Mortality, a subject most rarely pondered in an era with life expectancy at an all time high, comes back into fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As the Halloween season drew to a close, the Costume Gallery at the Met assembled an exhibit with a mood parallel to the spirit of the holiday. The gallery displays mourning clothes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from England and the United States. During that period it was customary for women to wear black or other dark colors for two years following the death of a close relative. With the rise of the middle class, development of the synthetic manufacturing of deep black dyes, and a strict adherence to societal values, the mourning attire industry skyrocketed at the time.
The foreboding ambiance of an exhibit about death begins even before entering. The visitor must walk down stairs into the exhibit – the Costume Institute is located in the basement. Upon descending, the room slowly darkens and the choral music gets eerily louder. Welcome to the crypt. The stairs open to a room lit from the bottom of the dresses, the dark casting an eerie glow on the room. The middle is filled with gowns and one takes a lap around the room to see each one. On the outer walls are quotes from contemporaneous women about mourning clothes, death, widow status and societal expectations that accompany mourning.
Though the visitor may think, “Oh, it’s just a room of black dresses,” at the beginning, there are many differentiations and intricacies within these outfits. Those from the first half of the nineteenth century from America are more modest than their British counterparts with extremely high necks and many buttoned buttons. The British dresses, alternatively, with their lower necklines and emphasized waists were more sexual in their mourning attire. This could be related to the allure of widows in Victorian England. There was a special allure that widows were known to possess over men; these dresses certainly highlight that these women were concerned with dressing suggestively even though still grieving. This is actually highlighted in the second part of the exhibit, the back-room, where there are framed illustrations on the walls depicting women in mourning. One is “A Widow and Her Friends” where a woman sits, dressed in black mourning clothes, with a low cut dress surrounded by all the men while the girls in white (i.e. not in mourning) stare angrily at the crowd formed around the widow.
Another differentiation for the viewer to note is the inclusion of color. Though the majority of the silhouettes are still black, there are some lighter gowns. There is a grey gown with black accents and a large full skirt, two beautiful mauve and lavender gowns that were worn by Queen Alexandra, and a beautiful deep purple gown that screams high fashion with its shoulder pads and accentuated waist. These outfits are all beautiful and intricate, and add a much-needed splash of color to the gothic collection.
The exhibit highlights the blurred line between mourning, fashion, and societal expectations. Mourning clothes styles were depicted in fashion magazine and etiquette books and became highly commercialized. In fact, one of the reasons for the decline of mourning clothes fashion was the financial burden that it placed on the middle class, who were forced to buy completely new clothes or dye their previous clothes black, ostensibly ruining them. Additionally, women were often judged on their mourning clothes, raising questions and eyebrows – why is she still wearing her mourning clothes (implying that she’s been grieving too long, just get over it)? Or, speculations that she took those mourning clothes off fast (did she genuinely care about the deceased?). Queen Victoria, who has a beautiful gown featured in the exhibit, dressed in black for the rest of her life after the death of her husband, Prince Albert.
Vogue published an article last week on “Public Mourning,” a trend in social media to post constantly after the death of a famous person. Chloe Malle writes that the public mourning on social media diminishes it because either people post tastelessly to self-promote or even if the post is appropriate, viewing it in conjunction with an inane status update minimizes its importance. It raises the question of whether people wore mourning clothes for their own benefit as opposed to for the dead. Though this is a complicated question, Nannie Haskins sums it up. “What do I care if it becomes me or not? I don’t wear black because it becomes me. I wear mourning because it corresponds with my feelings.”