Fashion is fascinating. It’s a creative minefield that touches on art, society and politics. When a Dior model wears “homeless” couture on the runway, commentators flipped. This wasn’t transgression, they said, it was exploitation. When luxury photographer Norbert Baksa shot models against the backdrop of a refugee camp, he was torn apart by the media for glamorizing global trauma. Have I mentioned the models? They’re usually white women, always dangerously thin, and they seem to affirm the worst conceptions of femininity imaginable. They are voiceless things, meant to do nothing but strut around and make pouty faces. Don’t expect the fashion houses to help either. They’re billion-dollar for-profit companies, intent on squeezing as much money as they can out us—a class-conscious populous easily mesmerized by pretty people in pretty clothes.
If this sounds critical of fashion, it is—and that’s the point. Fashion is a “hot mess,” meaning it’s a ripe topic for any truly engaged cultural critic. Throw in Fine Art with a capital “F” and “A” and you’ve got the ingredients for a damn good documentary. First Monday in May pairs the fields of art and fashion to show what goes into launching a new costume exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (“China: Through the Looking Glass”) and its coinciding main event, the “Met Gala.” The new documentary by Andrew Rossi (Page One) introduces viewers to the historic museum’s Costume Institute and a cast of characters including Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, Andrew Bolton, the China show’s curator and a menagerie of celebrities, assistants and anonymous office folk who come together to make this grand opening happen.
First Monday sounds like a pleasant viewing experience. Art, fashion and celebrities are easy to enjoy. Yet First Monday is a slog. It shares beautiful images and asks interesting questions without going into detail about either. Sound bites from world-famous designers such as John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld are predictable, even boring. The appearance of celebrities like Kate Hudson and Rihanna are so quick, they give as much satisfaction as flipping through the pages of Us Weekly. Rossi’s unwillingness to explore the unflattering side of his subject’s lives and work turn First Monday into a commercial for the kind of mindless glamour that serious documentaries are supposed to reject.
The film makes a few attempts at substance. It opens with a debate as to whether fashion belongs in The Met. Sure, painting architecture and sculpture are fine but according to one of the film’s many talking heads, costume is “looked down upon.” Bolton then emerges as the impeccably dressed hero who champions the importance of fashion: “We’re about clothing as artworks,” he says. If only this “problem” weren’t so pointless to discuss. Anyone willing to sit through First Monday will likely already consider fashion a form of art. The question is a non-issue.
The film gets into trickier territory when it explores the costumes that make up the “China” show. The exhibit is supposed to show “how western designers look to China for inspiration” and yes, it’s as problematic as it sounds. The aim of the exhibit is blatantly orientalist and though many of the film’s intelligent subjects dispute that accusation, it’s not enough. One designer touts Chinese clothes for “that sense of mystery” and “danger.” Later, a Met employee calls out inappropriateness of showing a communist uniform alongside a runway outfit. In this way, “China” plays with a fantasized vision of the country and it’s awkward. The show’s fantasies of the east involve both appropriation and misinterpretation and Rossi should have asked some tougher questions.
It’s telling that the best scene in the film has nothing to do with The Met, the fashion or the Gala. Rather, it’s a scene showing Anna Wintour as she walks around the Vogue offices at the World Trade Center. Followed by a string of assistants, she shares a slew of incisive opinions about the new space. She orders a display of TV screens gone and shakes her heads at an arrangement of desks. It’s electric because Wintour is a queen. Her words are strong and her actions searing; she was born to be made immortal. As she said in an interview, “People respond well to people who are sure of what they want.” It’s too bad First Monday lacks her strength and direction. Unlike Wintour, the film floats between people and places while saying not much of anything at all.
