Dressed To Express

 

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 19^th-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)