Charles James

Visiting Charles James: Beyond Fashion, dramatically installed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, I was tempted to retitle the show to read Charles James: Not Quite Fashion.  Certainly, he designed ball gowns for fashionable women, 15 of which occupy one large gallery, each with an analytical video showing how pieces of fabric are folded into the finished product.  But James was primarily and essentially a fabric sculptor, as he admits, but not really a dress designer, as he does not.  His thinking is sophisticated as amply demonstrated in his pronouncements about design, posted on the mirror walls on two sides of the large gallery.  But his visual sensitivity does not soar to the same level, hampered as he was by his understanding of the female body as he wanted it to be in his imagination.  As sculpture, his gowns are spectacular; downstairs in the Costume Institute, his more quotidian dresses, especially the coats, are little more than lackluster, none quite equal to the art of his mentors Poiret and Vionnet.