Photo Abigail Carreño Miller/WritersClearinghouse News Service
BY RICHARD CARRENO
[SPECIAL TO WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
I've been to numerous fashion shows.
Some live.
Years ago, when I was the men's fashion editor for the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts and, later, as the men's fashion reporter for The Hartford Courant, these used to be ritualised week-long affairs orchestrated twice a year. Winter fashion in the summer in New York and summer fashion in the winter at a mountain for seashore resort, mostly in New Jersey. (Or, was it winter fashion in New York? Never mind). Lots of models strutting. Lots of designers blowing hot air. And lots of swag bags. They were left in hotel rooms while reporters/editors were out to dinner and an evening event. Inside the bag -- actually, a basket or huge box -- were gifts worth hundreds. The hotel room and all meals were free too. Conflict of interest? Sure. Influence peddling. Not so much. Most colleagues I knew -- at least, the ones who weren't in it simply for the swag -- produced largely unbiased reports. Still, whatever the nature of the reporting, the industry of course got a huge publicity payoff.
These were mostly museum-based mannequin exhibits, largely out
of the purview of fashion reporters who like what's putatively
'new.' Museum shows, by definition, are retrospectives. Attendees
are fashion historians, art critics, and of course women, who make
up the largest contingent of paying customers to the block-buster
shows that are being held with ever-greater frequency at
institutions with sizable costume holdings, places like the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victorian & Albert Museum, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Fashion Institute of Technology in
New York.
This show, which runs through mid August, is atypical in that its
male oriented (most museum shows feature female styles to ring up
female attendance), historically based (as opposed to the more
common, popular designer-based exhibits), and the largely
result of the late Richard Merkin, who inspired the whole
thing. Merkin, who?
The time-line of modern men's fashion is remarkably short, just from
the early 19th century and from Regency England. Its practitioners
are remarkably few, from the grandee British tailors of Savile Row
and the New York innovators of versions of American classics
like Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and other Madison Avenue brethren.
On both sides of the Atlantic, we can thank George 'Beau'
Brummell as the incubator of modern fashion. In the 20th
century, in America, we can thank fashion plates like Cary Grant,
the Duke of Windsor (among his bi-ways, he was also bi-national),
Douglas Fairbanks, and George Frazier for popularizing the looks
that still dominate today. And, yes, Merkin.
Unlike most clotheshorses, Merkin, who died in 2009 at 70, was
an academic (a RISD professor) and painter.(He was best known
as illustrator of New Yorker covers). But to a small and influential
coterie of fashion insiders, he was also a fashion arbiter. And
dandy.
I got to know Merkin almost thirty years ago as a source and, in
meetings in Providence and New York (where he lived), just for
conversational refreshment on a cornucopia of topics. He was an
expert on such divers subjects as from erotica, the works of John
O'Hara, to the history of American men's fashion.
He died far too soon. But, thanks to RISD and the show's in-house
curators Kate Irvin and Laurie Brewer, his material legacy
remains powerfully alive. That was his wardrobe, a large part of
which he donated to he Providence college, one of the nation's
premier art schools, and what was to become the centerpiece of
'Artist/Rebel/Dandy.'
The show covers the broad expanse of British and American men's
fashion, from Brummell, Oscar Wilde, George IV, Sir Max Beerbohm, to
the contemporary upstart Thom Browne.
The exhibit is thorough, detailed, and comprehensive. Moreover,
explained Museum Director John W. Smith in an accompanying brochure,
'[it] comes at time of renewed appreciation for the nuances and
attention to detail of traditional tailoring, and also innovation
and boldness in menswear design' The historical figure of dandy, he
added, is 'central to this development.'
Of all the fashion exhibits I've attended, this was the first that I
knew first-hand one of the figures who actually inhabited the
clothes on display.
My hope to renew a visceral contact with Richard was disappointing,
even sad. I recollected Merkin in these very bespoke clothes on
display. At another time, the clothes encased his vitality. His
cheekiness. His erudition.