” says an anonymous young woman in one of the wall-projected excerpts, “[wearing sable] saves me the expense of advertising for a husband.” It’s no wonder, then, that mourning dresses were pushed heavily in the fashion magazines that cropped up during this era, and that so weighty an emotional burden would be dressed in cascading frills, albeit somber-toned ones.
Of course, lest it all seem a bit callous, it’s worth thinking of the ornate ensembles as a form of distraction in coping with death — which, as the exhibition’s opening wall text reminds us, occurred at a far higher rate in the 1800s, especially among children. Behind the panels of tulle and chiffon lurks the specter of genuine grief; each dress seems to represent the transfiguration of something brutal, baffling, and unavoidable into something delicate and ordered. Perhaps nowhere is this so poignant as in the few pieces of jewelry fitted with intricately-laid locks of the deceased’s hair — at once touching and macabre, even perversely romantic. Poe, at least, would certainly approve.
“Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum through February 1, 2015.
