At a recent MFA Late Nite, New England sartorial restraint is in short supply. Hundreds of visitors roam the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with bold lips and glittery lids, embellished athleisure and glam drag. Melding styles compliment Gender Bending Fashion, an exhibition of couture challenges to conventional dress codes of the last century, from the garçonne look to avant-garde designs by contemporaries: Rad Hourani, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alessandro Michele for Gucci, Palomo, and Rei Kawakubo.

A runway through the galleries disrupts the dance party. Models flaunt designer Andre Landeros Michel’s subversions of binary businesswear in evocative moments, alternating androgynous with sexily powerful. A waistcoat is teased into the deepest V; neckties twist like bondage; a pinstriped button-up cloak stretches into a monoplane when arms are raised. These silhouettes are as scintillating as Ziggy Stardust’s spacewear fused with the broody goth of Alexander McQueen and the angular slink of Grace Jones.

Across the Charles River, the Harvard Art Museums celebrate the century’s materiality in a different way. The Bauhaus and Harvard honors the Bauhaus centenary with output by teachers and students who emigrated to the US following the Weimar Republic’s end. See graphics, paintings, furniture, and textiles by makers under founder architect Walter Gropius’s influence. Despite a libertarian credo, gender equity within the Bauhaus was aspirational—for example, women like Anni Albers, who wished to study painting and glass, were typically limited to the weaving workshop.

Within Albers’s tapestries on view, undulating lines and bold geometries express Modernist tropes more often credited to the male artists of her time. Through experimentation with her assigned medium, she and her cohort advanced what fiber arts could be. Ironically, Bauhaus textiles were more profitable than production from the male-driven disciplines (painting, architecture, metal and glass work) and provided sustaining income for the entire school.

From “women’s work” to freedom to werk, these two identity perspectives are worth a trip to the “City of Notions.”

5/16/2019