Poiret, the Met, and Me

At what point does an impassioned clothes horse with taste and money cross into haute couture collector? The New York Times Style section reports on a Chilean scion of a banking family who is driving up the prices of “vintage”-- causing some consternation among curators at the Met and Boston Fine Arts where such things are collected-- I wondered why Jorge Yarur could be so inspired by his mother as to create a museum in Santiago that will showcase the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier's conical bra designed for Madonna's “Blind Ambition” tour, Nolan Miller's wardrobe for Joan Collins on “Dynasty,” as well as frocks from the 1930's. I guess to collect and exhibit is not the same as to covet and self-adorn.
         Jorge Yarur has been collecting fashion for his Museo de la Moda for the past decade. He was a player at the May 2005 auction in Paris of the wardrobe of Denise Poiret, the designer Paul Poiret's wife and muse, where the Costume Institute at the Met acquired many of the pieces in the current show of Poiret's work. In fact, the Met show is based on this important sale of Denise Poiret's presumed lost cache of costumes. What makes it art? Craft, construction, cloth, dazzling threads, beads, leather cut to look like lace, all inspire the fantasy of a bygone world, I suppose. At his famous “Thousand and Second Night” party, June 24, 1911, where Denise wore bejeweled pantaloons evoking a harem dancer, he gave perfume flasks to his guests. Talk about swag! The Met's fine catalogue explains Poiret's innovation: he was the first to offer with his dresses, décor, perfume, an entire lifestyle, the first to be inspired by painting as in his Raoul Dufyesque prints. Even before Chanel, he eschewed the bustle, bustier, and tight tailoring for loose, draped shapes, freeing us up for good. He called his 1930 autobiography, King of Fashion. He knew his worth. But, as Harold Koda pointed out, “He had the ideas, but he just didn't have that sense of business to make it last” and so therein lies the poignancy of Poiret's narrative; in a riches to rags romance, he died a pauper in 1944. Still, when I see the gowns, day dresses and coats in Berber patterns, they may be in a museum but in my mind's eye I see them on me.                                                                                                                                                Regina Weinreich