Not every New Yorker as nervy as Madonna
What to wear? Sounding a bit dazed, Amanda Cutter Brooks pondered her options for the Costume Institute‘s benefit gala, which takes place tomorrow night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The party’s theme, “Dangerous Liaisons,” did not exactly suit her, what with its suggestion of heaving bosoms and stiffly powdered hair. Try as she might, Ms. Brooks, 29, a fixture on the New York society circuit and a house muse for the design firm Tuleh, could not get in the mood. “I’m a total creature of the 20th century,” she said on Thursday. “I really had no vision for myself.” So she took her problem to Bryan Bradley, Tuleh’s designer, who lost no time trussing Ms. Brooks in a pointy-waisted corset worthy of La Pompadour.
Ms. Brooks’s conundrum resonated in bedrooms and dressing rooms all over town last week. The Costume Institute party, one of the most anticipated social events of the season, was only days away. But its mandate, to dress up in a version of 18th-century costume, left many of Manhattan’s most soigné young style setters feeling slightly clueless. Hoping to stay faithful to the spirit of an evening billed by the museum as “all about the choreography of seduction and erotic play,” some women rushed to their dressmakers. But with paniers and hoop skirts in short supply, others simply threw up their hands.
“It’s a stress moment,” said Sally Singer, an editor at Vogue, a gala sponsor. “In New York,” she said, “there is such an emphasis on looking sleek and chic. Period dressing presents a challenge to all that.”
Ms. Singer sidestepped the problem, and the period, by choosing a 1950’s boned evening dress tweaked by a softening of stays. After all, not every New Yorker is as nervy as Madonna, who promoted her “Reinvention” tour dressed as Marie Antoinette, with a poster showing her on all fours, the better to display a milky décolletage.
The challenge seemed to be how to modernize the style of a period which to some New Yorkers seemed as remote and exotic as Troy. “These women are not really used to wearing a corset or a big ballgown,” said Bill Bull, dressmaker to the city’s premier glamazons, including Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and a chairwoman of the gala. “They have no idea how to go about it.”
And there were more pressing concerns: how to get out of a car wearing a skirt as wide as a barn, or, worse, how to squeeze through the museum’s entrance.
Source: The New York Times