The Metropolitan Museum of Art Celebrated the Costume Institute’s Fall Exhibition Women Dressing Women

On the Upper East Side, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an evening cocktail reception to fête the Costume Institutes fall 2023 exhibition, Women Dressing Women, co-curated by Mellissa Huber and Karen Van Godtsenhoven. The exhibition features looks from The Met's permanent collectsion and explores the creative legacy of women fashion designers, tracing a lineage of makers from the turn of the twentieth century to the present-day designers, emerging voices, and forgotten histories alike.

"We had a sort of multi-tiered approach to curating Women Dressing Women. We knew that anything that we showed, we wanted to either already own or collects to bring into the collectsion. We had our incredible permanent collectsion at the Costume Institute to draw from as our starting point," co-curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven told Vogue. “When collectsing new pieces, we tried to focus on including just as many designers as possible, creating a nice assortment across time, which we organized around this broader trajectory looking at not only women's role in fashion but fashion's role for women too, through four critical notions of anonymity, visibility, agency, and absence or omission.”

Spirits were high in the museum's Great Hall as guests gathered to celebrate the first fall Costume Institute exhibition since 2019—partygoers enjoyed a flowing assortment of specialty cocktails and a wide selection of passed canapés. Afterward, attendees made their way through the museum's ancient Egypt collectsion and into the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Down the white marble stairs, viewers were met with a striking first glance welcoming them to the fall exhibition, featuring an iconic trio of vintage looks from famed women in fashion: Madeleine Vionnet, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Gabrielle Chanel. Guests weaved through a maze-like display of over 70 womenswear designers, spanning ca. 1910 to today, including French haute couture from houses such as Jeanne Lanvin to American designers like Claire McCardell and Isabel Toledo. Also included amidst the careful curation were contemporary designs by Iris van Herpen, Rei Kawakubo, Anifa Mvuemba, Simone Rocha, and Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada.

"The Collina Strada piece featured in this exhibition was from our AW '21 Collection, in which we shape-shifted our models into animals based on the David Manning League books. It's a really important piece because it's the first time a wheelchair has ever been exhibited in the Costume Institute," Hillary Taymour told Vogue. “I feel really honored and empowered to be able to be part of that. It's such a special moment; I'm just really proud.”

As part of the exhibition's effort to highlight fashion inclusivity, the museum captured a live body scan of model and disabled activist Aaron Rose Philip to ensure her likeness was properly captured wearing her Collina Strada runway look.

"To be featured as a mannequin representing Hillary Taymour's Collina Strada in The Met's new exhibition is one of the greatest honors of my life. As a model, and as a physically disabled Black trans woman, this is the first time that both the disabled and Black trans demographic gets to see ourselves represented as high art and fashion in this way," said Aaron Rose Philip. "It is such a beautiful step in more equitable usage and representation for people like me in fashion. This is disabled awareness. I'm so grateful for Hillary and Charlie Engman."

Attendees included Anna Wintour, Andrew Bolton, Max Hollein, Thom Browne, Amy Fine Collins, Elizabeth Diller, Olympia Gayot, Sara Hiromi, Zac Posen, James Reginato, Sandy Schreier, Sarah VanDerBeek, Maayan Zilberman, and many more faces from New York's art and culture world. Also in attendance were designers Melitta Baumeister, Barbara Hulanicki, Ester Manas, Jasmine Søe, and Yeohlee Teng—all of whom had the pleasure of viewing their works featured in the exhibition. Other contributors at the party included artist Caitlin Keogh, who created headpieces for the show, and musician Juliana Barwick, whose track “Prizewinning” plays in the galleries

"Women Dressing Women is about the individual designer's contributions and women's societal roles. There's a lot of ground to cover. Still, because of the framework of working with the museum's permanent collectsion, we managed to really dig into all of the designers and discover unknown names," co-curator Mellissa Huber told Vogue. “There were so many different viewpoints we wanted to highlight. The main takeaway is that the better periods for women in general were also the better periods for women in fashion—they're correlated.”