Tom Welling attends the Superheroes Fashion and Fantasy Night in NYC

Tom Welling was one of the SUPER people to attend the biggest fashion event of the year at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday night. Hosted by Julia Roberts, Giorgio Armani and George Clooney this star studded event included some favorites in the hero world as well.

As the event was co-chaired by the senior editor of Vogue- Tom was cued to attend as he is featured in this month’s HERO issue which has Gwyneth Paltrow in her IRON MAN garb on the cover. Gwyneth was out promoting her movie and did not make it though. See our earlier post for scans of Tom’s SUPER photoshoot in the May 2008 issue of Vogue. Here are 6 UHQ photos of Tom from the departures at the event- I will get the arrivals ones as soon as they are available! Tom Welling and Kate Bosworth ( Lois Lane from Superman Returns) represented the Superman franchise in style. Kate wore a lovely dress by her favorite designer Karl Lagerfeld. Also in attendance representing the Justice League was Lynda Carter who looked stunning as always as well as Batman: The Dark Knight’s Maggie Gyllenhaal and of course Katie Holmes from Batman: The Beginning. Photos of Kate, Maggie and Lynda are LQ. You can find Katie Holmes photos anywhere- as I consider her departure from the Batman franchise to be a good thing- I am not posting any here but you can see photos of the rest of our heroes at the event! For my complete gallery from the event click here.

The event is a huge annual who’s who in New York fashion and the glitterati of Hollywood but the special exhibition itself is all about how high fashion has been influenced by superhero icons of the last century.

From the Exhibition’s Website:

Since the first appearance of Superman in 1938, the superhero has exercised a powerful influence over our collective imagination, serving as avatars or conduits for our hopes, dreams, and desires. Until relatively recently, when they were co-opted by high art, superheroes have often been dismissed as frivolous and superficial, but their apparent triviality is the very thing that gives them the ability to address serious issues. Like Clark Kent’s nerdiness or Bruce Wayne’s playboy disaffection, the subterfuge frees superheroes to respond to and comment upon shifting attitudes toward self and society, toward identity and ideology.

Through the years, the superhero has been used to embody—through metaphor—our social and political realities. At the same time, it has been used to represent concepts reflective of sexuality and corporeality through idealized, objectified, and hyperbolic visualizations of the human body. Constantly redefined and reworked according to popular canons of beauty, superheroes embody the superlative.

Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.

The coffee table book from the event is available through the museum or if you are unable to attend, you can purchase it through Amazon.

Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy (Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications)

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