In which we speak

Nina Ricci Spring/Summer 2007

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a new blog in which it invites the general public to comment on items in its Costume Institute collection. How fabulous if the V&A here would do the same.

Discussing it in the Wall Street Journal Rachel Dodes, writes:

Fashion criticism has long been the exclusive realm of an insular band of journalists who traveled the big runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York and seemed to speak their own esoteric language. But the Met's new exhibit, "Blog.mode Addressing Fashion," is inviting anyone with an Internet connection to critique the clothes on display. With its new blog, blog.metmuseum.org/blogmode/, which went up this week, the august museum is also acknowledging that traditional fashion criticism is over.

"There's a whole new field out there," says Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator. He decided last summer to turn a retrospective of important garments acquired by the museum since 2000 into a three-way conversation of sorts between curator, designer and outside observers. "We wanted to further the practice of fashion interpretation and appreciation," he says.

Later it is revealed that Manolo Blahnik is a great fan of Manolo the Shoeblogger, 'I love it,' he says. Manolo the Shoblogger was the first fashion blog I ever read, and the first to wake me up to the possibilities of writing and thinking about fashion in non-traditional ways.