What won’t our loftier cultural institutions do to attract youthful patrons? In an age in which symphony pops concerts feature music from video games, it would seem not much. But the envelope was recently pushed in Pittsburgh.
A few weeks ago, the Frick Pittsburgh museum unveiled an exhibit titled “Undressed: A History of Fashion in Underwear.” Organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the show seems by all accounts to be a perfectly respectable exercise in cultural micro-history. How can one understand the plight of 19th-century women, for example, without understanding the constriction of corsets?
No, the envelope-pushing came with the way the museum chose to promote the exhibit, putting together what was advertised as a “high-fashion nightwear party.” And by nightwear they didn’t mean evening dress. Held at Pittsburgh’s Ace Hotel, the shindig was called “Adorning the Boudoir” and was meant, as one reporter put it, “to engage and inspire the next generation of museum enthusiasts.” Because nothing inspires museum-going more than a crowd of scantily clad hotties.
In the age of Weinstein, did anyone stop to think that there could be just the slightest problem, taste-wise, with a big public party consisting of robe-clad men ogling thong-attired women?
The ogling got going in earnest later in the evening, with a runway lingerie show, provided by a local unmentionables shop, that seems to have had less of a catwalk vibe than a strip-club aesthetic. “Seduction. Teasing. Removing. Writhing. Grinding. Smiling,” the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s Kate Benz described the proceedings. “Jaws dropped. Eyes wide. Oh. My. God, they said. Shocked. Enthralled. Appalled. They loved it. They hated it. They had to look away. But they couldn’t stop staring.”
One of the people who hated it was Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Natalie Bencivenga. The lingerie show devolved into “auditions for the next Ron Jeremy film,” she wrote. “It didn’t elevate, it degraded.” Bencivenga assured her readers she is no prude, but denounced the display as tone-deaf exploitation.
To which The Scrapbook says, kudos to her for being willing to point out that the emperor is wearing skivvies. Is it too much to ask of the curators of culture that they aspire to something better than burlesque?
