In America: A Lexicon of Fashion & An Anthology of Fashion

In America is a two-part exploration of American fashion celebrating the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s seventy-fifth anniversary. The first part, A Lexicon of Fashion, which opened in September 2021 and was refreshed in March 2022, seeks to establish a new vocabulary for American fashion. The second part, An Anthology of Fashion, which opened in May 2022, presents historical costumes displayed in the American Wing period rooms framing “sartorial narratives that relate to the complex and layered histories of those rooms” (exhibition press release). While it is unusual for the Costume Institute to link the fall/winter exhibition and the spring exhibition together and rotate out almost the entirety of the fashions on display halfway through a show’s run, the theme of American fashion has been a recurring focus for the Costume Institute over its seventy-fiveyear history. In this two-part exhibition, Head Curator Andrew Bolton and his team present their most unique, ambitious, and diverse exploration of this subject to date. In America is a culmination of all that has come before in exploring elements of craft, style, and design while addressing issues of identity, culture, society, race, and politics in American fashion. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the team worked to create a broader vocabulary for American fashion that extends beyond sport and ready-to-wear to generate a kind of emotional language long associated with the European haute couture; over 100 words are curated, defined, contextualized, and allocated to the garments on display via text panels described in the introductory wall text as “word-bubble headpieces.” Second, and perhaps more importantly, the exhibition seeks to tell the hidden histories of some of America’s lessknown designers. A Lexicon of Fashion is arranged in twelve sections described as the 1 Previous exhibitions such as American Creations and Sources from Which They Have Been Derived (1940), American Fashions and Fabrics (1945), American Women of Style (1975), American Ingenuity (1998), Adrian: American Glamour (2002), and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity (2010) have explored the designing, collecting, and shaping of American fashion.