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Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. March 2–July 26, 2026.
It is unfathomable today to think that fashion—that is, the design of wearable clothing—was considered beneath contempt by the art world through most of the twentieth century. Poiret, Chanel, Dior, and Givenchy may have been vaunted names in the upper echelons of civilized society, but they never stood alongside Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, or De Kooning—or Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler, for that matter—in the pantheon of arts and letters. In earlier centuries, fashion was understood to be a practical condition of high society, and its currents were determined by the evolving development of materials, the quality of ornamentation that determined stature and position, and the layers of undergarments—the corsets, hoops, panniers, crinolines, and bustles—required in the daily construction of the obligatory styles of an era. Yet the distance between the routine customs of society, in which fashion belonged, and the loftier aspirations of the fine arts was, at least metaphorically, as far as the earth from the moon.
