Hi all!
I need *one more week* to get the final touches on our Age of Innocence read-a-long details gathered, but this is my promise to you that all of the dates plus a brand-new read-a-long resource are coming in *hot* next Wednesday.
Our next read-a-long begins May 8th!
We’re kicking things off in just two weeks! Order yourself a copy of the novel (there are so many beautiful editions to choose from!) and get ready for an amazing story.
Here are a few editions you might consider, via my affiliate link on Bookshop. Note that purchases you make via these links send a portion of your sale to me.
This Penguin Classic edition, which includes a foreword by the contemporary novelist Elif Batuman (author of The Idiot)
This gorgeous 100th Anniversary edition, with foreword by the illustrious Colm Tóibín (author of Brooklyn)
A simple World’s Classic edition
Make sure you’re subscribed to Closely Reading to get all of the reading group details in your inbox next week!
I am *so unbelievably excited* to read more Wharton with you!
Wharton and the Met Gala
For this week’s Wharton Wednesday, let’s talk about fashion — and specifically, this year’s Met Gala!
The famous event takes place in just a couple weeks, on May 6. Back in November, Vogue announced the theme and details. And in the May issue, they dove into a lot more backstory on the exhibit and its inspiration.
The 2024 Met Gala theme will be “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” featuring many previously unseen pieces in the infamous annual exhibit.
“‘Sleeping Beauties’ will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion by evoking how they feel, move, sound, smell, and interact when being worn, ultimately offering a deeper appreciation of the integrity, beauty, and artistic brilliance of the works on display.”
And the cornerstone piece is a gorgeous, antique gown that was once owned by one of the Astor women. I just couldn’t help but notice a few Whartonian connections as I read about the exhibit.
The dress is an 1887 ballgown from Charles Frederick Worth — the designer who ran The House of Worth, a haute couture fashion design firm, at the end of the nineteenth century. (Does the name of his firm sound like any novels you’ve read recently…?!)
The gorgeous gown strikes me for its relevance to the Old New York world of Wharton’s socialite novels: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence.
The style of the gown is a bit too early for Lily Bart, but it is precisely the kind of gown May Welland — a central figure in the love triangle of The Age of Innocence — would have worn. In fact, it strikingly resembles, and perhaps inspired, the gowns worn for Martin Scorsese’s 1990s adaptation of the novel, starring Wynona Rider as May.
Met curator Andy Bolton explains that the 2024 exhibition “will be structured around approximately 15 historically significant and aesthetically beautiful pieces from the collection that are far too fragile ever to be worn again. These are the ‘Sleeping Beauties’ of the title,” he says.
“Instead of fulfilling their original worn function, these pieces—including…a silk satin ballgown by the English couturier Charles Frederick Worth from 1887 that was the show’s original inspiration—will instead be transformed through display.” Vogue
The theme of fragile, historic gowns and “sleeping beauties” recalls, for me, the end of The House of Mirth. In those closing chapters, we find Lily Bart delicately lifting a series of gorgeous gowns out of her trunk, finding in them the shadowy memories of the times she has worn them — the moments in her life when she gained a crushing proximity to the rich life she so desires.
In the folds of the gowns, there are trapped scents and airs that rise back into her consciousness as she unpacks her trunk; at this year’s exhibit, the curators aim to conjure the same sensory experiences of fashion with their digital renderings of the gowns (which can barely be touched, let alone worn), and imbued with technological feats that bring sound, smell, and touch to exhibit-goers.
As for “sleeping beauties,” as a theme, we can think of Lily Bart again.
The final scene of the The House of Mirth gives us a heartbreaking image of Lily as a sleeping beauty — though her slumber is not revived by Selden’s kiss. She is as fragile as the rippling fabrics in her trunk; her life a fragrant, tear-soaked memory to Selden and Gerty, as well as readers who meet her in the folds of the novel’s pages.
I find myself wondering how this year’s theme — which re-stages slowly decaying gowns — will navigate those all-too-American “progress” narratives that fixate on “how far we’ve come” in terms of fashion or styling or indefatigable fabric compounds.
I’m also wondering how this year’s event will actually showcase how very much we’ve stayed in one place: how fragile dresses and the socialites and models and actresses who bear them on their forms in 2024 will (perhaps in frightening or unexpected ways) mirror the dresses and the socialites — and the wealth disparities, political strife, and economic turmoil — of the 1890s or the 1860s or the 1920s.
These are particularly romanticized decades of Western history that we sometimes look back to with nostalgic curiosity, despite the fact that we’d have to be fools — so shielded by the privileges and relative comforts of our current moment’s realities — to truly wish to return there. (Taylor Swift clumsily says as much in one of her new songs, which I tragically find indistinguishable from the thirty other songs she released last week).
Worth’s frail and carefully preserved gown from 1877 marks the inescapable fact of time — how years wear down everything from silken threads to long-held customs to our very own faces. And so, I am curious to see how this year’s gala grapples with the fact of time and decay and age while it champions an industry — fashion and beauty — that so often rails against the ravages of time.
Lily Bart fretted about her wrinkles in the electric light of her vanity; I notice mine and gently tug at them under the electric lights of my own.
The gowns are sleeping beauties, yes, but so are the women — then and now — who are expected to don them.
After all, the fashion industry has long held a vested interest in everyone, and especially women, spending our time and money on methods to stop time — to freeze ourselves in a kind of rested, peaceful expression free of wrinkles or sun damage or smile lines — until such time arises that we must be awake (to do very specific things, like marry the type of guy who kisses unconscious women).
Recently, I’m told by all kinds of algorithmic targeting that I can “fix” my wrinkles by deadening the muscles in my face — by putting my face to sleep, freezing it at this moment in my mid-ish thirties when the creases of my face are not yet too deep to reverse.
I think of Lily fretting over her wrinkles, those delicate folds in her skin. I think of her desperation for a sleep that never ends. And I think there is too much connection between those two things.
Then I think of her careful unfolding of her dresses and all the signs of life that emanate from their forms, briefly energizing her with the fact of their status as proof of her life, lived.
And I wonder about our cultural fixation on freezing time and holding still, on preserving youth and curating beauty. And I think of the lines in my face — like the folds in Lily’s dresses — as the evidence of my life lived, of time spent, of going out and being somewhere that is not a quiet chamber where I lay in wait for things to happen to me that will change my life.
And I wonder if anything at the Gala this year will challenge the notion of a sleeping beauty, or if it will nip and tuck complicated ideas into a tidy and well-constructed image of ageless beauty, an AI-driven fantasy for perpetuity.
And I also wonder what Blake Lively will wear. She always does it best.
I'm excited about this year's Met Gala too. While I imagine a fair number of attendees will ignore the theme (as they always do), I look forward to seeing how others will engage with it. I hadn't made the mental connection between the lifespan of a gown and the pursuit of eternal youth in women, but that's a truly sharp observation and I'll be keeping it in mind now.
Also, I happened to receive a copy of The Age of Innocence for my birthday this year... perhaps this is my sign from the universe to pick it up! 🖤
So psyched for the read along!