Only in New York

“Manhattan is Modern again!” That's what the lamppost banners trumpeted for the reopening of The Museum of Modern Art last November, on MoMA's 75th anniversary.

And ever since, there has been ample evidence that Gotham tastemakers in all disciplines – particularly architecture, fashion and industrial design – have caught the fever. Which means the national rollout is not far behind.

You had to be in New York these last few months to catch the irony: that resurrecting the 20th Century's avant-garde in the 21st became an act of, well, conservatism.

Director Glenn D. Lowry explained MoMA's mission, as reflected in the redesign: “The desire to provide a detailed history of modern art structures almost everything [the musuem] does. And yet, since modern art is still unfolding and its history is still being written . . . The museum exists more as an evolving idea than as a treasure house.”

MoMA itself has gotten its latest makeover from Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In a humble departure from museum expansion trends, the architecture references the previous buildings and emphasizes the art. Taniguchi's command of interior volumes creates a variety of dramatic and delightfully unexpected building-framed vistas for viewing the works.

The in-house store, designed by Gluckman Mayner, seamlessly relates the Taniguchi macrostructure. Bonnie Mackay, MoMA's creative director of retail, says that in addition to the items that have been in the museum's permanent curatorial (and retail) collections for decades, the design shop every year expands its offerings to 200-odd new objects. She estimates that the retail collection represents nearly 100 different designers working in a simpatico MoMA idiom from all over the globe.

House of Chanel

At New York's other museum icon – The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel carries the current modernist standard. In terms of fashion, Chanel was very pro-evolution: appropriating fabrics like jersey and gypsy costumes into casual couture. She declared, “I want to be part of what is to come.” The very installation references not only the designer but her epoch: The white-box installations reference the Corbusier module.

Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel's artistic director for more than 20 years, clearly revels in flouting convention as much as she did, but he has thumbed his nose in a very different way than she did. She intended to liberate women with empowering clothes that enhanced active and truly rich lives, for walking, working, boating, riding, dancing. By the time Lagerfeld came to the helm, women were already quite liberated and certainly couldn't complain that their clothes held them back in life. So he has chosen to flout convention with more superficial and irreverent wit and sumptuous decadence.

Swept up in the gestalt, hipster stores like Club Monaco, French Connection, Anthropologie, Sean John, Mexx and H&M (which, in a stroke of high/low genius, commissioned a collection from Lagerfeld) are peddling classic preppie sportswear and partywear, strikingly similar to what people wore in last-century boarding school yearbooks or wedding albums. In fact, what's hot today makes the traditional-look purveyors – Brooks Brothers, Ralph Lauren, J. Crew – look prescient. Casual dress for men is officially out and suits are in. For women's fashion, there has been a renewed emphasis on pretty ladylikeness – sling-back kitten heels, tailored jackets with oversized sparkly broaches, below-the-knee full pleated skirts with grosgrain trim. Women don't look like they're going to work, but like they're actually going to to have fun.

Given our global socio-political moment, Modernism feels most welcome as its philosophical underpinnings – populism, rationality, practicality, elegance, the playful cross-

pollination of ideas in order to yield new optimistic possibilities – are in such dire short supply. Could this shift in taste be an implicit rejection of the homogenizing to the cheapest Wal-Mart denominator? Or is it just another calculated safe bet of regurgitating old faithfuls?

Me, I'm wholeheartedly in favor of a revival of the Modernist evolutionary trend, especially if it incorporates an ethical, sustainable, pro-humanity, pro-planet approach to production. It's true that in the hands of some (Soviet architecture or the Park Avenue International Style canyon), Modernism did not always realize its idealism successfully. But in the playful interpretations of Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, Charles Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, et al., it came to mean liveable individuality, innovation and hope for a world where man can coexist more happily with both man and nature, where the river would run through the house and mass-production didn't have to mean ugly.

Experience New York yourself. Attend StoreXpo in December.

Victoria Rowan is VM+SD's New York editor. Her tours through the shops, museums, windows, offices and streets of the city will be a regular feature of the magazine.