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May 09, 2008

1542: Superheroes @ the Met

I may be dragging Pete to this...
Well, "will be" dragging Pete to this, more likely.

Power Dressing, Cathy Horyn, New York Times

Superheroes exist for many reasons. Certainly in our time they exist to sell movie tickets and plastic action figures. (Somewhere in my basement is a box of X-Men that represents a period of desperate pleadings.) But superheroes, those crusading men and women in tights, allow us to believe that in a cape or magical second skin we can do the impossible. We can transform ourselves.

Fashion thrives on the same expectation: Buy this hot dress or pair of Jimmy Choos, and see if you don’t feel curiously invincible at the next party. To an extent all superheroes, like some of the most flamboyant creatures in fashion, are playing a role inadvertently thrust on them by circumstance, their true identities and physical shortcomings concealed. What separates the nerdish Bruce Banner, who morphs into the Incredible Hulk, from the mousy Luisa Annan, who as the outlandish Marchesa Casati aspired to look like a wild animal and for one Belle Époque-era ball wore a necklace of live, writhing snakes?

The answer is nothing. They each make their claim on the world by becoming Another. The ideas that dominate fashion — identity, performance, gender, body shapes, sexuality, logos and the quest for state-of-the-art materials — pretty well describe the world of the superhero.

Posted by ashley at May 9, 2008 11:25 AM

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