“The Model as Muse” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opens on Wednesday, feels a little like a funhouse caught between the mummies and the Renoirs. You’re tempted to snap into one of those incredible bump-and-grind poses suggested by tiny amounts of Spandex and squeal, “Hey, girlfriend!”
Sometime in the 1980s fashion models left the glossy kingdom of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and moved in with us. We haven’t been able to get rid of them since. They went from being remote goddesses in Paris couture — and, just as condescending, starved British chicks with super boyfriends — to being plain old Gisele, Naomi and Tyra.
We’re not sure why they fascinate us, though with their height, long legs and skin like polished marble, they fail to suppress the idea that pretty girls always get what they want. Sharon Stone, at the peak of her fame, said she felt like a stump next to these women.
Like it or not, these creatures embody ideals of beauty and fashion, often representing generational shifts in taste and popular culture. The curators of “The Model as Muse,” Harold Koda and Kohle Yohannan, focus on the second half of the 20th century, starting with Dior’s New Look in 1947. Fashion models certainly existed before then — Mr. Yohannan notes in the exhibition’s catalog that in 1924 Vogue conducted a model search and got more than 500 applicants — but, despite the creamy images of photographers like Edward Steichen and Horst, it was hard to compete with the glamour of movie stars and debutantes.
What changed, in a word, was fashion. Postwar fashion, which essentially meant French fashion, assumed an ultra-sophisticated, imperious look that demanded an expressive type of model, one who didn’t shrink from the boned corsets and satin folds but instead felt a heightened sense of femininity — arching her narrow back, extending her long, alabaster neck. The 1950s seemed to invite men to make love to the clavicle.
It’s hardly a surprise that the ’50s and ’60s provide the curators with their best material. More than the merger of great photographers like Irving Penn, Lillian Bassman and Richard Avedon, or beauties like the Texas-born sisters Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh, or energetic art directors like Alexey Brodovitch at Bazaar, these years were when a relationship developed between model and photographer.
This was especially evident in the pictures that Penn made with his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, whose lithe body lent a kind of nonchalant grace to the most imposing Balenciaga garment. But a similar understanding is also clear in Penn’s images of other models, notably Jean Patchett and Leigh. As Penn said of Leigh: “She seems to sense the coming click of the camera; her expression builds until she and the camera come alive together.”
Although models in the ’60s seem no less integral to the fashion-making process — Marisa Berenson recalled recently that she always had to do her own makeup for shoots and that it was her idea to give herself exploding lashes — the young women were becoming personalities in their own right. To deal with the crowds following Twiggy during her first shoot in New York, in 1967, the photographer Melvin Sokolsky had hand masks made of her image for the fans to hold up on cue. It was a way both to acknowledge Twiggy’s celebrity and avoid seeing other faces.
Of all the exhibition rooms at the Met, which are organized around decades and include copies of fashion magazines and re-creations of famous shoots with original garments (like the Dior dress in Avedon’s “Dovima With Elephants”), the ’60s room is the most effective. Blown up on one wall is “Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Maggoo?,” William Klein’s 1966 satiric film of the fashion world, and in the center are Bernard and François Baschet’s aluminum dresses from the movie, their cold surfaces reflecting the quest for modernity.
In many ways, though, the exhibition feels in search of a legitimate center, a justification — beyond icon-mongering — to spend so much time looking at pretty faces. By its very title, “The Model as Muse” presents an idealized relationship between photographer and model, or designer and model, and while much of the work in fashion is collaborative, the fact is that many designers and photographers are major control freaks. And some just outright dismiss the role of models.
As it is, the exhibition ignores one of the most significant model-designer relationships of the last 30 years: that between the Paris designer Azzedine Alaïa and his long-serving muses, among them Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista. It’s hard to imagine their careers — and bodies — without Mr. Alaïa’s singular fashion. The omission of Bruce Weber, who expertly plugs models and designers alike into his cinematic vision, also seems glaring.
Ultimately, in this attractive-looking exhibition, you don’t learn enough about the modeling experience as it played out in the late 20th century really to care. Linda and Naomi came along. Steven Meisel photographed them. They wore grunge and had a real good time. Then came Kate Moss, and, well, she was different. By the time you reach the last rooms of “The Model as Muse,” in the ’80s and ’90s, you might as well be flipping through the pages of a fashion magazine, so random and arbitrary are the conclusions.
Personality takes over the exhibition, the cult of personality that Gisele and Kate necessarily fuel. This may be a cultural reality, but it seems to me the curators could have avoided the obvious. What goes unaddressed is the change from film to digital photography, and how that affected sittings and the dynamics of the photographer-model relationship. It’s the sort of elemental question the curators should have asked. Instead they seem guilty of the grossest fashion sin: wanting to hang out with the models.
