Women Dressing Women review: it felt like a screening of the Barbie movie

Metropolitan Museum of Art's survey of more than 70 female designers celebrates overlooked brilliance. It is long overdue - but still won me over

There weren't many men visiting Women Dressing Women, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit on female designers through modern history. It was as if all the ladies who attended had checked their boyfriends or husbands at the door, where they huddled together like dads outside a Forever 21 dressing room during back-to-school shopping season.

We were better off for it. It felt like a screening of the Barbie movie inside the Met's Costume Institute on an early afternoon last week. I saw people of various races, ages and body types let out collective shrieks at an original Chanel little black dress. As I stood in front of a sexy, see-through, white Tory Burch gown, I nodded emphatically when a woman turned to me and said, I need that for my wedding." Nearby, one twentysomething complimented another on her Telfar loafers. When two elderly women admired a Norma Kamali parachute dress, a young mother offered to take their photo in front of it.