Customer Reviews

Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

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Sentient humans with brains as well as bodies have always been fascinated by the way we adorn ourselves and why. Once we can get past the cultural anthropology of fashion, and the fads that make it a billion-dollar world industry, we can dig down to discover the roots of historical and current adorned beauty, and EXTREME BEAUTY does this . . . beautifully.
It is pleasing--in an era in which physical beauty and adornment typified by fashion have been roundly rejected by most of the jeans-wearing public--to find a book that lets beauty out and helps us exercise our sense of mystery and wonder, based in no small part on human sexuality and attraction. Harold Koda (curator of the Costume Institute at New York's Met) has mounted a show and created a book with marvelous insights and passion, and the illustrations are wondrous--consider, as a case in point, Thiery Mugler's 'Chimere,' with its savage eroticism.
One could quibble with Koda's arbitrary division of the body into 'neck and shoulders,' 'chest,' 'waist,' 'hips' and 'feet,'
and his exclusion of the fascinating face/head/hair perplex, and the hands, with their magical touch and allure. But this book and its illustrations will become a benchmark by which human adornment is judged, and is a keeper of power and importance.

Extreme Beauty is a wonderful book that celebrates the Metropolitan's equally brilliant exhibit about fashion and it's different preoccupations with the body. The exhibit was magnificent, and the book truly honors the tone and feeling of it, while being extremely informative in it's own right. The book is divided into different chapters such as neck and shoulders, waist, chest, etc. Each chapter features photos of the garments displayed in the original exhibit, as well as additional historical drawings and photographs of the various fashions and cultural trends that have celebrated the parts of the body. And, as promised in the title, the book explores the cultural foundations of bodily transformation and mutilation(?) through everything from extreme corsetry, [..] footwear and peircing to the tribal women who use metal rings to actually elongate their vertebrae. Harold Koda's insightful and meticulously researched commentary is just the icing on the cake. This is a must for any fashion library, but also of great interest to non-fashionistas.

This is a beautiful book illustrating the different ways cultures reform the body and for what reasons. It is just like actually visiting an exhibit at a major museum. But this you get to take home and enjoy over and over. The photos are plentiful, full color, large and professional. The text is not overly scholarly, but informative and intelligent. It does leave me wanting to delve deeper into the subject intellectually.

Harold Koda's Extreme Beauty surveys concepts of fashion and beauty. Koda considers the evolving, changing strategies of beauty around the world, focussing on different body parts and how they are accented and displayed through varying uses of clothing and cultural perception. Black and white and color photos of unusual fashion choices and styles make for some eye-opening insights.

To read this book reveals not only plenty of interesting and quite often surprising information on fashions past and current but its text and pictures are highly complementary. In addition a lot of the provided information gives insight into social structures of the centuries referred to - and once more it is proven that fashion is one of the quickest instruments to testify social and historical changes to the world.

EXTREME BEAUTY is one of the more interesting challenges for a museum exhibition one could imagine. But miraculously the Metropolitan Museum pulled it off and this catalogue documents that very popular exhibition. The catalogue/monograph is an art work itself, so well designed it is with beautifully balanced photography and text. It is refreshing to sit and study these pages of accoutrements to the world of fashion when our eyes are so blurred with the skimpy, minimal clothing seemingly designed to displayed the growing obsession with complex and multicolored tattoos we see on the ladies of the day.

The catalogue, like the exhibition, is divided into Neck and Shoulders, Chest, Waist, Hips, and Feet - five areas where the focus is restricted to each area mentioned but never confined or isolated in regards to the rhythm of the design of the entire outfit. Each section displays cultural fashions form around the world, each culture emphasizing different body parts. This is an historical survey of the many changes that have occurred throughout the past. As one observer phrased the exhibition 'Over time and across cultures, extraordinary manipulations of the body have occurred in a continuing evolution of the concept of beauty. This exhibition will offer a unique opportunity to see fashion as the practice of some of the most extreme strategies to conform to shifting concepts of the physical ideal. Various zones of the body--neck, shoulders, bust, waist, hips, and feet--have been constricted, padded, truncated, or extended through subtle visual adjustments of proportion, less subtle prosthesis, and often deliberate physical deformation. Costumes in the exhibition--ranging from a 16th-century-style iron corset to Jean Paul Gaultier's notorious "Madonna" bustier--will be augmented by anthropological and ethnographic examples and by paintings, prints, and drawings, including caricatures by Cruikshank, Daumier, Rowlandson, and Vernet.'

These fashions and the at times inflictions one the body the neck stretching gold bands, the perilous shoes, the anti-inspiratory bodices, the flagrantly sexy male codpieces that were supposed to attract the attention of ladies in the period in Europe after the plague decimated the population - sort of a reproductive advertisement - all are fascinating and at times beyond belief, except that they are all real and historically documented. This is a beautiful catalogue of a magnificent exhibition in the Costume Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Grady Harp, August 11

I bought this book as a birthday present for a friend. She fell in love with this book. Thank you