Fashionistas at La Fashionista MFA Boston

Today, teen Fashionista (wants a haute couture wardrobe) and mom Fashionista  (on a tight budget) drove in Boston slush to the Boston MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) Haute Couture exhibit, which closes tomorrow.

I heard it is sold out. We bought our tickets yesterday at a typically pricey price. Ouch.

Fab is the way to describe this show. About 10 Haute Couture designers were featured, with 8 to 10 designs from each designer from the Winter/Spring 2006 Paris show.

Chanel, LaCroix, Dior, Valentino come to mind. A few others I'm not that familiar with.

A very young museum guard (under 18, I'm sure) with exceptionally beautiful eyelashes to match his exceptionally beautiful face and nose very high in the air kept deliberately bumping into my daughter. I didn't think she was his type. Obviously, I was wrong.

Clare Stella reviewed this exhibit recently and took some photos before a guard caught up with her. Here is the link to Clare's article, in which she did take 5 incredible photos.  

"Please Put Away Your Camera, Ma'am."

Among some I liked (or found amusing) were these:

A man's vest made up of distressed, lacquered playing cards. Wonder when knock offs of this will hit the ready-to-wear market.

An Elizabethan-inspired man's jacket, replete with silk, brocade, pleats, puffed sleeves, peacock eyes. Shakespeare looked like a plain Jane next to this garb.

A tunic made of red artificial flowers. Must be worn over full garb. You can imagine the looks people would make if this were worn in public, as this design was shown on the mannequin: over bare skin.

A man's vest made entirely of leather belts. Hmm, more food for thought, here.

Goat hair coats. Not inspired by Cashmere sweaters, but by long-haired beasties. Long-haired coats as wide around as they are long. Must be seen to be believed. Clare Stella has photos of these in the link above.

Karl Lagerfeld for the House of Chanel created updated classic Chanel, with a video of runway models sporting same, in the background.

Black, white, beige, gold, silver, red were the colors of the season at the exhibit. Wonder why those colors were popular in department stores? Yep, the buyers saw it in Paris last year.

Christian LaCroix was very interesting. A few wedding dresses were shown. Not your antebellum dress, not your moderne, off the shoulder, slim dress. A concoction beyond belief.

Haute Couture dresses are made to order and require between 1,000 hours to hand-sew and up to several weeks to assemble. They begin at several thousand dollars and can cost up to $200,000. 

Only the wealthiest of the celebrities can afford to buy the Haute Couture dresses they wear at the Oscars. Most will return the dress,  whereby it is then sold to a collection.

Helen Mirren bought (and therefore, kept) the dress she wore at the Oscars this year. Dresses she wore at previous Oscars, she had to return, unpurchased.

I ran into someone I work with. Not that surprising. Several high school students who take art classes at the MFA were sketching the designs. Oh they were good!

After the exhibit, we were pumped,  we were primed and we were starving. We paid the parking (ouch) then drove to the Pru (the Prudential shopping plaza) where we parked again - ouch, ouch (consider the parking fee a reasonable alternative to a ticket or worse, being towed.)

We walked through Saks Fifth Avenue, but were too hungry to stop. Usually upscale department stores interest me, as I work in a very-good, but-not upscale-America's Favorite-Unnamed Department Store and very occasionally, I will go to another store to see what people are buying or looking at.

What people are looking at in Saks: Furs, Juicy Couture sweats at $84 a piece, gorgeous fine jewelry (the lighting is excellent at Saks, much to its credit) fragrantly filled women's fragrance counters and tasteful, expensive Misses clothing. Well it is SFA, so all this is to be expected.

Stopped at the food court, where we shared one lunch. I was not hungry and we are on a budget. As I counted how much I spent for the day after paying for tickets and parking (not to mention food) I came to one conclusion: I won't pay bills this week.

The day was worth it. Most definitely. Next time we take the T and hit Neiman's and Saks, in the same day.