Met’s “Women Dressing Women” Exhibition Celebrates Female Designers

The exhibition, first since 2019, showcases generations of female designers, highlighting topics from representation to gender fluidity.

The Met’s latest Costume Institute exhibition “Women Dressing Women” showcases the creations of generations of female designers, highlighting topics such as omission, representation, inclusion, entrepreneurialism, body stereotypes, sustainability, gender fluidity and intergenerational communication.
The exhibition is the first one that the Met has staged since 2019, with an emphasis on items from the early 20th century to the contemporary, 50 percent of the 83 or so items are being displayed publicly for the first time.
The exhibition features the work of Ann Lowe, a Black designer whose 50-year career included designing Jackie Kennedy’s 1953 wedding dress without any credit, and Adele Henriette Negrin Fortuny, whose 1909 size-less pleated “Delphos” gown was popular for 40 years and widely credited to her husband Mariano.
The show is organized in multiple sections, with Anonymity, Visibility, Agency and Absence/Omission being the main ones. Liminal Spaces of Fashion, American Women, Appropriating Menswear, the Boutique Generation, Reclaiming the Body and Empowerment Through Practice also come into play.
The exhibition also addresses the current state of fashion, which many criticize for having the majority of European luxury houses being led by men. It ends with more contemporary design houses working more collaboratively, such as a Gabriela Hearst fall 2022 ensemble for Chloé that incorporated the work of Gee’s Bend quilters.