Thierry Mugler exhibit showcases an eccentric career
NEW YORK — Manfred Thierry Mugler, a boundarypushing French couturier whose glamazons and fembots helped define fashion in the 1980s and ’90s and who died this year, famously hated retrospectives.
“In the museum world, everyone knew he was against the idea,” said Thierry-maxime Loriot, curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the institution that finally persuaded Mugler to reconsider.
They changed his mind, Loriot said, by promising that any exhibition wouldn’t be a boring chronological tour of clothes. Instead, it would “look at the big themes, and put his work in the context of what his clothes represent in the world of now: creativity and the importance of being different.”
That was in 2016; the exhibition, “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime,” opened in Quebec in 2019. Now, after stops in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Munich and Paris, it has finally landed at the Brooklyn Museum.
Sprawling more than 16,000 square feet, “Couturissime” comprises a mixed media display featuring about 130 outfits plus sketches, photographs, videos and even scent, with backdrops created by a host of scenographers, including Philipp Furhofer and Rodeo FX, a special effects company that worked on “Dune” and “Stranger Things,” the better to reflect the immersive theatricality of the runway shows that made
his name.
And although the world of now is very different from the world when the show first opened — not just because of the loss of Mugler, but because of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, #Metoo — rather than making the exhibition feel outdated or irrelevant, the developments actually serve to give it even more relevance than it might originally have had.
It may not be called a retrospective, but that’s semantics. It functions the same way: as a convincing argument for the importance of a career that expertly walked the tightrope where originality met camp, challenging old hierarchies and inspiring designers from Alexander Mcqueen to Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. One that was founded on many of the cultural values currently in vogue today.
“Mugler was a pioneer when it came to women’s empowerment and diversity, starting in the 1970s,” Loriot said.
Although in the years after Mugler sold his brand (Clarins bought it in 1997 and he left to fully embrace theatrical work in 2002), these values were increasingly overshadowed by the designer’s penchant for kitsch razzle-dazzle, he experienced something of a 21st-century renaissance, thanks to his rediscovery by a generation of American pop stars such as Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Cardi B, who saw in his vision of female self-determination a kindred spirit.
This exhibition serves as a reminder of just how important he was as a link in the chain that got us to now, and how innovative his fashion truly was beneath the grandiosity and glitz. (Although the grandiosity and glitz are also awfully fun to see.)
The point is foreshadowed not just by the epigraph that opens the show — “In my work I’ve always tried to make people look stronger than they really are” — but by the first room, which showcases not a gown but a hologram of a gown: an elaborate gold cage built on a metal skeleton Mugler created in 1985 for a Comédie-française production of “La Tragédie de Macbeth.”
Little wonder that David Bowie, a chameleon of a rock star, went through a Mugler period. (His brightly colored suits form part of the celebrity section, which also includes looks worn by Diana Ross and Madonna.) Ditto George Michael, whose 1992 video “Too Funky,” co-directed by Mugler and featuring a variety of supermodels vamping in Mugler outfits, deservedly gets its own special showcase.
So does “Angel,” a perfume Mugler introduced the same year (1992 was also the year of his first couture show), and which was the first scent to dethrone Chanel No. 5 in France — in part because of its secret ingredient: the Pavlovian addition of a whiff of cotton candy. Three winged and diaphanous gowns, including one that transformed the model Pat Cleveland into a Madonna descending from the heavens for the finale of Mugler’s 1984 stadium show, situate the scent in the Mugler universe, although the attempt to frame further perfume bottles as sculpture is the one jarring note in the show.
The exhibition finally and fully takes wing in the last room, dedicated to the natural world and the sartorial artifice it inspired: an organza confection with the squishy pulse of a jellyfish dangling silicon tendrils; a column gown open at the back into feathered butterfly wings; and, at the center of it all, La Chimère, perhaps the most elaborate dress Mugler ever made.
Featuring a rainbow of exactingly beaded scales that form the iridescent carapace of a mythic creature, it took thousands of hours to produce and is so complicated to put on, it actually travels on its display mannequin. When it appeared on the runway, it also proved nearly impossible to walk in, the skirt was so tight; a not unusual corollary to Mugler’s tendency to go to any length necessary for aesthetic impact.
Although the idea of trading freedom for effect may seem the literal antithesis of empowerment, that imagery helped clear a path in the collective imagination. Even if now it is the very definition of a museum piece.