Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed

by Harold Koda. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York,
and Yale University Press, New Haven,
Connecticut, 2001. 168 pp., illus.
Cloth, $40.00. ISBN 0-300-09117-6.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens.
2022 X Avenue, Dysart, Iowa
USA.
ballast@netins.net


There are any number of ways by which we change the way we look: We do the strangest things to hair, paint our faces, and transform the surface of our skin by the painful incision of tattoos. This book is not about those methods but is focused instead on the changes that come from "extreme" or astonishing uses of clothes. The book‚s author is the Curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was produced as the catalog for an exhibition that took place in the winter months of 2001-2002. As explained in its fluent and interesting text, this is only the latest in a long and respectable history of exhibits and publications about the uses of adornment for reasons other than warmth¯as tacit symbols that announce "status, wealth, power, gender, cultivation, ceremony, and group affiliations." Like the exquisite corpse (a Surrealist variation on a Victorian parlor game), in which distinctly different parts are juxtaposed to arrive at zany mismatched wholes, the contents of this book are grouped into body parts: neck and shoulders, chest, waist, hips, and feet. Within these zones, many or most of the topics addressed may be old hat to anyone with a long-term, serious interest in the subject, things like Victorian corsets, Chinese foot-binding, high heeled shoes, bustles, push-up bras, and cod pieces. While the richness and variety of its 225 full-color paintings, prints and photographs are reason enough to buy this volume, of added interest is the text, which offers brief descriptions of such oddities as Salomon Reinach‚s system for dating nude statuary, based on measurements of the breasts (he believed that the space between nipples was linked to certain time periods); a rarely seen screw-like costume (c. 1922), with a blade that moves from waist to hem, from the Triadic Ballet of Bauhaus theatre designer Oskar Schlemmer; and x-ray demonstrations that the Padaung women of Burma do not really stretch their necks by wearing eight pound rings of brass, but only (only!) create the appearance of that by radically redirecting the growth of their collarbones.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 1,
Autumn 2002.)