Winter Wonderwhirling: Day 3

Today’s List: The Brooklyn Museum’s Dior Show, A Broadway Musical, FIT, and SoHo

If there’s one thing I miss about New York City, it’s the world-class events, exhibits, and talent that you find on every corner. I learned this when I was lacing my ice skates at Battery Park and overheard that the woman skating ahead of me was practicing for her show at the Olympics. Similarly, I remember meeting a woman in Central Park who was performing in preparation for her upcoming show at Carnegie Hall. The competition and rent are high enough in every storefront, that no matter where you go or what you buy, it must be the best or the business won’t survive. 

The third day of my Winter Wonderwhirling excursion was a celebration of world-class excellence. I started my day at Mille-Feuille Bakery, where I ate a world-class almond croissant with a world-class cup of joe before making my way by Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Library (world-class architecture) to the Brooklyn Museum to see the world-class Christian Dior exhibit. 

Considering myself a student of the world, I paid for a discounted student ticket and wove my way through the crowd to the cave-like entrance of the exhibit.

The first room was modestly filled with Dior’s early pieces set against black backgrounds and a lot of biographical text. I’d studied Dior heavily when I was a tween, sucking up photographs from library books and Pinterest of his divinely feminine gowns with my hungry eyeballs and pouring over every detail of the man’s construction lines and fabric choices, but I hadn’t apparently paid as close attention to the man’s life story. I was surprised to read in the exhibit that Christian Dior was only big for about 10 years before he died. 

The man who had so greatly influenced fashion and was the aspiration of so many designers was only able to enjoy his empire for a short portion of his life. It made every original design of his that I saw in the exhibit feel that much more sacred. A handful of designers have come after him to direct his label, but you can spot his original works in a crowd of Dior gowns from ten yards away. Granted, fashion does change and it isn’t completely fair to judge a 2017 gown with one from 1957, but there is something about Dior’s original gowns that couldn’t be re-created by any other artist. Balenciaga had some similar gowns at the time, but you can still tell them apart. 

The second segment of the exhibit was a dark room full of fashion film photography featuring Dior’s gowns from the 1950s. This was the era when technology, fashion, photography, and film were all at their peak of collaboration and the resulting images were breathtaking. There is a nearly life-size portrait of a model wearing a black Dior gown standing between two elephants. In the middle of the room, there is a mannequin wearing the same dress where you can see through to the image of it on the model behind it. 

The next room was an ode to the designers who have come after Dior at his label. I was reminded that the first to come after Dior himself was Yves Saint Laurent. My favorite gown in the room was black and white checkered and pieced together with narrowing black and white squares to fill out the fullness of the skirt and shrink back to its narrow waist. 

Selfie from the magical garden room

The next room was not what I was expecting. There were pristine columns bathed in bright white light from sparkling chandeliers. Sounds of chirping birds and flowing water filled the air. You were led through a narrow hall of old and new creations until you came to an elaborate eighteenth-century-inspired gown in a glass sepulcher. Thousands of hand-cut paper flowers hung on a canopy over the top of it and a light projection of flower petals faded behind it into a black screen. 

At the end of the hall, I was met by another dark room, but as soon as I’d taken a few steps I was taken aback by the rainbow of gowns, accessories, and mock-ups that filled a curving wall ranging from deep purple, into pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and finally blues. 

I came up for air into another brightly lit hallway walled with a hundred white boxes filled with white mannequins wearing white muslin “toilles,” or “prototypes,” of dresses from the Dior workroom placed to show the process of making a couture gown. 

The doorway at the end of the stark white hall opened to a massive gallery with hundred-foot ceilings covered in pyramids of gowns. Light projections threw flowering vines and flying birds across the dark walls and the same waterfall/bird soundtrack from the columned room was amplified. It was a nighttime fairy garden feel, with dresses that appeared to be blooming right on the mannequins. 

These are the dresses that first inspired me when I was a little girl. I had seen pictures of Dior’s blooming flower gowns and had created my own crude purple, orange, and magenta versions to dress my little cousins in. I wanted to linger in that room, where you could almost breathe in the earthy smell of moss, and you could expect a bird to land on your shoulder at any moment, but the day was climbing toward noon and I had somewhere to be. 

An Egg Tart in the Subway :)

I walked through the last room in a bit of a hurry, but its display was not lost on me. Twenty dresses stood on mannequins in a tight cluster, each with a coordinating plaque and photo of a celebrity wearing the gown for an awards ceremony. It was lovely to see the progression from 1960’s actresses to today’s icons such as Jennifer Lawrence in her incredible white Dior gown. 

Completely overwhelmed and satisfied with how much beauty and excellence I had just taken in, I left the museum for the subway where I headed for Times Square. 

I chatted with the old man next to me on the train ride. He was from Greece and was in New York working on some stonework for the Brooklyn Museum. His daughter happened to be a designer at Alexander Wang, so it was a special extension of my Dior fashion exhibit to hear of his daughter’s life today in fashion. He was incredibly proud of both daughters, the other one an aspiring film director, and he showed me a photo of them sandwiched in a happy trio with his wife who he had met when he was fifteen. He provided a list of all the places I needed to see in Greece when Alex and I get there one day, and along with all the foods we had to be sure to try. We parted ways and he kissed my hand saying “You are one of the good ones, Katharina. I know these things!” 

I popped up out of the Subway at 42nd Street and only walked two blocks before finding the marquis of the Broadway matinee I wanted to see. I didn’t have tickets yet, but when I arrived at the booth five minutes before the opening curtain, the ticket man gave me a ticket in the fourth row for $30 — the same seat was listed for $140 on the board. 

I sat next to an older woman wearing designer everything. She was from San Fransisco, had seen dozens of Broadway shows, and had traveled the world. She was staying at the Plaza Hotel. This theater was part of her world and somehow part of mine. I was a country mouse with scuffed shoes and somehow, we were here at the same time in the same place sharing an experience together. This is a phenomenon that only happens in a place like New York City. 

We watched The Girl from The North Country with music by Bob Dylan. From the title, I’d expected a tragic love story about the girl in the song. What the plot did give me were a few tragic love stories around a group of people living in a boarding house together during The Great Depression, but the characters were never explored deeply enough to really feel too much for them. There weren’t really any main characters to root for. All of that being said, the music was phenomenal. 

Bob Dylan was a genius songwriter and I have always loved his lyrics, but his vocals aren’t quite on the same level as his writing. It was exciting to hear his beautiful words performed by actors whose vocals are world-class. 

The fourth song, Slow Train, was performed with so much soul that I wanted to stand to my feet and start swaying along. Theirs wasn’t too far from Dylan’s original version, but here, sung by a man with incredible range and bravado, you could feel the lyrics bite into your skin. 

The sixth song they performed was I Want You. Star-crossed lovers sang it in a duet while parting ways — he was an aspiring writer and alcoholic who couldn’t commit to a job and she was leaving to marry a boring man with a good job. His character was hungover and haggard, and hers was sweet with a floral cotton house-dress and perfectly curled hair, but their chemistry was remarkable. He sang the first half with tender sincerity, but when her voice busted out of the chute in the second half, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I wrenched forward like I’d been punched in the gut. Her voice was pure and haunting and it was hard to believe that such a big song could come out of such a tiny person. 

A studio recording of ‘I Want You’ — This is the same actress who I saw but we had a different man who’s voice I much preferred. It’s close though!

Well, I'll return to the Queen of Spades

And talk with my chambermaid

She knows that I'm not afraid to look at her

She is good to me

And there's nothing she doesn't see

She knows where I'd like to be

But it doesn't matter

Dylan’s version opens like a traveler’s song with a peppy harmonica and he sings it without a lick of pain in his voice. It’s a very dark song but performed his way you don’t feel the full blow of it. Watching it performed on Broadway between two characters who want to be together but can’t, sung with a balance of defeat and acceptance gives you a much different experience of the song. It didn’t just bite into me like in Slow Train. It made me feel like I could throw up. 

When the song was over the entire audience sat in silence, gripping the pits that had formed in their guts, too preoccupied to dab at the tears that gathered in more than a few faces. I thought about leaving as there was no way any of the songs would be able to compete with that performance, but I was still in shock so I stayed out of necessity. 

My prediction that I’d already seen the best of the show turned out to be accurate, but I was glad to have stayed regardless to enjoy the costumes and some lovely renditions of Like a Rolling Stone and Hurricane/Along the Watchtower. 

My favorite Dylan song is the show’s namesake, The Girl from The North Country, but ironically enough they only played about 60 seconds of the song in a sort of bridge. I felt a little betrayed to find out that the song didn’t have a larger role in the show, but the newfound appreciation for Slow Train and I Want You nearly made up for it. 

No one sings The Girl from The North Country as Johnny Cash does, but I have come to love the Swedish artist, Ane Brun, and her ghostly version of it almost as much. She has a few Dylan covers that leave me breathless. His songs really need to be performed with more feeling than his range gives him, in my opinion. 

It was night when I came out of the theater, but it never gets dark in Times Square, especially at Christmas. 

It was a clear night when I flew into JFK, and I’d been lucky enough to have a row to myself. I pressed my nose up to the window and looked down at my sparkling city. It was a tiny lit-up strip of land smaller in area than my uncle’s ranch. The middle of the island glowed so brightly from the neon conglomeration of Times Square that it was hard to see anything else. 

Now, standing outside the theater in Times Square, I was a tiny ant inside that neon halo that stretches 30,000 feet up. 

I grabbed a chicken kabab and some seltzer from a street cart to settle my stomach that was still recovering from I Want You, and I walked a few blocks back to Bryant Park to check out the Holiday Market and ice skating rink.

There were forty or so tents stretched in a horseshoe around the skating rink offering gifts from everything from jewelry to hot sauce. Everything smelled of browning sugar from a pop-up waffle shop, but you could also find food vendors offering food from around the world and unusual offerings such as fried artisan pickles. The taking rink was so full that skaters hardly had room to move, but I enjoyed watching a few practiced individuals move gracefully across the ice as if they were the only ones there. 

I headed North on 5th Ave towards the ritzy department stores to check out the Christmas windows. I’d heard that last year’s display was slim due to all of the rioting and COVID, but when I stood outside Sacks, it was obvious that they had put twice as much effort into this year’s windows to make up for it. 

There was a mermaid riding a Harley and a 6ft penguin dressed head-to-claws in couture. I was passing an elaborate window filled with ladies in sparkling neon dresses and dozens of creepy cats when I saw the next window held a motorcycle covered in flowers. The display reminded me of Lewis Miller’s “Flower Flashes” that he does around NYC. Miller’s parents are good friends with my grandparents, so I have heard by proxy about his adventures in New York as a high-end wedding florist. 

Lewis Miller’s Window

I was about to pass on to the next window when my eyeballs zoomed in on a plaque at the bottom of the motorcycle that read “Lewis Miller.” I couldn’t believe it! Someone I knew happened to have a display in the most famous Christmas windows in NYC! I sent a picture to my grandma and she responded right away with four exclamation marks. I’d found my golden egg of the day for sure. Of course, his display was here, because in order to make it in NYC you have to be the best. You have to be world-class, and Lewis Miller is nothing short of that. 

The night was still young, so I decided to take the opportunity to zip down to the fashion museum at my old school, The Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea. It was a strange feeling walking down Fashion Ave, but it was important for me to be there and face the trepidation that still stings my sense of identity that I’ve struggled with since leaving New York four years ago. It gets easier to be there every time I go, and it makes me feel a little sense of victory to go back to those places and declare silently that “you do not make me who I am.”

By the time I reached the FIT campus, I’d squashed any unsettling feelings and I was just an ordinary tourist going to a museum to see some beautiful clothes. The downstairs exhibit was closed, but the main hall was open and had a show bout the history of accessories on display. 

“Head to Toe explores more than two hundred years of women’s dress from 1800 through the early twenty-first century, focusing on the role that accessories play within the total ensembles of Western women’s fashion, as well as the messages that they communicate about social and cultural values.”

It was fun to see each era's rejection to the last, where history flip-flopped between extravagant clothes paired with simple accessories and the opposite of simple clothed dresses up or down by extravagant accessories. For example, clothing was limited and very utilitarian during WW2, so people dressed things up with an ornate purse or a festive pair of shoes, but by the fifties, when clothing was more extravagant, it was seen as kitsch to have flashy bags or shoes. 

By the time I got to the ’80s and 90’s I was surprised to realize that it was only since those times that people started dressing to identify with different sub-genres of music. For example, in the 60’s you wore a cowboy hat if you were a cowboy, but in the 90’s you wore a cowboy hat if you listened to country music. In the 60’s you wore black leather if you were a witch, but by the 90’s it just meant you were identifying with punk rock music. Saggy jeans, sneaker culture, and hoop earrings were born of the church of hip hop.

I was pretty hungry again by the time I got out of the museum, and my conversation with the elderly Greek gentleman had me craving a good Greek sammy, so I decided to take the A down to SoHo to my favorite Greek Bakery. 

A Greek “Spankopita!” from Pi Bakerie

They were out of the sandwich I’d been craving at that hour, so I decided to try something new. The girl at the counter recommended a Philo ring filled with feta cheese. 

I sat in the corner savoring each flaky bite, remembering coming there with my mother for Orange Cake before my internship that I went to down the street from there. She had come with me to New York for the first nine months of my New York adventure until I turned 18. She didn’t have to do that, but she did. I could have survived those days on my own, but I didn’t have to and there is no greater gift she could have given me than those nine months we had together before I flew the coop for adulthood. 

My belly was full of pastry and cheese and I had a hundred memories of good times my mother and I shared in New York City. I walked back to the train incredibly happy and thankful for the full life I’ve been able to experience in my mere 22 years. I don’t have the pedigree or prestige of the elegant woman I’d sat by in the theater, but we’d been seated together and we could both talk of our favorite cafes in London, of knowing hardship and knowing good art and that is is worth being grateful for. 

I read from my novel about a young Jewish girl named Ana with many longings on the train back to Kelly’s apartment. Her character is described as having a largeness inside her that is fed by her experiences, but it's the hardest experiences that seem to have fueled her the most.

“I bless the largeness inside you,” her mother-figure tells her in the book.

I picked up a few veggies to offset all the delicious breads I’d been surviving on at a market and went upstairs to give Kelly a brief summary of the day’s adventures before falling immediately into bed where I dreamed of beautiful fabrics and gut-wrenching music.

I had already seen a lot in New York on this trip, but this had been an especially emotion-heavy day and it felt good to have explored some challenging feelings around my relationship with fashion and the largeness inside me. It felt like this day had nurtured a few sore spots inside me that I can often neglect outside of New York City.