Selling Culture

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

UCLA cultural history professor Silverman aims to demonstrate a connection between the values of the ``New Right'' and recent trends in high fashion, focusing on Diana Vreeland, particularly on her role as curator of several Costume Institute exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum. Surely Silverman shows that Vreeland's clothing exhibits are woefully ahistorical (mixing and matching from different eras and social stations) and promote opulent living as desirable in and of itself. But Silverman's prose is arch, repetitive and academic. (``Vreeland's Saint Laurent presentation reiterated the essential link between historical and contemporary luxury, organizing the Saint Laurent costumes along a single axisluxury.'') There are many trenchant observations scattered here, but does anyone need to argue in such detail that Diana Vreeland is not Mother Teresa? (October)

Library Journal

Cultural historian Silverman analyzes the phenomenon of aristocratic emulation in contemporary America. She sees the evocation of opulence, privilege, and historical fantasy in Vreeland's costume exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum and in Bloomingdale's theme promotions and suggests an affiliation with the policies and ethos of the Reagan White House. Comparing Vreeland's shows with Bloomingdale's commercial versions, she finds a common value system: opulent objects offered for cultural consumption through an appeal to snobbery, with cool disregard for historical meanings. This antihistorical attitude is mirrored in the political arena by Reagan. The thesis is provocative, but slight. It is here attenuated, overelaborated, and overburdened with proofs, some strained. Marjorie Miller, Fashion Inst. of Technology Lib., New York