“63 years old, Curator in Charge, The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. BA/BFA English Literature/Art History, University of Hawaii, MLA (Masters of Landscape Architecture), Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. No children. My spouse is a lawyer.  If I begin to speak about fashion or details of style, he rolls his eyes as if forced to endure something incredibly inconsequential as well as a waste of time. Growing up, I had strong opinions about dress.  Without knowing it, I was an evolving minimalist.  I was always telling my family to wear less pattern—in Hawaii there was a lot of kitschy, but in retrospect fun, use of prints—and my mother to wear less jewelry.

Products from Pukimo Raivio

Kiton, grey sports jacket, size 50EU
Ralph Lauren, Black Label suit, size 52EU

When I was 7 or 8, I began to go to Saturday art classes in Honolulu.  I lived in the suburbs, and my mother thought that dressing for the city meant a button-down collared shirt, chinos, a belt and polished lace-up shoes.  I got to the Academy of Arts early, and was waiting in front for the building to open when a green Jaguar XKE pulled up.  A girl, my age, jumped out wearing tennis whites—she had clearly come from an early lesson—but barefoot!  I realized immediately the status implications of her deliberate casualness.  The next week I didn’t come barefooted, but I did insist on flip-flops.

Individuals of great style generally appreciate being noticed for their appearance, enjoy the creative process of dressing which requires no small amount of attention and discipline, tend to have a strong aesthetic focus, and a willingness to dedicate the time to their efforts.  As a disorganized person who prefers to be judged on other aspects of my personality than my taste, a uniform of classic dressing is expedient.  The codes are established, and though menswear is susceptible to change over time, those trends are relatively diurnal compared to the more rapid and quixotic shifts in women’s wear, so it is possible to have an established look or style, even while subtly adapting to the current mode with rather little effort.  Also, I love fashion, but unlike the person of style who tends to edit to a very personal and individuated sensibility, I am completely omnivorous.  If I dressed in the styles I appreciate as a curator, I’d be in debt AND I’d look so erratic as to be thought insane.  It is best for all that I sublimate my appreciation for fashion into my work and not my personal style.

My first job as an associate curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology was to go through the whole collection to review it for deaccessioning.  The Director at the time, Bob Riley, was incredibly knowledgeable, but so much of his connoisseurship was intuitive, having been derived from decades of seeing historic examples.  When I’d ask him, “How is it you know that this bustle dress is from the 1880s and that from the 1870s?,” he’d answer, “You just know.”  I was left to really look at the pieces to understand how he immediately just knew:  the length of the waist, the slope of the shoulder, the types of fabrics, all the separate elements that contribute to the gestalt.  Nothing, nothing is better than the simple looking at an object, and really studying its details, to learn about it.

Men today are so much more literate about style than when I was younger.  It is a given now that how you dress is a language that can be manipulated to your specific intentions and advantage.  Other than suits meant that you were Establishment, and cotton shirts and bell-bottoms meant that you were counter-culture, I don’t think there was among most men in the 1960s, the self-awareness that what you wear is something that could be a proactive means of communication.

In the 1980s and ‘90s I wore a lot of Armani, always some Ralph Lauren, and now Thom Browne, and shoes from John Lobb.  With every designer, though, I pick the most Brooks Brothers looking examples from their designs.  Brooks never fitted me, but that is what I think of myself as:  the man in the grey flannel suit.  Today when I wear Thom Browne, it doesn’t actually look very Thom Browne unless you’re someone who really follows fashion and notices the small details like the grosgrain touches and lifted button stance.  The reason is that as someone short, Thom’s sizing fits me perfectly in a conventional way.  On me the sleeve lengths are not cropped, but fall exactly where they would if I had the jacket ordered to fit.

When my former boss and colleague, the great fashion critic and curator, Richard Martin, died, I was asked to take over his role.  Richard was intellectually, on a plane of his own, of a level not usually seen in our field.  Clearly, a new path had to be established, as no one could easily have continued with the scholarly rigor and accelerated calendar that Richard had established.  My intention was at first to simply keep up the level of thoughtfulness and conceptual focus introduced by Richard’s exhibition themes, but with an additional focus on the mise-en-scene.  I’ve always argued that as good a job as we do as curators, we are relinquishing our responsibility if we do not make an effort to get as many people to see our exhibitions.  You cannot educate, if the public hasn’t shown up for the lesson.  In this regard, The Costume Institute has been very successful.  We are among the most widely attended exhibitions in the category of the decorative arts in the world.

I love food!  I’ll eat anything if it is appealingly plated.  I just returned from a long weekend centered on a reservation at Noma.  Unfortunately, we are part of the recent group that caught the norovirus from eating there.  But, and this is an important point, despite everything, the experience of the meal was sublime.  I want to go back in every season to see how the menu changes with the sourcing of the dishes.  But I’m not restricted to farm-to-table or foraging, globalized cuisine fascinates me.  When I was in Hawaii a few months ago, I ate at a restaurant called Mavro.  There was a side dish with white truffles, from the South of France where the chef had just been, shaved onto a chestnut puree in HONOLULU!!

Always get the best version of whatever you can afford.  Great materials and construction make a difference.  But, whether formal or informal, the most important thing in dressing is proper fit.  Sometimes proper, fit especially in sports clothing, does not mean the same as in tailored apparel, but there is always a proportion and cut that is intended for a garment.  The closer a man comes to wearing items that relate to his body as they were intended to appear, the more comfortable he will be.  And when we are comfortable, the projection of confidence is effortless.”

http://www.metmuseum.org/

Picture: © Karin Willis, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art