N.Y. Journal: Impractical beauty

The Lower East Side is the seamy, artsy part of New York, where I usually see men in horn-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans drinking gin and tonics while they listen to live music. This week, though, a friend from church invited me down to the Bridge Gallery for the closing event of an interior design display.

This was classier than most Lower East Side venues I'd been in. They served white wine in plastic champagne glasses and carbon-neutral cupcakes. Not carbohydrate-neutral cupcakes, as I thought at first, but cupcakes that leave no carbon footprint. (Who knew that cupcakes left a carbon footprint? Yet another reason to feel guilty for eating them.)

Christina Nakaoka, who has attended my friend's church fellowship group, designed the interior on display with Norman Roberts. They lit the gallery with chandeliers that hung from the ceiling almost to the floor-with a silky white fringe encasing the light. Fringe walls reached from the ceiling to the floor and curved around the room. They used magnets to design shelves that could stick to the wall. They hung one wall with mirrors that were part smoky, part clear.

But I was fascinated most by the paper gowns. Nakaoka saw the gowns in a shop window 15 years ago in France, but the shop was closed and she never met the designer, Mireille Etienne Brunel, until she called her up and asked if she would contribute to her exhibit. The designer listened, said she liked Nakaoka, and sent the gowns.

They were wedding gowns, meant to be worn once, and they looked like something a fairy bride would wear-filmy and light, except for the armor bodices that would have to be molded to your body. They looked like dew would melt them into a cloud and leave just the flowers that pinned them.

I tried to communicate the appeal to my sister when I got home. I loved the idea of something exquisite and expensive you would wear just once. She said a paper gown was ridiculous and asked all the questions that never even entered my brain: What if it rained? What if you spilled something on it?

A paper gown is a metaphor for beauty's fragility, I thought, and for its value apart from its practicality. Interior design is about beauty married to functionality, but the gowns' beauty was their impracticality. They were a reminder that beauty exists and has value for itself. Practicality, even in an interior design display, doesn't have to be the point of art.