The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute followed up its smash exhibition “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” sponsored by Georgio Armani, with a one-day conference in the Sunday June 22nd. The conference, hosted by Dr. Peter Coogan, director of the Institute for Comics Studies and Xomba feature writer, brought together leading international and American scholars, comics artists and writers, costume designers, and a film producer to discuss the superhero costume.

According to Coogan in a Xomba exclusive, whose talk “E Pluribus Unitard: Notes Toward a Theory of Superhero Costuming" kicked off the day, the conference “was really a first. Very little has been written on the superhero costume, so this conference really pushed into new territory. And by bringing together artists like Alex Ross and John Cassaday with writers like DC Comics publisher Paul Levitz and the Iron Man movie concept designers Phil Saunders and Adi Granov we wanted to mix things up and really shake loose some new insights and new understanding of the role the costume plays in the superhero genre.” The organizers have done an amazing job of recruiting panelists. Besides the ones Coogan mentioned, Batman Begins executive producer Michael Uslan gave the keynote, Spider-Man writer and editor Danny Fingeroth and X-Men movie costume designer Gordon Smith participated on panels, and professors Stanford Carpenter of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Geoff Klock of Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Scott Bukatman of Stanford University rounded out the program.

The conference built on the success of the exhibition, curated by Andrew Bolton, which has seen more than 100,000 visitors since it opened May 7, and on the Costume Institute’s Gala this year. The Gala, which took place in the midst of the exhibit, was co-chaired by George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, and attended by a bevy of A-list Hollywood celebrities. Coogan said, “It’s amazing that many of the celebrities had a real familiarity with the material. I saw in a Vogue.TV piece on the Gala that André Benjamin of Outkast picked the X-Men’s Colossus as his favorite superhero—that shows he’s a fan and knows the comics.”

The Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy exhibition runs until September 1 and a catalog of the show, with an introduction by Micheal Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Kavalier and Clay, is for sale at the gift shop as are the books of many of the participants.

For a review of the artists panel and Michael Uslan’s talk, see: http://www.comicmix.com/news/2008/06/23/superheroes-fashion-and-fantasy-report-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art/

Interviews with Peter Coogan can be found at: http://www.comicbookbin.com/fashionandfantasy001.html, www.majorspoilers.com, and http://www.wizarduniverse.com/061708superherocostumeconference.html