If you’re unfamiliar with the history of Abercrombie & Fitch, you may be surprised to see a calf-length safari skirt suit on display at the Museum at FIT. It’s rightfully placed beside tunics from Yves Saint Laurent’s Saharienne collection and a khaki-jacketed 1984 look from Ralph Lauren. Together, from a diorama evoking the African savanna, they welcome visitors to the museum’s latest show.
Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme is the first exhibition to thoroughly document what fashion has done with garments designed for survival. Grouped into the sections Safari, Mountaineering, Deep Sea, Arctic and Space, it illustrates evolutions both subtle and dramatic through archival garments and vintage editorials. Curator Patricia Mears was inspired by Joseph Altuzarra’s early parkas, which are prominently displayed with two of their own influences: a Siberian funerary tunic and an M-51 fishtail jacket designed by the US military for the Korean War and later adopted by the punk movement.
The show, to its credit, doesn’t hesitate to address the naiveté (intentional and otherwise) that can infuse high fashion interpretations. An illustrated Vogue cover from 1926 shows a woman on safari (wearing a green gown with pearls, no less) riding a bucking zebra, a move that particular equid is unable to make. A caption in the Space section notes, amidst shiny silver dresses, that early space suits’ only metallic layer wasn’t visible—it was insulation. And on a recent evening, a museum staffer described their efforts to sit one of Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga puffers properly onto a mannequin’s shoulders (it didn’t work—the nonchalant shoulder reveal is actually engineered into the garment).
Wandering through the galleries filled with faux icebergs and spacecraft, there’s equal delight in seeing the fanciful and the truly familiar—some garments feel quite distant from their influences because of how integral they are to contemporary ready-to-wear. There are mod mini dresses in the context of the space race, a 1930s Eddie Bauer mountaineering jacket that would fit nicely into their current assortment, and a bright pink fit-and-flare Donna Karan cocktail dress in neoprene, a material once relegated to diving equipment.
As for the fanciful, a number of menswear items steal the show: Karl Lagerfeld’s faux fur jumpsuit for Chanel, a metallic gold Tommy Hilfiger puffer jacket and a Thom Browne tromp l’oeil wetsuit printed with, what else? A gray single-breasted suit, the uniform of many generations of Manhattan explorers.
Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme is open at The Museum at FIT through January 6, 2018.
