When Matthew Yokobosky noticed French pop star Aya Nakamura sashay down a rain-slicked Pont des Arts in a gold Dior Haute Couture minidress on the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics final summer time, he knew he needed to have the gown for his upcoming Brooklyn Museum exhibition.
By no means thoughts that the five hundred objects for “Stable Gold,” the museum’s marquee 200th anniversary present opening Saturday, had been all however finalized by the point Nakamura, the most well-liked Francophone musician on the earth, dazzled a world viewers with a mash-up of her hits “Pookie” and “Djadja” accompanied by the musicians of France’s Republican Guard.
The customized frock was designed for the French Malian singer by Dior artistic director of ladies’s collections Maria Grazia Chiuri, and options a whole lot of feathers painted gold and painstakingly hand-embroidered by Lemarié artisans.
“It’s one factor to see [the dress] on TV,” Yokobosky tells WWD. “However when it arrived and we opened the crate, and noticed all of those golden rooster feathers, everybody gasped. It’s thrilling once you see one in all these clothes up shut, the materials, the methods used to assemble them. Individuals wish to have these emotions.”
As a theme for a museum present, gold is a really broad and considerably amorphous matter. However its commemorative connotations aligned with the museum’s bicentennial, and its expansive vary touched actually each period of human historical past in type, fashion and software from historic Egyptian sarcophagi to the glittery robes that designer John Galliano despatched down the 2024 spring high fashion runway. “Stable Gold” contains 250 objects from the museum’s archives and one other 250 on mortgage.
The exhibit is organized in 9 distinct sections that look at numerous facets of gold all through historical past and tradition starting from Historical Gold to Fashioning Gold to Topped: From Egyptian Queens to Hip-Hop Kings. Marc Quinn’s Siren (Kate Moss) — a placing life-size sculpture made from strong 18-karat gold and depicting the style mannequin in an anatomically unimaginable yoga pose, and on view within the U.S. for the primary time — is grouped with Nam June Paik’s 2005 video set up Golden Buddha within the Historical Gold galleries. And classic Cartier cigarette instances share area with 6th century C.E. earrings within the Fashioning Gold area. Within the Topped part, a circa 120 to 130 C.E. wooden Egyptian mummy portrait is juxtaposed with photographer Barron Claiborne’s iconic 1997 “King of New York” portrait of rapper Infamous B.I.G. sporting a $6 plastic crown.
“I actually tried to make every part really feel like its personal distinct expertise,” says Yokobosky, the museum’s senior curator of trend and materials tradition. “I wished it to be like a film, the place you sort of have a scene and then you definitely go to a different scene. And like in a film, you’re attempting to create these interrelationships.”
“Stable Gold” features a surfeit of hardly ever seen items from the museum’s archives, together with a big sarcophagus lid from Dynasty 22 (945 to 740 B.C.E.), which has not been on show in additional than a century and the Lunar Moth child grand piano, restored and on public view for the primary time since its creation by photographer and painter Edward Steichen in 1928. It’s one in all solely two Steichen-designed pianos identified to exist, which had been featured in his portraits of luminaries together with George Gershwin.
Constructed of mahogany inlaid with gilded bands and mirrored tesserae, it has been painstakingly restored by the museum’s conservation group. There are additionally greater than 180 gold items from the Hellenistic interval, in addition to historic jewellery and chain mail that span three millennia throughout Egypt, the Mediterranean coast, and the pre-Hispanic Americas.
Yokobosky has used up to date trend and jewellery as a unifying touchstone for “Stable Gold.”
“After I began engaged on the present, I made a listing of all of the designers which have executed lovely gold work,” he says. “After which I began to construct tableaus of various groupings of works that speak to one another and had a sympathetic aesthetic.”
The work of Mary McFadden, and David and Phillippe (together with sneakers designed for The Blonds by Christian Louboutin) are featured closely within the exhibit.
“I used to be very all in favour of taking a look at completely different methods that had been utilized in gold trend,” says Yokobosky. “As an example, Mary McFadden did a set the place she had the chiffon painted with gold paint.”
There are a number of robes from French designer Marc Bohan of Dior which can be constituted of silk and metal thread, together with a gold lamé Grecian robe worn by Lauren Hutton in director Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s 1982 function movie “All Fired Up.” There may be additionally Tina Turner’s gold pearl bustier gown made for her in 1989 by Azzedine Alaïa, jewellery designer Gabby Elan’s gold and diamond tooth grills, a sequence of gold-embellished coats from Anna Sui, Italian-born American designer Giorgio di Saint’Angelo’s 1969 Klimt gown from the non-public couture assortment of editor Hamish Bowles, two Thirties gold-plated steel purses from Elsa Schiaparelli polyurethane and leather-based robes created by Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré, a dramatic golden ballroom gown constructed of crinkled gold metalized polyester from Balenciaga designer Demna’s spring 2020 high fashion assortment, and Chiuri’s 2018 J’Adore gown worn by Charlize Theron; made from one hundred pc polyamide and hand-embroidered with 1000’s of sequins.
“Varied research have been executed about how museum-goers don’t learn all of the labels and didactic panels. And whereas these panels have numerous data that would assist them expertise the work, persons are selective about what they wish to examine. I feel a part of curating and designing the present is to essentially create alternatives for a visible studying expertise,” says Yokobosky.
“I feel folks come to museums as a result of they wish to have that non-verbal expertise. I’ve actually been desirous about the lighting and a few soundtrack that helps join and bridge the completely different scenes. I’ve been working with the sound designer to create what I prefer to name a sound web, which can also be one thing that’s serving to us knit collectively the scenes. I’m actually attempting to create an expertise for those who’s each a visible expertise and the chance for studying.”
