Fashion funnies

'Zeitgeist' at the Art Institute

by Meg Sullivan

"Zeitgeist Becomes Form: German Fashion Photography from 1945 to the Present." At the Art Institute of Boston, through December 12.

Superficiality dominates the capricious world of fashion, where an identifiable trend is a trend passé. Fashion speaks of the moment, of people's tastes and attitudes in the now, of the mood and atmosphere at a given, fleeting instant. When done well, the potent union of fashion and photography can monitor social currents, gauging the spirit of an era like two strong fingers on the pulse of a contemporary culture. Such, as its title indicates, is the objective of the Art Institute of Boston's clever, witty show of German fashion photography from 1945 to 1995, "Zeitgeist Becomes Form."

Bonnell Robinson, director of exhibitions at the Art Institute of Boston, is behind the show's sojourn here, its second of three US stops. The show's original curator, F.C. Gundlach, himself a German fashion photographer, culled the 180-plus images from the work of 39 photographers, among them Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh, Charlotte Rohrbach, Andre Rau, and Ulrike Schamoni. Glamor abounds in this collection, with equal doses of fantasy and ennui. These images are not about how people really see themselves so much as about how they would like to see themselves: younger, taller, thinner.

The obligatory shot of über-supermodel Cindy Crawford, Rau's portraits of Isabella Rossellini, and Lindbergh's pictures of Linda Evangelista and Tatjana Patitz certainly pay homage to the current standards of beauty in mainstream Western culture. But delving deeper than skin, the show's variegated depictions of women over the past 50 years reflect changing attitudes toward their roles in society.

As women's self-perceptions evolved in postwar Europe, fashion photographers captured every stage of the process. The image of the traditional hausfrau in the photos from the late '40s and early '50s, such as Charlotte Rohrbach's Three Worlds Meet, gradually gives way to the empowered post-industrial woman of the '90s, who's evident in the blurred outlines and vibrant colors of Rainer Leitzgen's 1992 Issey Miyake Model. But the show does not limit itself to women only. There is an obvious change in the depictions of men as well, from a 1959 shot of a young, clean-cut Karl Lagerfeld in jacket and tie to Gerhard Vormwald's 1983 nude, The Flying Negro.

One of the show's major strengths is its sense of humor. Robinson has astutely ordered the installation, inasmuch as that's possible in the AIB's cramped space, emphasizing its whimsical irony. A photo of Catherine Deneuve in an elaborate feather boa hangs just underneath Sibylle Bergemann's quirky Kathi Reinwald, which shows an outfit of fish-scale-like armor with a huge wire headpiece. Horst Wackerbarth's parody of the confident, modern woman riding on a broomstick, Verena Trolsch as a Witch (1990), is juxtaposed against an ultra-feminine, almost Victorian-looking shot from 1994, with the model in lace and long flowing velvet skirt. The happy, roly-poly figure in Christian von Alvensleben's Sunshine delightfully mocks the entire premise of a single ideal of beauty, as does Wolfgang Tillmans's portrait of a contortionist and friend, Susanne and Lutz. And any collection with a shot of canary-yellow disco sliders and white lightning bolts as tacky as Uwe Ommer's picture from 1979 surely doesn't take itself that seriously.

Yet overall, you're left wondering whether there is a particularly German sensibility to "Zeitgeist Becomes Form." One problem is that the show offers no clear definition of what constitutes German fashion photography. The photographers whose works are showcased do not all live in Germany; they're not even all of German origin. Neither did the photos all appear in German publications. You could point to a sense of playful candor toward sexuality arguably absent from the mainstream American fashion press. And there are the traces of Germany's postwar economic reconstruction evident in the earliest photos. Amid the bombed-out buildings in Norbert Leonard's Wide Spring Coat, a clumsy attempt has been made to hide the model's shoe. New clothes were available in the Germany of 1950, but shoes and leather goods were hard to come by. Since then, however, high fashion has moved into an international arena, assuming a cosmopolitan perspective that makes national characteristics hard to pinpoint.

"Zeitgeist Becomes Form" is not an "event" along the lines of the Herb Ritts show at the Museum of Fine Arts. But for the discerning viewer interested in photography or fashion, it's a shrewd, amusing take on an industry that's often far too humorless.