NEW YORK — On stage, screen and magazine covers, Lauren Bacall was known as “The Look,” but in her regular life, the late icon described her style as “studied carelessness.”
Now, more than six months after her death, student curators at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology have managed to capture both sides of Bacall in an intimate new exhibit that runs through April 4.
The graduate students relied on garments they helped cull from more than 700 items Bacall donated to FIT over 18 years. And they used clips from a TV show she hosted, interviews and archival photos, covers and sketches to accompany about a dozen looks from her professional and personal wardrobes. The idea was to hone in on Bacall’s relationship with the fashion world as model, muse and friend to couturiers at home and abroad.
The exhibit “Lauren Bacall: The Look” seizes on a moment that resonated with the students and the museum itself: her 1968 job as host on CBS’ prime-time, hourlong “Bacall and the Boys,” the boys being designers Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro. The special aired the year Bacall began donating clothes and accessories to the museum, which continued through 1986. On the show, Bacall interviews the couturiers for their fall collections in Paris, models some of their creations and profiles the four along the way.
The exhibit includes three looks she wore that night, including a fuchsia pink mini-dress by Cardin with a molded pyramid design in a fabric he invented and dubbed Cardine.
“As he promoted it, it could be crushed, washed and even burned, and it would keep its shape,” said curators Mindy Meissen.
Bacall demonstrates on air, whipping the dress out of a paper bag to endorse those properties and modeling it herself with long, black gloves against a stark white background.
Among other looks included in the exhibit is a bright pink wool Norman Norell coat Bacall wore in the 1964 film “Sex and the Single Girl.”
Norell, a New York designer, clothed Bacall for work and her personal life. His famous tan subway coat, part of the exhibit, is an example of how Bacall often blended the two worlds. Its outwardly simple look is suitable for public transportation, but it glistens when opened, exposing a lining of hand-sewn sequins that adorn a matching sheath dress underneath.
Bacall, who died at 89, was a teen when she landed on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in 1943. It’s a cover included in the museum show, along with a 1959 Vogue story that described her in an epic opening sentence: “Wide-mouthed, with a deep, dead-eye voice — sounding sexy and faintly mad at someone — Lauren Bacall looks the way most American women yearn to look; the way that stops men — American and otherwise — smack in their tracks.”
Also represented are the ripples of influence she left behind in fashion, in images of model Karlie Kloss looking Bacall-esque in a 2010 design by John Galliano for Dior, and another of Kate Moss with softly waved hair and big eyebrows in an issue of W magazine from 2004.
Perhaps Bacall herself best summed her relationship with fashion, Meissen said, when she complained of no air conditioning at a Dior show, adding: “and you have to sit on those damn gilt chairs. Is it worth it? It is.”
