Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and visiting both the Vigee LeBrun exhibition, the female 18th century French painter, as well as the Manus + Machina exhibition.  What I will mention here more so, is the latter.

The purpose of Manus + Machina is essentially to show the juxtaposition between what clothing can be when handmade, versus when made by by machine.  It can even become a machine, who knew!  I came away from the exhibition with the knowledge of a dress that puts YOU on, a dress that is remote-controlled to reveal its frilly backside, and a dress that goes up to your face and rather obstructs your vision.  The thought came to me that, you would have thought that in the era when it was not easy to mass produce, there would be… less.  Perhaps clothing would be more immodest, and in an era now of such richness, we would drape more, we have more at our disposal.  Yes, our present is so rich, and yet we do nothing but drag the person down, particularly women, when it comes to fashion.  We put them down with immodesty.  In steps theatre/film/media.

In fashion and in theatre, you cant ever really get to the core of anything, because it’s all the product of someone’s angst always and their own perspective, so it points to the fact that there is objective truth.  But someone will throw this at me and say to me who are you to define truth?  Well, the very nature of fashion, that all this stuff stems from someone’s angst and you can’t ever get to the root of anything.  ‘Tis why we go round and round in circles, watching the same things all the time, wearing the same things all the time.