‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ Review: Fashion That Stitches Together East and West

New York

The soft gleam of polished lacquer, the luminous glow of old porcelain, the bottomless black-glass calm of water under the moon. These are among the many reflective and mysterious surfaces that temper the bright splash and splendor of “China: Through the Looking Glass,” the new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That subtitle, of course, refers to the second of Lewis Carroll’s subversive children’s books, semantic adventures in which a young girl named Alice tumbles into a strange parallel universe, first through a rabbit hole and then through a mirror. Here, it is Western fashion designers of the 20th and 21st centuries who have done the tumbling. Beguiled by the intoxicating aesthetics of China, they’ve made their own adventure of the culture. This, too, has some sharp semantic edges.