THE METROPOLITAN MUSIUM OF ART CELEBRATES 600 YEARS OF YEARS OF TEXTILE PATTERNS

The idea of textile patterns of the Renaissance may not get your blood boiling, but there’s no denying that the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Musium of Art, “Fashion and Virtue: Textile Patterns and the Print Revolution, 1520–1620,” is a visual feast. Staged throughout the museum’s circular Robert Lehman wing, the show starts off with 16th-century prints and fabrics and ends triumphantly on sparkling Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, and Todd Oldham pieces from the 20th century, proving that pattern has been a great unifier across places, genres, and centuries of fashion.

On Friday evening, Oldham was on hand to discuss his own love affair with archival patterns and fabrics with curator Femke Speelberg and a group of guests. “The DNA between them all is so obvious, even in the dress that I made, in proximity to this exquisite Russian apron from the 1800s,” he said, motioning to a glittering minidress of his design from the ’90s paired with traditional Russian garb from a century earlier. “When you look at those two pieces together, the Russian dress from the 1800s looks like it could be the contemporary dress, and my dress looks much, much older, but they do look very closely in the way we bifurcated the upper parts of the dress and where we set motifs or volumes. They’re practically identical.” The same could be said for a traditional Nordic Fair Isle sweater, which was paired with a ’70s iteration from Yves Saint Laurent, but could also stand against the cropped versions shown Raf Simmons's collection this October.

The proliferation of cross-cultural borrowing of pattern and print is nothing too new, Speelberg’s exhibition points out. Thanks to the discovery of the printing press in the 15th century, textile pattern books became popular fodder by the 1530s, allowing ideas to be carried from Italy to France to the Germanic Northern states throughout the Renaissance. The Renaissance printing boom was essentially the Instagram of its day, bringing new imagery into homes far and wide and inspiring a new generation of textile designers. The only thing to remember at the Met exhibit: Don’t double-tap the art.

“Fashion and virtue: Textile patterns and the print Revolution  1520-1620 is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 10, 2016.