What's In Your Wardrobe?

The Age

Friday August 3, 2007

Janice Breen Burns

The future star of a National Gallery of Victoria exhibition may be mothballed in your attic, writes fashion editor Janice Breen Burns.

BERNARD WILLHELM'S checkered blue bloomers (pictured) aren't every chap's notion of masculine chic. But Roger Leong would love to meet someone who thinks they are. "We're desperate for some crazy men's wear," says Leong, curator of international fashion and textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria. "We want to get in touch with more of those extreme, brave dressers."

Until they do, the NGV's permanent collection of men's wear will be a swiss cheese full of holes marked "Claude Montana", or "Tom Ford for Gucci", "Comes des Garcons", "Gaultier", "Helmut Lang" or a hundred missing others. "We would kill for some really dedicated followers," Leong says. He means "of fashion", but among men his chances are not good. Although men generally dress more fashionably now than they did for decades, there is also a pall of sameness and conservatism across most wardrobes. There are not as many of the flamboyant types around now as in the '70s and '80s, when some men experimented wildly with off-beat international designers and spiced up Melbourne's streets and nightclub scene.

Where did they go? Swapped their Yamamoto jodhpurs and Gaultier sequined suspenders for mortgages and bespoke Brioni suits most probably. Leong is worried about what happened to their wardrobes. Where are the Kenzos and Yve Saint Laurents? The Miyakes and Giglis and Comme des Garcons? The Walter Van Beirendoncks? He suspects most are lost to ragbags and thrift shops but some must also have been carefully preserved in suit folds and boxes by men who could not bear to part with them. "I have heard on the grapevine of several serious collections," Leong says. "But collectors are usually very private people. They're often very guarded too; and rightly so. It's a very personal pastime, collecting, and a very expensive one, come to that." He does wish like crazy though that they would donate their rarest pieces - or at worst, lend them - to the NGV international fashion and textiles collection. There may even be blokes out there unaware that "paydirt" - in Leong's opinion - is lurking at the back of their wardrobe. "Maybe we'll get one of Piero Gesualdi's (customers) from the 1980s," he says hopefully. "One who wore those Claude Montana jackets with the huge shoulders, or maybe someone who bought their Comme Des Garcons from Trellini." (Gesualdi owned a pull-no-punches fashion boutique for men called Masons. Trellini boutiques, owned by the visionary entrepreneur Tony Newsham, specialised in razor-edge European and Japanese designers, including, particularly, Commes des Garcons.)

Leong and assistant curator Paola Di Trocchio are preparing for several NGV exhibitions scheduled up to 2010, including Manstyle in late 2009 which will track a history of men's wear from the 18th century. The show will include an extravagant late 19th century opera coat or dinner suit if they can find one, and a 1960s Pierre Cardin skinny suit, too, if they can find one of those. There is still a couple of years before the show's opening but the shopping list is long.

It might surprise some people that those dopey looking Willhelm bloomers, bought directly by the NGV from the German designer's 2005 spring/summer collection, will also be included in the Manstyle show to represent one pivotal moment in men's fashion history. "He (Willhelm) has always been on the edge of mainstream fashion," says Leong, who - in case you're wondering - does not consider the dungarees, as they are technically known, dopey. Au contraire. "All that colour and print and pattern you see young men wearing today - that was partly Willhelm. He's been very influential on casual men's wear."

It is Leong's and Di Trocchio's job to plumb fashion history and locate key works by iconoclasts who jolted us from one aesthetic era into the next. "From those moments in fashion when the ground starts to shift," Leong says. With a relatively small budget (less than $20,000 a year) to spend on private sales and public auctions such as Sothebys and Doyles, they rely heavily on collectors with altruistic tendencies. And there have been some extraordinary collections offered to the gallery since the 1950s. In 1951, one of the most significant, 38 immaculate House of Worth gowns owned in the late 1880s by one Lady Florence Phillips, was donated to the NGV by her daughter Lady Nicholson and grand daughter Elizabeth Banks.

Later, one of the rarest frocks in the world, a 1939 Balenciaga gown, bought from the legendary Lilian Wightman at Le Louvre in Collins Street, Melbourne by Janet Lovell Moran for her marriage to Harold James Carter in 1940, was donated by Carter's grandaughter Sara Bostock. "There are only three of these known to be in existence," Leong says. The dress is undergoing a laborious stitch-by-stitch, year-long restoration to stem and repair the shattering effect of metallic salts used to give its glorious silk extra weight and an elegant rustle. "These things can be like butterflies," Leong says. "So fragile."

Visitors to the NGV's Super Bodies exhibition opening later this month will also see some remarkable examples of 1980s fashion from Iris Lustig-Moar's collection. And next year the NGV's celebration of black, From Mourning to Night, will also feature designs selected from a collection of Japanese fashions accumulated by the late Delia Muriti which were donated by her niece Rebecca Dalwitz. There are gowns by seminal designers in the NGV collection that are the envy of curators around the world. A disarmingly simple but dramatic Dior red silk evening blouse and heart-pumpingly lovely sunray pleated floor-sweeper skirt donated by Angela Wood from her late mother, Mavis Powell's wardrobe, is considered a "find" even by Dior's archivist in Paris.

Ironically, Leong and Di Trocchio also express regret that they cannot accept every donation made to the gallery. "We just have enough of some things," Leong says. "We have to say no, sometimes. We have to be disciplined. I have seen a lot of disappointment - they've nursed this beautiful thing, this divine turn-of-the-century Scottish christening gown worn by their great-great-grandfather and we can't take it because we already have six."

It's a terrible irony that Leong and Di Trocchio live with every day: too much of some glorious things and desperate for just one lovely example of another. "A Christian Dior, a Tom Ford, a John Galliano maybe ...." Leong picks names from a neatly typed, five foolscap page "wish list" of garments yet to be acquired. "Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, Courreges, Biba, Madame Gres, Lacroix, Margiela, Schiaparelli, Quant, Poiret ...."

He could go on.

CAN YOU HELP?

Future fashion exhibitions

Super Bodies: Heroic Fashion from the 1980s

At the NGV International, from August 22, 2007 until February 3, 2008.

A tribute to the powerful and body-conscious styles that dominated women's fashion in the 1980s. Designers include Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Jean Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaia, Norma Kamali, Issey Miyake and Mariuccia Mandelli for Krizia.

(Gifts are no longer needed for this exhibition, but welcome for the NGV's permanent collection of designs from this period.)

From Mourning to Night: Black in Fashion

To show concurrently at the Ian Potter Centre and NGV International from February to August, 2008.

The exhibition will consider how black has been used to signify elegance, urbanity, fetish wear, subversion and sex appeal in Western fashion in the 19th and 20th centuries. Designers include Yves Saint Laurent, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcon, Madeline Vionnet, Cristobel Balenciaga, Chanel, Vivienne Westwood and Gianni Versace.

(Roger Leong is particularly keen to locate a rare "mermaid" dress by Azzedine Alaia.)

A New Aesthetic

Planned to show late 2008 into 2009.

An exhibition that will explore the incorporation of dressmaking elements - visible construction - as components of design. Most recently this aesthetic appeared in John Galliano's Fall 2005 collection for Christian Dior, and in Prada's fall 2006 collection. This exhibition will draw on a rare collection of Pierre Cardin toiles donated by Mrs Price of Lucas & Co. in 1980 and used to make dresses for the Australian market in the 1960s. The NGV hopes to find the finished garments made from the toiles which would be labelled "Pierre Cardin by Lucas & Co". Gifts or lent designs from the 1980s to the present by Comme des Garcons, Junya Watanabe for Commes de Garcons, Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan, and Yohji Yanamoto would also be welcomed.

Glamour

Planned for mid 2009

An exhibition to explore our constantly evolving notions of style and glamour from the early 20th century as epitomised in works by Callot Soeurs, Madeleine Vionnet, Christian Dior, Norman Hartnell, Pierre Balmain, Barbara Hulanicki for Biba, Vivienne Westwood, Gianni Versace, Martin Margiela and Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga. The NGV also hopes to locate designs from the 1950s by Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga, from the 1960s by Yves Saint Laurent, the 1980s to early 1990s by Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood and Thierry Mugler, and from the 1990s by Helmut Lang, Romeo Gigli and Tom Ford for Gucci.

Man Style

Planned late 2009 to early 2010.

A history of men's fashion from the 18th century to the present, and its manifestations in women's wear via tailored jackets, suits and military styling. Gifts and lent designs are being sought by designers including Mr Freedom, Pierre Cardin, Rudi Gernreich, Vivienne Westwood, Walter Van Beirendonck, Yves Saint Laurent, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garons, Jean Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace, Miuccia Prada, Tom Ford, Raf Simons, Bernhard Wilhelm and Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme.

© 2007 The Age

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