On Tuesday night, Susan Casden hosted her ninth annual dinner with Friends of the Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in honor of Andrew Bolton and The Costume Institute’s Spring exhibition. A good number of the 35 California members were in attendance at the Cartier-sponsored affair at Spago Beverly Hills, including fellow couture collectors Tatiana Sorokko, Larissa Sabadash and NJ Goldston. All came out to get face time with Bolton, including Libertine’s Johnson Hartig, who interrupted Kendall Conrad’s conversation to take a selfie with the curator. Bolton was game, saying, “I look forward to this event every year, because people are so polite — which they aren’t always in New York — and they’re really interested in the exhibition.” To that end, Bolton took the mic this year, standing in the middle of the restaurant’s courtyard, to field questions about Manus x Machina. Sorokko asked about the effect of fast fashion on couture and whether such pieces were museum-worthy, to which Bolton replied, “Only if they would do something innovative with design.”
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George Kotsiopoulos asked what Bolton thought of the attire of the Met Gala attendees, noting, “There was quite a…range of outfits. Well, that was probably my fault. I’m partly responsible for that,” said Bolton, drawing laughs from some tables. “Obviously some people didn’t read up on the meaning of the title, which refers to handmade and machine-made fashion. They thought they should dress like machines.”
Later, Bolton revealed that he’s still nailing down the subject of next year’s exhibition, the reason for the unusual brevity of planning being that the original idea has been moved to 2018 to allow for more production time. “I like to be able to stay current and capture the zeitgeist but we really should plan these years out.”
Hartig then piped in, “So how does it feel to be a movie star?” referencing the documentary “The First Monday in May.” Replied Bolton, “Well I was walking down the street recently and one woman stopped me and said, ‘I thought you were Fred Astaire.’”