“What would Dovima With Elephants have been without Dovima?” the curator Kohle Yohannan said last week, referring to a celebrated Richard Avedon photograph of 1955 that depicted the attenuated mannequin Dovima (nee Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba) wearing a Christian Dior sheath and sandwiched between monumental pachyderms.
One could just as easily ask what Dovima With Elephants would have been without the elephants, of course, but then 3-tonne pachyderms don’t rate the cultural attention devoted to beautiful clothes-hangers who weigh 50kg.
Elephants don’t have fanzines, magazines, Web sites and blogs devoted to their images and antics. They don’t attract the thumb-tapping haiku artists of the Twitter-sphere. They do not rate museum shows consecrated to their essentially unsung contributions to fashion, art, feminism, commerce, body imagery and art. In truth, models have never garnered the full-scale museum treatment, either. Or they didn’t until now.
Opening at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art today, The Model as Muse aims to give credit to the assorted women who, at least since the invention of photography, have helped set the standard of Western feminine beauty. The sophisticates (Dovima, Lisa Fonssagrives, Sunny Harnett) of the 1950s, with their distant gazes and angular figures, became the hippie goddesses (Veruschka, Penelope Tree, Twiggy) of the 1960s. And they in turn were transformed into the ruddy athletic types of the following decade (Lisa Taylor, Patty Hansen), who gave way to the glamourpuss supermodels (Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista) of the 1980s. And, with the notable exceptions of Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen, that is pretty much where the occupational and cultural needle got stuck.
The Model as Muse seeks to examine the relationship, as Yohannan writes in the big glossy book that accompanies the exhibition, “between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models who posed in the salons, walked the runways and exploded onto the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and even Life and Time.”
Action verbs are one of the enduring tropisms of fashion-speak and so naturally models never “land” in either Vogue or our lives with a passive thump. Models are locomotives, to use an archaic Vreeland-era formulation. Models rocket. Models explode. Whether or not models are icons, they incontestably excite our attention and draw us in.
“I was a little Southern, ignorant white female and would have been one forever,” Lauren Hutton once told me, had modeling not propelled the Carolina tomboy from her simple beginnings and onto a string of Vogue covers and lucrative advertising campaigns.
Now in her 60s and still working, Hutton is among the few models to have improvised a durable career in a business where the talent is often considered a necessary nuisance and in which it is commonplace for people to talk about a model’s “use by” date.
“Modeling is a heinous job,” said Yohannan last week and, having been a model himself, the curator should know.
Yet an awful lot of people seem to want to be a model or else look at or look like or learn about one (check the Google hits for Gisele Bundchen). And it almost goes without saying that a reason for all this interest is that these gorgeous and petted and idealized creatures are passive — their beauty that of a butterfly pinned to a collector’s tray.
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