Jaunt over to your local department store’s menswear section and you’ll enter a wonderland of professional male dressing, with fitted lavender button-downs, blue patterned ties and gray pinstripe suits by label Geoffrey Beene.
Tragically, what you will never see amidst the accountants’ uniforms is any reference to the innovative couture womenswear that made Geoffrey Beene a revolutionary American designer in the 1960s.
Make an additional outing to SU’s Fashion Design department, and the only Geoffrey Beene suits you’ll find are ones that come with skirts.
Pulling nine pieces from the Sue Ann Genet Costume Collection, the department created a small retrospective of Beene’s womenswear to keep his work alive in the minds of its design students. The exhibit is on display in the Leon Genet Gallery on the seventh floor of The Warehouse until Jan. 7, 2010.
Smartly juxtaposed with the industrial white walls and concrete columns of the gallery, the collection displays Beene’s use of fabrics, from a stiff lace to an airy cotton to a minute silk weave.
Contrasting further still with the blank canvas-like room, Beene’s range in color includes electric pink, black, peach and a daring plaid combining orange and green.
But material and dye are merely the perch from which Beene’s genius takes flight.
What the exhibit effectively captures more than any other aspect of Beene’s 40-year career is the way he understood shape. In a matter of four mannequins, you’ll see a décolleté V-neckline, a pleated A-line skirt, a sleeveless sheath tiered with lace ruffles and an enormous collar folded over and coming to a point at the back of an evening coat. In the last case, imagine Dracula as a woman in the `60s dressed for a night at the opera, and you’ll know how playful Beene could be.
Through such detailed and evocative pieces, the small collection swiftly delivers its message: here was a designer whose taste made the case for American couture when Europe ruled the runway.
- by Phillip Crook
- by Phillip Crook
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