Jacqueline Onassis, an early aficionado, wore a gown from McFadden’s “Greece, the Classical Period’’ collection in 1976. There’s a similar gown from that group on view here, an ivory-toned dress cut close to the body, with snug draping around the bodice and a flowing skirt. McFadden took her inspiration from Greek sculptors’ depictions of pleated robes and drapery. This exhibit begins at the dawn of Western civilization, referencing the closest thing to a 20th-century American goddess, and flies giddily around the world, through time and across cultures.
Museum exhibits often strictly pair like with like. Not this show. McFadden audaciously groups her own 1978 “Pendant (Archaic Ax),’’ a gold-dipped, hand-forged brass number that resembles an inverted mushroom, alongside a gold, fourth-century Colombian death mask and a pair of 17th-century Tibetan turquoise earrings. They come together perfectly: The gold forms gently echo one another, as do the dangling shapes of the pendant and the earrings.
This is how McFadden works within her own designs, gathering patterns and techniques from across the world and throughout history and dovetailing them in one startling garment. While many of her lines pay tribute to a particular culture - Renaissance Italy, Javanese, and Dynastic Chinese, to name a few - she ebulliently draws in other references, to marry East and West, to make a gown or a jacket original and contemporary.
In her “Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’’ collection named for the 19th-century artist who savored the female form, McFadden adorns graceful, French-inspired black velvet sheath dresses with a traditional, high-relief Indian embroidery technique known as Zardozi, once used to decorate the robes of Indian kings. Two of these hang near a 19th-century Spanish matador costume, also made of velvet and outfitted with gorgeous embroidery and beadwork. The matador who wore this, a small man, would have looked like a prince standing beside a woman in one of McFadden’s regal gowns.
