The art of fashion on display at Bruce and other area museums

We are awash with fashion this summer as our three major art museums are exhibiting their costume collections. Our own Bruce Museum is focusing on the Edwardian period, the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, a time in which dress making became an art form, helped by the accessibility of the sewing machine.

Exquisite gowns from Greenwich families grace the exhibit, called "The Dressmaker's Art," and convey us to another era.

Usually I am not enthralled with fashion, but I was quite taken with this display of womanly splendor. Don't miss it.

Greenwich also is tied into the costume exhibit at the Brooklyn Art Museum. Called "American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection," this show introduces us to designs made for mid-20th century women.

These dresses do not have the handwork or the beading of the older Bruce collection but the elegance shines through in the luxurious materials and the gorgeous cut of the gowns. To enter a ballroom dressed in one of those gowns must have been a thrill.

I know someone who experienced that thrill. One of the designers featured in the Brooklyn exhibit, Charles James, designed two ball gowns and a cocktail dress for a friend of mine, Cinnie Coulson, a writer and editor from Riverside.

Cinnie donated two of her gowns to the Brooklyn Museum and one of them is featured in the current show. She recently told me the unique story of how she acquired the dresses. When the designer, Charles James, came from England to Chicago he met Cinnie's father. Both were working at Commonwealth Edison, in different departments.

When James decided to move to New York to enter the world of high fashion, he remained friends with her father who offered to help him manage his finances. James, now called America's First Couturier, quickly established a reputation and designed extensively for notables such as Mrs. William Randolph Hearst.

As a thank you to her father, James designed two gowns and a cocktail dress for Cinnie and one for her mother. Cinnie wore the gown that is now displayed at the Museum to the elegant Passavant Debutante Cotillion in Chicago and later to President Eisenhower's inaugural ball. The gown of white satin with four "poufs" radiates the designer's genius. She said it was the "most beautiful dress ever, really spectacular."

Balenciaga, the famous Spanish designer, said that James was the "best and only dressmaker who has raised dressmaking to a pure art form," a designer deservedly in a museum. What fun it is for me to imagine Cinnie in that dress -- which I am sure would still fit her.

The third current costume exhibit is being held at the Metropolitan Museum, which has purchased the Brooklyn costume archives and also is featuring "American High Styles."

With dresses designed by Charles James, House of Worth and others for the American woman, the show highlights riding gear, cycling clothes, and military gear as well as ball gowns. One could linger and examine the photos of the women in their gowns and "gear" and imagine a different era, before women could wear pants.

When I was walking through the Bruce Museum exhibit, I thought of the prices of those dresses. The beautiful hand embroidery and bead work could not be replicated for the average buyer today.

Also, the weight of those beaded garments on a woman must have been burdensome -- yet they carried themselves so erectly. The waistlines of the dresses were enhanced by body corsets but I wonder how those women breathed and danced at the same time.

Now we favor garments that reflect our natural bodies and we seldom find such elegant details in a gown. Which is why the gowns at the Bruce, Brooklyn, and Metropolitan Museums are worth visiting. The Brooklyn exhibit ends on August 1st, the Metropolitan on August 15th, and the Bruce on September 5th .

Ann Caron is an author of books on adolescence and a parent-educator. She can be reached via e-mail at anncaron@optonline.net