How I learned to appreciate fashion through traveling with my kid - Houston Chronicle

I didn’t mean to step on Pierre Cardin’s shoe. But I did it just the same, and the diminutive Italian designer swiftly recoiled and looked upon me with irritation.

But having escaped a brief bit of rain, I’d removed my glasses and entered a lobby where Cardin stood to the side, and, well, my 20/500 eyes just saw an elderly man in a topcoat, and I was doing my best in tight quarters. I was also completely unaware that the elderly man was the subject of the shrine whose lobby he inhabited.

The three of us — me, my wife and Hazel, our fashion-minded daughter — were on our way to the Picasso Museum in Paris when we saw a sign for a museum dedicated to Cardin. Trying to further kindle the kid’s interest in design, we threw ourselves into the museum where two impossibly tall women stood wearing monochrome mini dresses with a singular geometric design on the front of each. I’d say they looked like a prime ’60s design, but honestly, everything old is new again. So their dresses looked ageless.

One of the impossibly tall women guided us into an exhibit that featured a half century of Cardin’s work. “Something something something,” she said. “And you met Monsieur Cardin.”

She waved her hand toward the lobby.

Wait. What?

Cardin, then a spry 91, had placed a hat upon his head and left his own museum with a black umbrella cast above his head, looking like an aged spy, disgusted with the current state of espionage to the point of calling it quits and disappearing into the fog.

“Wait,” Hazel said. “Did she say that …”

“Shhh,” I told her. “Let’s look at some dresses.”

That weird moment of half-revelation has defined much of the 13 years my kid has been around. She determined early on that fashion was her interest. It was never a big deal to me. My tastes run more toward comfort (high), cost (low) and durability (yes). I spent the ’90s in New York, a boom decade for that city, and managed to live paycheck to paycheck the entire time. New clothes were not an option, so I shopped at the thrift store that sold by the pound.

This is all to say that I came into parenthood without much affinity for a well-conceived, well-constructed garment. My wife has a far sharper eye for fashion as craft and art, whereas I have come to appreciate a nice sweatpant.

But the kid showed up like an creature from outer space. And we’ve tried to cater to her interest without suffocating it. So a trip to Rome also included a sider to Milan. Visits to New York were built increasingly around sights that weren’t bars and restaurants. Like the exhibits at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which presented a lavish and compelling set of works inspired by fairy tales.

Since Hazel has been dragged to a ventriloquism museum, a “snake museum” located in a guy’s double-wide and other such odd points of interest (to me), I felt I owed her my attention for her world. And as somebody who has tried to never miss an art gallery when traveling, I’ve reveled in observing the creative nature of this sartorial art. I’ve found it heartening that fine-arts museums have increasingly dedicated their space to 20th-century fashion, treating it like 20th-century painting.

And the evolution of it all can be intriguing to observe. The Dallas Museum of Art has an enlightening set of paintings by Piet Mondrian that trace his evolution from landscapes to more abstract landscapes to spare geometric pieces with earth tones to spare geometric pieces with primary colors that would become his enduring legacy. Fashion — at least as I’ve observed it in exhibitions representing the 20th century — works in reverse: simple and spacious lines giving way to more ornate detail over time. Only to return to simplicity again.

I’m far from an expert. But I can appreciate some of the qualities I see in painting in a dress: texture and depth, color and contrast, line and shape.

And I’ve found it amusing how my distaste for certain designers has more to do with era than any personal ethos. Cardin in the ’60s showed a genius for saying a lot with a little. The ’80s devoured him. But a trip to the Armani Gallery in Milan only underscored how ruthless that decade was to artists.

Speaking of the Dallas Museum of Art, we wound through the new Christian Dior exhibition there recently. It underscored my nascent but firm design beliefs. I adored Dior’s simple lines and design elements, and appreciated the way Yves Saint Laurent took those classic elements and expanded them in ways both subtle and profound. Curling through one of the show’s major halls, the three of us would play “Who designed this dress?” And nobody missed a defiantly gaudy design by John Galliano.

I was particularly intrigued by Saint Laurent, whose time as the head of House of Dior was short: He took over as couturier upon Dior’s death in 1957. Saint Laurent was 21 at the time. He ran it for three years, but Saint Laurent was on a path of his own.

Thanks to our ongoing fashion tourism, I’ve seen what came next, too.

While in Paris a few years ago, we walked up to the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, where a new exhibit was set to open in two days.

“What do I always say?” my wife asked. Her eyes brightened with mischief.

“Shhhh,” I said. “No.”

“Always try the door,” she said.

She tugged on a door with a sign that read “Ferme” or “Clos” or something like that. And the door opened.

“C’mon,” she said.

An impossibly tall woman in a slick double-breasted pant suit intercepted us at the top of a short stairway.

“The exhibit doesn’t open until Thursday,” she informed us.

It was Wednesday.

“Oh noooooo,” my wife said. She pulled a well-appointed child to the fore, and said, “She loves fashion more than anything. And we fly back to the United States in the morning.”

“One moment,” the impossibly tall woman in the slick double-breasted pant suit said.

She returned a moment later and took us on a private guided tour of YSL’s “Scandal Collection,” a revolutionary assembly of designs from 1971 that felt both far from YSL’s Dior work and also deeply connected to it: a healthy branch far from the tree’s trunk.

It was a revelation to me as one who had scoffed at the sometimes comical nature of Fashion Week each year, when severe presentations would yield more muted trends that could emerge in the coming year.

YSL’s brilliant forest-green fur coat seemed muted by the ’80s, gauche by the early ’90s and then de rigueur again. I’m not saying I’d ever wear a green fur coat. But I hope Kanye West has one.

What is provocative becomes conservative and then provocative again.

This became more than apparent at “An Unruly History,” an exhibit of designs by Isaac Mizrahi at the Jewish Museum in New York that we saw in 2016.

The exhibit played to my personal taste of bold use of uninterrupted color. But it folded in T-shirts, canned drink pop-tops and other elements that were far from fine fabrics.

As we were set to leave, my wife headed to the restroom, and Hazel and I sat on a bench so she could lean on my arm. We’d been on our feet all day.

“I’m pretty sure Mizrahi’s going to come walking in here,” I told the kid.

“That’s ridiculous, Pop,” she said. “Also, shhh. I’m resting.”

And just like that, Mizrahi showed up at his own exhibit, dressed in all black and capped with a black floppy hat.

“Hey, go tell that guy you love his work,” I told her.

I was sort of kidding, but she walked over and introduced herself, and Mizrahi was a mensch, shaking her hand, asking her questions and posing for a photo.

“I can’t explain this, kid, but you know, it doesn’t always work this way,” I told her. “You don’t always bump into the designer. For starters, a lot of them in the museums are dead.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “You don’t always get to step on Pierre Cardin’s foot as though he were just another guy at the museum.”

On the same trip as the Cardin run-in, we caught a Jeanne Lanvin exhibit in Paris. And at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, she got to look closely at a dress worn by Catherine the Great.

We’ve done other museums and exhibitions since. The Kimbell in Fort Worth had a remarkable show in December with the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga, which proved that black fabric of all sorts can be used time and again without ever becoming repetitive.

That Balenciaga exhibit was among the most immersive I’d ever seen, regardless of medium: It told a story of an artist from one era to another and then another, covering years, with a connective through-line naturally uniting work that pushed forward time with its progressive use of color, texture and shape.

For those with even a passing interest, the Dior show justifies the drive to downtown Dallas. Here in Houston, we have “Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography,” which shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 22. The effect isn’t quite the same to me: I certainly admire the art of concept and execution in turning a three-dimensional garment into a two-dimensional photograph. But I’ve become more an advocate for the artistry in the three-dimensional creations themselves, which is more like sculpture than arranged thematic representation.

And I look forward to the next one, whatever it may be. With the kid in tow, even as she becomes less a kid and more an active participant in this art and craft.

She returned from fashion camp last week having turned a set of jeans I’d designated as garbage — too terribly torn for Goodwill — and refashioned them as part of a denim-trimmed jacket with floral sleeves. I admired the imagination, and the execution wasn’t half bad, either.

It has been heartening to see her little sketch books fill with designs. Occasionally something she’s seen in an exhibit becomes the kernel for an entirely different idea. It’ll be interesting to see as her skills improve whether she can execute them. One dress — in which the wearer is wrapped up as if by butterfly wings — looks great on paper but would be a monster to build.

I’m an easy mark for admiration: She’s my kid. That said, I look forward to our keeping her company as we hit as many of these exhibitions as we can, covering centuries of fashion trends, both awe-inspiring and regrettable.

And whatever her path is, I’ll do my best not to step on her toes.

andrew.dansby@chron.com

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2019-07-08 09:00:00Z
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