Sex and the Brits: An ode to irony By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2006 NEW YORK Gathered in Manhattan to celebrate the essence of English- ness, fashion's Britpack proposed their own ideas. "The garden, sweet peas, black tie and green Wellies," said Stella Tennant, the beanpole model descended from a duke. "It's sex in the garden!" claimed the movie star Sienna Miller, looking round at the pansies and primulas on the rooftop terrace. "Tomato ketchup," announced the soccer player's wife, Victoria Beckham, in a tomato red dress; while the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver went for the "roast beef and Yorkshire pudding" that he had cooked for the festive meal. Tamara Mellon, queen of Jimmy Choo shoes, threw in "scruffy"; and the actor Rupert Everett said "nor washing too much or smelling of lip gloss." The rock star Nick Rhodes summed up a general view. "If there is a difference between the English and the Americans, it is irony," he said. It takes a certain irony to envisage Anna Wintour, first lady of American Vogue, showing the Duke of Devonshire around the grand and glorious English period rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, among dark Jacobean furniture and an Elizabethan portrait, a Vivienne Westwood gown is accessorized with a necklace filled with sperm; or where a grand state bed has a Gothic scenario of Queen Victoria in her widow's weeds watching her Albert lying in a compromising position in a silver death mask and Alexander McQueen's taut tartan trousers. And it was surely with a wicked wink that Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute's new exhibition, placed the quill hat worn by Camilla Parker-Bowles on her wedding day, beside the tailcoat and top-hatted figure of the Duke of Windsor, the British royal family's ultimate transgressor. With its powerful sexual charge and a scurrilous element under an elegant exterior, "AngloMania" (until Sept. 4) is a spectacular success: dramatic and exciting to look at, but also with a powerful undercurrent of intelligence. There are subversive Punk pieces (think Queen Elizabeth printed on a T- shirt with a safety pin through her nose or an image of two gay cowboys on a 1976 Westwood T-shirt that caused a furor in its time.) The historical base is the fine English furniture, the Gainsborough and Reynolds portraits and nostalgia, as in the now-forbidden fox hunt. In that scene, a trench coat flows down a life- size resin horse revealing bared female legs. It is an example of sly contrasts and a tribute to Burberry, celebrating its 150th birthday with this show. "It is the clash of two different worlds that makes British-ness unique - we have an aristocratic, noble history, but it is always contrasted with something rebellious," claims Christopher Bailey, Burberry's creative director. The show opens with a faded and distressed Union Jack and two figures juxtaposing a traditional frock coat and a Westwood 1976 Punk version. They represent Bolton's subtext: "Tradition and transgression in British fashion." Using those two competing elements in each non-chronological vignette, Bolton produces tension and drama, linking a dandy in a pinstriped suit and a bowler hat in a neo-Classical gentleman's club with the Punks. They are louche and menacing, as they loll across a dining table, their Mohican headgear made out of cigarettes, dolls legs or even tampons - all envisaged by the milliner Stephen Jones in his student years in the 1970s. The origin of AngloMania was French: the 18th-century enthusiasm by Voltaire and Montesquieu for England as a land of reason, freedom and tolerance. Bolton sees that as a romantic construct and its force as an expression of style. Wintour translates that as a free- flowing attitude to fashion. "You don't quite know what is going to happen or how people will behave," she says. "In the way the English dress, everyone looks different and has a personality, whereas so much of fashion is bland." Inevitably, the exhibition focuses on fashion's great originals, especially Westwood and John Galliano, who compete in the hunt ball scene for the most extraordinary gowns infused with what Bolton calls "sardonic historicism." (The curator added a Galliano-clad man in newspaper print underclothes, stretched out on a marble mantelpiece, to represent another British phenomenon: the gutter press.) Other major fashion roles are played by McQueen, whose distressed Union Jack frock coat, made for David Bowie in 1996, is shown, like many of the exhibits, as a portrait in a frame. Hussein Chalayan's topiary-trimmed tulle dress is part of an English country garden scene, where a video pours virtual rain down the windows and exquisite 18th-century dresses with exotic flower patterns are set off by Philip Treacy's erotic orchid hats, swelling up like Georgia O'Keeffe paintings. In another powerful Upstairs/ Downstairs vignette, Chalayan's maids wear deconstructed dresses spilling out layers of the past in what Bolton calls "sartorial archaeology." Mounting the monumental carved staircase is a lavishly embroidered 19th-century dress and train by Charles Frederick Worth. Honors go to the two British milliners Treacy and Jones, the latter offering a raven's feather headdress worn with Galliano's Dior gown, with crows cawing on the soundtrack. Three key figures behind the show are the creative consultants and set designers Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda, who turn each tableau into an intriguing narrative; and the wig maker extraordinaire Julien D'Ys, whose disheveled hairpieces - stained with blood for the hunting scene, damp and deflated in the rain-soaked garden and woven into a Union Jack Mohican hair style - are mini-masterpieces of invention. Bolton is modest about his exceptional vision, but the senior curator Harol Koda praises the exhibition's cultural gravitas, energized by the edginess of Punk pieces and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern. "It makes everybody think," says the Duke of Devonshire. "There are resonances to and fro, so a lot seems to be impulsive, but you can go back and see where it comes from - either consciously or not. And having the wealth of the Met to support it, this is a great collection."