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Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed
December 6, 2001–March 17, 2002
The Costume Institute, ground floor
Over time and across cultures, extraordinary manipulations of the body have occurred in a continuing evolution of the concept of beauty. This exhibition will offer a unique opportunity to see fashion as the practice of some of the most extreme strategies to conform to shifting concepts of the physical ideal. Various zones of the body—neck, shoulders, bust, waist, hips, and feet—have been constricted, padded, truncated, or extended through subtle visual adjustments of proportion, less subtle prosthesis, and often deliberate physical deformation. Costumes in the exhibition—ranging from a 16th-century-style iron corset to Jean Paul Gaultier's notorious “Madonna” bustier—will be augmented by anthropological and ethnographic examples and by paintings, prints, and drawings, including caricatures by Cruikshank, Daumier, Rowlandson, and Vernet.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
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