Blockbuster Exhibition: Vanity Fair in 1979

The “Blockbuster Exhibition” series highlights past exhibitions that had mass appeal, drawing up to 200,000 visitors or more.  

Four hundred years of fashion displayed across more than 135 mannequins in 1979 brought 117,195 visitors to the Museum.  

Drawn from the most comprehensive costume collection in the United States, the exhibition Vanity Fair: Four Centuries of Fashion from The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art was on view from February through April in 1979 and featured an extraordinary array of garments and decorative regalia chronicling the artistic, social, economic, and political history of the times in which they were worn. This influential show focused on glamorous, high-society fashion and set new standards for dramatic, thematic costume exhibitions.     

The St. Louis exhibition was an abridged version of a 1977 exhibition that opened at The Met called Vanity Fair: A Treasure Trove of The Costume Institute. The Met press release announcing their exhibition called it “a bazaar of fantastic luxurious clothing: follies and fripperies reflecting men’s and women’s vanities of many times and places.” Items in the exhibition spanned four centuries and five continents, including a pair of 17th-century Venetian shoes; a group of clothing items from historic figures like the Duke of Windsor and Queen Alexandra; and a variety of other period pieces such as hats, lace, parasols, feather dresses, and embroidered vests from multiple cultures. 

Vanity Fair was originally curated by legendary fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland, who worked at fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar and as editor-in-chief at Vogue before becoming a special consultant to The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked from 1973 until her death in 1989. Stella Blum, a curator with The Costume Institute, assisted with the exhibition at The Met and was a guest curator for the St. Louis presentation two years later.  

The Costume Institute began in 1937 as an independent entity known as the Museum of Costume Art. Supported by the fashion industry, it merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as The Costume Institute in 1946; in 1959, it became a curatorial department.  

“Until the spring of 1973, it could be said that the field of costume had been a sleepy and rarified one, at least in the context of museums. An aura of antiquarianism seemed to enshroud every costume display, and they had, for all intents and purposes, no audience beyond a few specialists. Then, in that spring of 1973, Diana Vreeland joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art as Special Consultant to The Costume Institute, and almost immediately . . . a large and enthusiastic audience discovered costume, not only in New York but around the world as well,” according to a Met book description of Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style.