Peacock-feathered butterfly wings on the back of a perfectly spotlit gown. Blade Runner leather body suits. Kick-ass boots with red flames, a red-eyed skull and a gold TM logo: all this at the Thierry Mugler haute couture exhibition at the Musée des beaux-artes in Montreal.

I like ducking into art museums, finding a moment outside the crowded hours to have a quick look at the latest show, then going back if I find it interesting. A couple of weeks ago, that meant half running through the Mugler exhibition before playing the first game in the hockey tournament that had brought me to Quebec. 

I was with three teammates. We weren’t in our equipment but several black-painted rooms of mannequins were, staged in dresses from Mugler’s collections over the years, some of them very beautiful, many of them suggesting bondage. Titled Thierry Mugler Couturissime, the show features more than 150 garments the French designer created between 1997 and 2014. Shown with them are fashion photographs, some by masters, and a selection of Mugler’s sketches.

After lingering by the butterfly dress, I tried to photograph a witchy outfit without the glittery green claw-fingers setting off my flash. It was either Cruella de Ville, I thought, moving around it, or something from the touring Broadway show, Wicked. 

Maybe the word was kitsch. I felt underwhelmed by the exhibition, not least because it doesn’t feel sufficiently edited. There’s too much of a muchness, as my mother used to say. Room after room of the same thing, however different the fabric and design. All right, I get the point, I soon found myself thinking. I won’t be back.

Yet there was also this: The exhibition reverberated off a show I’d seen almost exactly a year earlier. We were in Nashville last April for another hockey tournament (I do do other things), and the artist and dancer Nick Cave’s work was on display at the Frist Centre of the Visual Arts. 

I loved it, and as I thought of the two shows, Mugler’s gowns and garments seemed to shrink even further in comparison. Why?

Nick Cave is a visual artist and dancer from Chicago who makes what he calls Soundsuits, elaborate constructions I wrote about last year. (The singer Nick Cave is another person entirely.) The Soundsuits are costumes that Cave says combine Mardi Gras with the Dogon traditions in Africa, drag culture and his own childhood memories. They’re imposing and elaborate, they have a sense of humour, and they rustle with raffia and brightly-painted tin toys. 

They rustle with intent. Cave, as a Black man and a gay man, has said that around the time of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, he felt so vulnerable that he picked up leaves in a park as if to hide under them from scrutiny and danger, which at that point felt like the same thing. 

The Soundsuits grew out of that moment, and they’ve become costumes that at once hide and express who Cave is. There’s a doubling down of meaning, a handy signifier of art, since art often means both this and its opposite, two ideas or observations that simultaneously conflict and harmonize. Cave’s Soundsuits have a lot to say. They’re aboutsomething.

Of course, that happens throughout the world of fashion, and in a sense, my complaint is with fashion itself. But the whole point of Thierry Mugler is that he takes fashion to extremes, and the exhibition highlights that. I found the photographs of the models and performers wearing his designs to be de-personalized and de-personalizing. There wasn’t much room for an individual inside the garments, and I felt Mugler used his models like dolls, not as partners in fashion. 

Room after room of the Mugler show instead made me see his elaborately-personal couture not as art but as imposition, which has more of an affinity with propaganda. Telling people what to be and do. Mugler didn’t make these high-concept garments to wear himself. Instead, his work involves imposing his own preoccupations on other people—which can get difficult when it’s a man imposing his picture of beauty and desirability on women, even if he’s a gay man. 

Even photographs of powerful women like Madonna wearing his gowns made me feel they were being used. They looked as if they were wearing uniforms, campy, glittered-up versions of the women’s habits in The Handmaid’s Tale, designed to make women live up to someone else’s standards. 

Of course, Madonna was also playing. High fashion revolves around adults playing dress-up–which can be heavily about hiding. Madonna or Beyoncé hide inside Mugler’s garments onstage like children hiding under bedspreads or blankets. You can’t see me, Mommy.There’s delight involved. There’s mischief. There’s fun.

Yet I don’t find hiding all that interesting. By definition, the act of hiding strips meaning from a person rather than expressing it.

That can be useful if you’re in danger. But it’s only revealing when you’re caught. 

I left the exhibition thinking about an article I’d read recently in the New York Times magazine about the drag artist and playwright Taylor Mac, written by Sasha Weiss. I’d bookmarked it, since in Montreal I wasn’t just playing hockey, I was also story editing a feature film about the drag culture. The article concentrates on a new play Mac is bring to Broadway, “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.” 

What I remembered from the article was a quote about the contrast between Mac’s low-key off-stage persona and the elaborate spectacles he creates when he’s on it.

“When I once made the mistake of calling his drag a ‘persona,’ or a character he plays,” Weiss writes, “he promptly corrected me: ‘I’m just exposing what I look like on the inside.’ Wearing jeans and a T-shirt is his way of hiding; drag is the opposite—it’s revealing, with tremendous confidence and panache, who he really is.”

I couldn’t help feeling that in Mugler’s case, there was confidence and panache, but little revelation. I mean, okay, he likes whips and leather. And?

Then it was time to dress so we could play hockey.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel, Mad Richard from ECW Press, is available here.