Dressed to Express
By Tom Wachunas
“To the
young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable and all
open; There is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.” -
From The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today – an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and
Charles Dudley Warner
"To
gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw perfume on the violet... is
wasteful and ridiculous excess." - William Shakespeare, from King John
(Act IV)
"Vain
trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to
merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of
us." - Virginia Woolf
EXHIBIT: Gilding
Northeast Ohio: Fashion and Fortune 1870–1900, on view THROUGH OCTOBER 13, 2024 in the Main
Gallery at Massillon Museum, 121
Lincoln Way East in downtown Massillon, Ohio / Tuesday- Saturday 9:30 am – 5:00
pm, Sunday 2:00-5:00 pm / 330.833.4061
From
Massillon Museum website: https://www.massillonmuseum.org/
“Gilding
Northeast Ohio… showcases fashion from the permanent collections of the
Massillon Museum and the Western Reserve Historical Society and loans from
various regional museums. The garments
and objects in the show tell the story of politicians, titans of industry,
socialites, and the workers who helped gild Ohio… Exciting exhibition features
include original costumes designed for the HBO series The Gilded Age. The exhibition is guest-curated by Brian
Centrone, who has long partnered with the Massillon Museum…”
On the front page of Massillon Museum’s
website, you’ll read, “…Our mission is to be a cultural hub where art
and history come together.” With this ambitious and stunning installation,
Massillon Museum has outdone itself, fulfilling its mission in a thoroughly
absorbing, efficacious and educational manner. It’s a transportive and
immersive experience, wherein the museum’s main gallery
has been morphed into a sprawling, flaunt-it-if-you’ve-got-it soirée. Here’s a
telltale mingling of mannequins standing in a movie set, or aboard a time
machine. We’re on a captivating expedition into the late 19th-century
period of societal wealth and industrial/economic prosperity which historians called
“The Gilded Age.”
That
designation was originally inspired by the title of an 1873 collaborative novel
by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner – The Gilded Age: A Tale of
Our Time. The novel was a satirical lampooning of the lust for influence
and fortune that had emerged in post-Civil War America.
Gilded. As guest curator Brian Centrone wrote
in one of the many narrative text panels accompanying this exhibit, the word “…suggests
a golden façade, hiding a harsh reality beneath. This exhibition showcases
Northeast Ohio’s families, fashions, and frivolities while peeling back the
gilt to reveal the workers and structures foundational to Northeast Ohio, and
to America.”
When
you read those panels, notice how most of them are bordered at the bottom with a
section under the heading of “Beneath The Gilding.” Candid peeks under the
patinas. Amidst all this opulence, these superbly crafted accoutrements and elegant
artifacts of affluence, underneath all this fancy, was a time
nonetheless fraught with sociopolitical disparities, inequities, contentions
and corruptions.
Gilding.
Sounds uncomfortably close to Guilting? In saying that, I don’t mean to
in any way disparage or condemn the overall quality or content as such of this magnificent
exhibition. Only that its impact evoked something far deeper in me than just
appreciating the realities of a past era. I’m simply not convinced that we can
categorically say “The Gilded Age” had an end-date at all. Consider this: For
better or worse, what was once still is.
Thousands of years ago, in a land far, far
away, a ridiculously rich and wise king wrote, “…What has been will be
again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the
sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
