The Scrapbook likes to think it’s open to new experiences. For instance, we have concluded that the designated hitter rule won’t destroy the institution of baseball. The Scrapbook is worldly.
So worldly that, recently, we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in upper Manhattan for a day of cultural edification wandering through the various rooms and collections. We lingered in the European galleries, outside of which a crowd was gathering as if for a rock concert or a Science March. In fact, it was for the latest Costume Institute exhibition: “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between.”
Now, The Scrapbook is no philistine when it comes to fashion. We once hung around the Condé Nast building for a few years, and watching the Vogue staffers get on and off the elevators is equivalent to an associate’s degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Rei Kawakubo, founder of the Paris and Tokyo fashion house Comme des Garçons, is a great designer with a unique sense of style and wit, whose dresses are like a perpetual reinvention of Japanese visual tradition—perfect for a postmodern Three Little Maids.
The show, however, gave The Scrapbook a foretaste of what the bad place in the afterlife might look like. Hundreds of people jammed into a circular room taking selfies under a glaring white light from which there was no escape.
And that seems to be the point. According to the press release, the show is about “establishing an unsettling zone of oscillating visual ambiguity that challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability.” And, for whatever it’s worth,
it succeeded.
