The Oscars of fashion is the annual Vogue-sponsored red carpet fete for the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. But this year's show "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" happens to  run concurrently with an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum "American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection featuring a beautifully curated 85 masterpieces of couture. Along with Elsa Schiaparelli pieces like the surrealist plastic disk necklace crawling with toy insects ( below left) and elegant, here-and-now-looking pieces by Norman Norell (below right), the show has an interesting focus on the forties-a pivotal time in American fashion. Couture customers stranded stateside by Germans in Paris discovered a talented group of American women designers. Claire McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, Valentina (whose designs were worn in films by Garbo and Kathryn Hepburn),Carolyn Schnurer and Vera Maxwell had the business incentive and freedom to express a "national identity' with their designs. Enamored of Schiaparelli's surrealist sportswear like divided tennis skirts and one of the first (if not the first) pant suits they created clothes that broke with the formality and rigor of French fashion.