What's the True Cost of Selling More Than Just the Clothes on the Models' Backs?

With the economy shrinking, people's jobs imperiled and fearfulness about the future infecting even those who are normally optimistic, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will unveil its annual spring exhibition on fashion this week. Its challenge is to lure an audience into a world that in the most high-flying times still is deemed frivolous and elitist.

Last year, the curators had the prescience to mount an exhibition on superhero fashion just as the world was focused on the athletic feats of Olympians and sending "Iron Man" to the top of the box-office charts. What piece of fashion history might distract folks from the jittery suspicion that soon the only frock they will be able to afford is a burlap sack?

The curators settled on a topic that has caused young women to riot, inspired a catalogue of reality shows, made grown men swoon and feminists snarl: models.

"The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion" runs from Wednesday to Aug. 9, and will, as always, be kicked off with a lavish formal gala that, with all of its celebrity-studded, bacchanalian extravagance, serves as the primary source of funding for the Costume Institute. The country might be in a recession, but glamour must go on.

This year, the benefit will be co-chaired by Justin Timberlake, model Kate Moss and Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Marc Jacobs is the exhibition's primary sponsor and the honorary chair of the party. The list of names serves as a reminder of how deeply fashion has permeated every aspect of popular culture. Timberlake bridges the divide between fashion and music; Wintour mixes politics with style in the pages of her magazine; Jacobs incorporates the work of visual artists such as Richard Prince into his collections. And Moss is the consummate pitchwoman, selling whatever she happens to be wearing or holding, as well as marketing herself as an enigmatic arbiter of cool.

The exhibition focuses on the years 1947 to 1997 and is divided by decades. It includes iconic photographs from magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, as well as garments made famous by the models who wore them -- such as Brooke Shields and the Calvin Klein jeans between which nothing, she said seductively, ever came.

Some of the oldest images in the exhibit feature models such as Dovima, Lisa Fonssagrives and Suzy Parker during their heyday in the 1950s. Each exudes an unmistakable haughtiness. They are selling the frocks, of course, but they also are selling class, social prominence and appropriateness. They may be celebrating sensuality, but they are not selling sex. Fashion at that time was focused on its ability to improve one's social standing.

Age and body shape were less powerful in defining what was deemed stylish or chic. Clothes back then had an infrastructure that created their silhouette. And youth was not the driving force in fashion. In fact, young models were styled to look more mature.

The exhibition also looks at how these living mannequins shaped a population's definition of beauty and become shorthand for entire decades. Twiggy equals the 1960s. Naomi, Christy and Linda defined the excess of the 1980s. Kate Moss personified the louche grunginess of the 1990s.

As a viewer moves from one decade to the next, the relationship to the models becomes more intimate and more complicated. In the period immediately following World War II, women had a more admiring connection to models. They were glamorous and gorgeous and yet they did not evoke the same kind of suspicion as models do today. That perception was influenced, co-curator Harold Koda says, by the Hollywood starmaking machine. That network controlled the images of actresses, placing them on a pedestal and making them inaccessible.

That same attitude dominated the fashion world. The public admired fashion's elite beauties, but there was little pressure to look like them. Fashion was still focused on selling clothes, and the message was that with the right suit or the perfect evening gown, a woman would be grand. The body hadn't yet been objectified to the point that today, a model like Gisele Bündchen isn't merely selling a dress, she's peddling the desirability of her body as well. Throw in the accessibility of plastic surgery, youth elixirs, Pilates classes and magic-bullet diets, and the question isn't whether a woman wants to look like a model, but why doesn't she look like one?

The transition from selling clothes to selling the body along with them occurred in the 1960s. Women's bodies were freed from the constraints of bullet brassieres and girdles. But as a result, to be fashionable, a woman needed to have a particular kind of physique because her clothes were not going to provide any help. She needed to have a flat stomach all on her own because she was no long wearing a girdle. She needed perky breasts because the armorlike bras had been tossed to the side.

The models of the day, most notably Twiggy, were known for their physiques rather than their demeanor. That focus continued with "supermodels" of the 1980s and early '90s, who merged fashion with the idealized body and the sort of personalities -- and cellphone-throwing escapades -- that fed and helped to create the celebrity hype machine that now surrounds models.

The exhibition closes with a nod to one of Jacobs's collections for Louis Vuitton that was inspired by Prince's nurse paintings. The clothes, from spring 2008, were worn by recognizable models such as Naomi Campbell. But those famous faces were obscured. Jacobs's clothes were virtually hidden underneath translucent nurse uniforms. The models weren't selling themselves, but they weren't really selling the clothes, either.

An optimist might conclude that this final installation represents a reassuring circling back by the fashion industry to the idea that the individual woman brings a garment to life. It's the personality that ultimately matters. The body on the runway is just a vehicle for commerce. Wouldn't that be nice?

A cynic would argue that the exhibition confirms women's worst fears. That in the past 50 years, fashion has lost its way. That is has stopped selling clothes and now sells only hype and titillation. It idolizes the model body and forsakes all others.

That point of view makes for a more provocative exhibition. But if that's the truth of the fashion industry, it means more bad news for the economy.