Turn of the Century in a Skewed View

What has defined the last 20 years in fashion? Celebrity? Girls gone wild? Designer handbags? Visible lingerie? Platform shoes? Or none of the above, if you take a cerebral approach and trace the rise of minimalism, the Belgian and Japanese counterculture and the surviving splendor of haute couture. Fashion history is selective, and nothing proves it more than the second part of “The Idealized History of Fashion,” an exploration of how we have looked from the 1970s to today. The current exhibition, which is at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and covers 1990 to the present, is as much a failure as the first installment was a triumph. Maybe distance makes the eye grow sharper. While the curator Olivier Saillard distilled the essence of the 1970s and ’80s, bringing fresh information with forgotten videos of early Yves Saint Laurent shows, his vision of these more recent years falls flat. Where is the fashion tension that pitted Prada’s sly sensuality and prim uniforms against Gucci’s sexual grand slam? Just one single dress — although it is a stunning white column with a keyhole cutout at the hip — illustrates Tom Ford’s renaissance of Gucci in the 1990s. Helmut Lang has a fair showing, but not of the designer’s signature multi-straps. Whereas there might have been a compare-and-contrast involving Lang and Martin Margiela, both of whom ultimately left their fashion houses, they do not occupy the same space. Of Jil Sander, one of the most powerful forces in 1990s minimalism, there is nothing at all. But this uneven exhibition is not entirely the fault of Mr. Saillard, a fine fashion historian, who has recently been tapped to head up the Musée Galliera in Paris, and where, from that museum’s enormous archives, he will put together an exhibition this year on Madame Grès. Ironically, it is the awareness of the importance of heritage by the major houses that is making the situation so difficult for museums. Mr. Saillard was refused any loans from Gucci or Jil Sander. He borrowed the keyhole dress from a Spanish museum. And Gucci gives a simple reason for its reluctance to take part in the Paris show: Its archive is going on display in a dedicated Gucci museum that will open in Florence this year — and its current donations are to a Chinese university.