Superhero costumes are big this year and it’s not just the new Ironman movie that has influenced the zeitgeist. In case you have been living in a vacuum, last night was the opening of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.”
The MET’s annual Costume Institute Gala has been called the “Oscars of the East” and has long been a star filled event with a huge list of who’s who in the art, fashion, and celebrity word. This year, co-hosted by Giorgio Armani, and filled with past silver screen embodiments of superhero’s past was no exception. Most wore the appropriate designer red carpet ensembles, but there are defiantly a few who took the superhero theme to the limits.
While the ideal of a superhero costume obviously fits well into the whole costume concept, one might find it a far stretch to compare Wonder Woman to a 1740’s English dress designed by Robe a la Francaise which resides in the Costume Institutes permanent exhibit. Never fear though, as the MET has perfectly explained how something as campy and pop ridden as Spiderman deserves apt recognition. As state on the main exhibit Web site:
“Through the years, the superhero has been used to embody—through metaphor—our social and political realities … Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. …”
The actual costumes drawn for comic books become blurred with the costumes designed for the movies and then, when you add the fashion designers interpretations, somehow it makes sense.
Take Catwoman, for example. Created by Bob Kane in 1940, as a simple burglary foe of Batman’s, she not only rose to popularity and achieved her own comic book, but also, no matter how poor the reviews were, got her own movie as well in 2004. In some ways, she is a clear parable for the plight of women and their independence of men though time.
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