At first, it looks like any other Valentino bubble dress — so elegant, so easy on the eyes.
Only this one comes with built-in birth control.
Made of more than 1,200 hand-dyed condoms, Brazilian artist Adriana Bertini’s lavender concoction — call it haute contraceptive-couture — is among the more alluring aspects of “Rubbers,” the new exhibit at the Museum of Sex.
Part sobering, part salacious — and equal parts historical and hysterical — it explains, perhaps more vividly than sensitive folk can stomach, how one odd little object has played such a pivotal and controversial role in our lives.
Starting with the first, primitive attempts at barrier protection (linen sheets, fish bladders, gourds), we’re taken on a magical contraceptive tour, meeting along the way such entrepreneurs as Julius Schmid, a 19th-century sausage maker who found new uses for old skins.
Soon he was cranking out condoms in his 46th Street apartment that were sold, discreetly, in the city’s more daring pharmacies.
Gradually, skins yielded to man-made materials. Soon vulcanized rubber was meeting a lot more than the road.
As condoms evolved, so did their wrappers — from the Army-issued “Doughboys” to Marc Jacobs’ austere, black-and-white versions. Here, too, are crystal-encrusted carrying cases and, from Denmark, a condom-bearing cuckoo bird: Pull a switch on its box and a porcelain bird emerges with a wrapped rubber in its beak.
You can try your hand at the videogame “Slip It On” — Australia’s gift to sex education; giggle at the condom-inspired (fully functional) salt and pepper shakers, and ogle Japanese woodcuts of geishas opening condoms with their teeth. (“That’s so wrong,” sighs MoSex curator Sarah Forbes. “They can break!”)
“Rubbers” isn’t all fun and games. A sobering display on syphilis and other diseases condoms are designed to prevent unfurls against one wall, along with snippets from Army-training health films.
The exhibit is like a public-service announcement with benefits — not least of which are the 60 or so nicknames this little bit of latex has accrued over the years.
Zucchini beanies, anyone?
“Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom” is at the Museum of Sex, 233 Fifth Ave., at 27th Street; museumofsex.com. Visitors must be 18 or older.