Nan Kempner - American Chic

Appropriately, Poetic & Chic's 200th post talks about two of our favorite things: fashion and museums... 

2007 has been a banner year for fashion exhibitions in museums; I was priviledged enough to visit the Poiret exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few weeks ago, but most of the fashionable blockbusters have been kind enough to come to my own home town. Earlier this year it was Masterpieces of French Jewelry, followed closely by the Vivienne Westwood retrospective, and now we have the wonderful exhibit Nan Kempner - American Chic.

When I attended the press preview for the Vivienne Westwood exhibition, the ever-elegant Dede Wilsey gave a brief introduction noting why that show and the other fashion exhibitions to come were so important. When the plans for the new de Young Museum were still in the talking stages, Mrs. Wilsey campaigned to have the textiles wing expanded and highlighted, despite the reluctance of her fellow trustees. She insisted that every major museum in the country maintains spaces entirely devoted textiles and costume exhibits, and that San Francisco should rightly uphold the same standard. And so, thanks to Mrs. Wilsey, the fashion exhibitions have begun to arrive…

For me, the Vivienne Westwood press preview was more impressive than the actual show, which while comprehensive and worthy of respect, was not one of my favorites. But I did introduce myself to Mrs. Wilsey toward the end of the tour and thanked her for fighting so hard to bring fashion exhibitions back to San Francisco. I told her that it was one such showing at the de Young Museum – New Look to Now: French Haute Couture 1947 – 1987 – that had changed my entire world. My mother brought me to that show when I was ten, and I’ve had “Christian Dior” on my lips and a spangle in my eye ever since. I’m not sure that I really thought that real people could wear such clothes, but I knew that I wanted to be a part of it somehow.

Now, another haute couture exhibition is here in San Francisco: Nan Kempner - American Chic. I had first read about Nan Kempner in the different biographies of Yves Saint Laurent I had read over the years as the two were longtime friends, and then of course in various issues of Vogue, W, and Vanity Fair. But I didn’t know that her social galavanting was just a front for an inordinate passion for clothing, and that she was a San Franciscan.

In fact, over her lifetime she had donated many important couture ensembles to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, building the costume collections that Mrs. Wilsey fought to preserve. I also did not know that her style sensibilities were close to my own: simple pieces, clean lines, a little bit of drama, and intrepid mixology. An exhibition card reads:

“I’m spoiled when it comes to clothes,” she [Nan Kempner] is quoted as saying in W in 1972, “I love comfort, great fit, simplicity, and things well made.”

I suppose this is why I loved this show so much: not only does it showcase some of the finest examples of iconic couture pieces (original YSL Safari Tunic from 1969 anyone?) but it also shows that despite the elevated designer names, Mrs. Kempner dressed the way most of us do: a little bit of this, a little bit of that – rarely a “head to toe” look, all while seeking comfort. The curators call this a “sportswear sensibility” as it stems from the idea that modern designers rely on separate pieces to form a collection rather than complete ensembles. Of course, at the haute couture level one would think that ensembles are a bit more sacred, but not to Mrs. Kempner. The exhibition pairs the most unlikely couture bedfellows throughout, and showcases Mrs. Kempner in a union of Lacroix and Saint Laurent as the signature image of the show.

I loved the group of evening jackets that is shown just at the beginning of the exhibit – evening jackets fast becoming a garment of a bygone age, and yet they make a lot of sense! The item was developed out of café society of the early twentieth-century as something meant to be worn during dinner or the theatre. As such, the collars and shoulders – the pieces still visible when seated – are given added design interest and embellishment. These pieces showed incredible craftsmanship in their appliqué and embroidery, yet would have allowed the wearer to don something incredibly simple underneath. I think it’s high time we revived the evening jacket.

Mrs. Kempner was said to be extremely proud of her clothing archives, collecting some of the most significant pieces of the past fifty years. I think the best example of this is shown in the four different Yves Saint Laurent “Le Smoking” ensembles, grouped together, demonstrating over fifteen years of design. One can see how Saint Laurent’s aesthetics developed over the period, focusing within the narrow constraint of one type of evening garment.


YSL's evening domino - 1983Of course, like every robust archive, one can see how the past has influenced the present: the short black suede and colored stones evening dress by Yves Saint Laurent from 1968 looks remarkably similar to some from Prada over the past few years, while the two Madame Grès silk jersey gowns from 1969 and 1971 look like softer versions of some early-1990s Versace. Another prime example of the fashion lifecycle was found in some of the accessories displayed – the Kenneth Jay Lane cuffs and belts are still produced today with little variation, and any of the other costume belts and brooches could easily live on in a current wardrobe.

The exhibit also did not spare the sense of the dramatic that Mrs. Kempner was known for. It is said that while she preferred clean, columnar shapes for evening, she also believed in bareness as an important aspect of nighttime glamour. Hence the classic Kempner bateau necks, one-shoulders, and plunging Vs both in front and in back. Yet, at the same time, there is a penchant for the mysterious – swathing oneself underneath luxurious fabrics to create allure. No piece showed this sartorial witticism better than the gigantic yellow silk faille “domino” by Yves Saint Laurent in the early 1980s. Oh, what treasures lie within those bishop sleeves!

Two of the pieces shown seemed oddly familiar to me – one was a Christian Dior by Marc Bohan opera ensemble from 1972, and the other was an Emmanuel Ungaro evening kimono from 1977. I knew I had seen them somewhere before! Upon returning home, I consulted my original catalog from that exhibition in 1987 - New Look to Now, and both had been featured in that showing so long ago, being listed as “The Gift of Mrs. Thomas Kempner”. While the Nan Kempner American Chic show had begun at the Metropolitan Museum in New York some months ago, twenty-five of the seventy-five pieces shown were exclusive to San Francisco as they had been in the museum’s collections for years. In fact, the first gown Mrs. Kempner donated to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco was at the exhibition: her 1949 Jacques Griffe gown of pale pink cotton lace and violet silk tulle, which she had worn to make her debut. The beauty of this dress turns into utter delight when one sees the picture of a very young Nan Field Schlessinger wearing the gown on the wall behind it.

This exhibition proved to be both a study of twentieth-century haute couture, while it also celebrated the new and old traditions of San Francisco style. Mrs. Wilsey seems to have carried to completion what Mrs. Kempner knew so long ago…

"Fashion is an art. When you look at paintings in museums, you see a reflection of how women dressed in certain era. A designer is as much of an artists as an author, painter, or architect. Fashion design is, after all, architecture for the body."

-Nan Kempner