Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond 1474287107, 9781474287104

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FASHION CURATING

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FASHION CURATING Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond Edited by

ANNAMARI VÄNSKÄ AND HAZEL CLARK

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Annamari Vänskä and Hazel Clark, 2018 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2018 Annamari Vänskä and Hazel Clark have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : PB : ePDF : ePub:

978-1-4742-8710-4 978-1-4742-8709-8 978-1-4742-8711-1 978-1-4742-8712-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Liron Gilenberg Cover image: Performance for the book launch of Henrik Vibskov, published by Gestalten (Berlin, 2012) © Henrik Vibskov Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of figures vii List of plates xi List of contributors xiii Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: fashion curating in the museum and beyond

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Hazel Clark and Annamari Vänskä

SECTION ONE INSIDE THE MUSEUM

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Inside the museum—introduction

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Confronting fashion’s death drive: conservation, ghost labor, and the material turn within fashion curation

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Sarah Scaturro 2

Permanence and impermanence: curating Western textiles and fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum 39 Alexandra Palmer

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Unfamiliar places, local voices: four emerging curatorial narratives in Australia (2010–2016)

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Robyn Healy 4

Fashion curation at MoMu: digital challenges

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Kaat Debo

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CONTENTS

SECTION TWO THE INDEPENDENTS

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The independents—introduction

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Props and other attributes: fashion and exhibition-making Judith Clark

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Staging fashion in Somerset House, London

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Alistair O’Neill 7

Boutique—Where Art and Fashion Meet: curating as collaboration and cultural critique

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Annamari Vänskä 8

From lesbian and gay to queer: challenging the hegemony in collecting and exhibiting LGBT fashion and dress

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Shaun Cole 9

Intervening fashion: a case for feminist approaches to fashion curation

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Nathalie Khan

SECTION THREE BEYOND THE MUSEUM

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Beyond the museum—introduction

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10 Fashion museums and fashion exhibitions in Italy: new perspectives in Italian fashion studies

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Simona Segre Reinach 11 Beyond garments: reorienting the practice and discourse of fashion curating

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Marco Pecorari 12 Fashion curates art: Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton

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Peter Bengtsen 13 Artification and authenticity: museum exhibitions of luxury fashion brands in China

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Yuli Bai Index

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LIST OF FIGURES

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Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology (2016), Lower Level Gallery View: (Pleating), Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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NEW YORK —NOVEMBER 06: Chanel Mobile Art Exhibit at the Chanel Mobile Art event with XOJET Core Club at Rumsey Playfield, Central Park on November 6, 2008 in New York City. Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Chanel.

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Acne Studios, Berlin. Courtesy of Acne Studios.

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Beauty Curators, 6th Avenue, New York, December 2016. Photo: Hazel Clark.

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Conservator Laura Mina treating a robe à la française (1760s, Gift of Fédération de la Soirie, 1950 [50.168.2a, b]) in preparation for the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition at the Costume Institute. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Alexandra Barlow.

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Curator Jan Glier Reeder and Conservator Glenn Petersen discussing the restoration of trim on a House of Worth evening gown (ca. 1882, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of the Princess Viggo in accordance with the wishes of the Misses Hewitt, 1931 [2009.300.635a, b]) in preparation for the Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Sarah Scaturro.

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Conservator Glenn Petersen performing stereomicroscopy on Charles James iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown (1953, Gift of Elizabeth Fairall, 1953 [C.I.53.73]). The microscopic images were sent to the exhibition designers for Charles James: Beyond Fashion as potential content for the exhibition animations. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Won Ng.

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A robot mapping Charles James iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown (1953, Gift of Elizabeth Fairall, 1953 [C.I.53.73]) in the conservation laboratory in preparation for the Beyond Fashion: Charles James exhibition at the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Sarah Scaturro.

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Before treatment photography showing shredded darts on a 1917 Poiret coat. © The Museum at FIT. Photo: Nicole Bloomfield.

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1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

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2.1

LIST OF FIGURES

Opening installation in the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume [April 16, 2008]. The Screen Printing section. Vivienne Westwood toga-dress hand-screened printed with Henri Matisse’s Femmes et singes (Fall 1992) and Zandra Rhodes Zig-Zag Shell (1994) gown in front of a mid-century Canadian commercially screen printed furnishing textile, Cedar Canyon (1954) by Thor Hansen. With the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM .

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Plan of the permanent case and platform layout in the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume, ROM for BIG 2012. © ROM .

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Fashion Follows Form Designs for Sitting (June 21, 2014–January 25, 2015). Seated and standing trench coats next to late nineteenth-century bustle, cape and dolman in case. Photo: Brian Boyle, with the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. © ROM . Photo: Izzy Camilleri.

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¡Viva México! Clothing & Culture (May 9, 2015–May 23, 2016) featured indigenous and European influenced Mexican costume and textile from eighteenth century to present. © ROM . Photo: Alexandra Palmer.

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Installation Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced. Photo: Marino Kojdanovski © Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney 2016.

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A model displays a creation of Romance Was Born’s collection during Rosemount Australian Fashion Week in Sydney, April 30, 2009. Photo: Marianna Massey. © Getty Images.

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Installation view of Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids at NGV International October 17, 2014–April 12, 2015. © National Gallery of Victoria.

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Atrium of ModeNatie by architect Marie-Josée Van Hee. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Sonja Dewolf.

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Exhibition view of Goddess. The Classical Mode, MoMu, Antwerp, 2004. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Tim Stoops.

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Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back, MoMu, Antwerp, 2004. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Ronald Stoops.

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“Dresses Undressed” by Bart Hess, 2012.

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Fashion films with objects from the MoMu collection by Frederik Heyman, 2014.

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Installation view of “Human Sanctuary” by Daniel Sannwald, 2016. Photo: Dennis Ravays.

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MoMu’s interactive multi-touchscreen, inviting visitors to browse the collection, 2015. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: David Dos Santos.

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Gianfranco Ferré installed in the Medici Cappella dei Principi, Florence. Italy, 2016. Archivio della Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré.

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The Judgement of Paris, Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London, 2011. Photo: Judith Clark.

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2.2 2.3

2.4

3.1 3.2

3.3

4.1 4.2 4.3

4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2

LIST OF FIGURES

5.3 6.1

6.2 7.1

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7.3

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Spirit of Travel, La Galerie, Louis Vuitton, Asnieres, Paris, 2015. Photo: Judith Clark.

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Valentino: Master of Couture, 2012, Somerset House, installation view. Photo: Alistair O’Neill. © Valentino—Valentino is a registered trademark of The Valentino Fashion Group.

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Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!, 2013, Somerset House, installation view. Photo: Somerset House Trust.

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Paola Suhonen and Mikko Ijäs, from the installation “The Land of Seven Fairy Tales,” room no. 2, “Route 66.” Installation view, Helsinki, 2012. Photo: Kari Siltala. © Amos Anderson Art Museum.

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Tero Puha and Teemu Muurimäki, “Body Beautiful (Remix).” Installation view, Helsinki, 2012. Photo: Kari Siltala. © Amos Anderson Art Museum.

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Timo Wright, still-image from the video accompanying the dance piece “un-fit,” 2012. © Timo Wright.

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Heidi Lunabba and Tärähtäneet Ämmät, “Dresscode.” Installation view, Tokyo, 2014. Photo: Akihide Mishima, Courtesy of SPIRAL /Wacoal Art Center. 126

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Timo Rissanen and Salla Salin, “15 %.” Installation view with performer Janelle Abbott, New York, 2013. Photo: Timo Rissanen.

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Installation view with matohu and Kenmei Nagaoka, “Fukiyose” (foreground) and Katja Tukiainen and Samu-Jussi Koski, “Girl Evacuees” (background). Tokyo, 2014. Photo: Akihide Mishima, Courtesy of SPIRAL /Wacoal Art Center. 130

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Installation shot of Lesbian and Gay Style section in Streetstyle exhibition. With permission of Amy de la Haye.

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AIDS T-shirt display in A Queer History of Fashion at Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. With permission of Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.

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Anna Davin’s Mini Dress. With permission of Clare Rose and Anna Davin.

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Photograph of Anna Davin at a political protest. Permission: Anna Davin.

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Detail of display of Michelene Vandor’s knitted children’s jumper. Permission: Anna Davin.

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10.1 “The Quiet Revolution: American Gigolos and Androgynous Dandies.” Garments from the exhibition 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Simona Segre Reinach). Garments: Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini.

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10.2 “Cinderella,” white jute and cotton voile long dress, 1980s, 2000; cream velvet and satin multilayered collar, 2000; damask bandana. Monica Bolzoni Bianca e Blu. Storia e Narrazioni di una Moda Designer. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo). Photo: Michelangelo Battista, Vogue Italia, November 2006. 179

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LIST OF FIGURES

10.3 Iconic extra-long dresses and objects installation reproducing the mood of Monica Bolzoni’s atelier Bianca e Blu, Via De Amicis 53, Milan (1981–2009). Monica Bolzoni Bianca e Blu. Storia e Narrazioni di una Moda Designer. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013. Photo: Michelangelo Battista, Vogue Italia, November 2006. 180 11.1 Parfumerie du Parc, 2015–2016. Exhibition view, “The Temporary Fashion Museum,” Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Holland. Photo: © Johannes Schwartz.

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11.2 Models Never Talk, 2015. Performance view, “Models Never Talk,” Milk Studios, New York. Photo: Milk Studios. © Giovanni Giannoni.

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11.3 Imagining Chanel. An Interpretation of the V&A Archive, 2012. Performance view, “Imagining Chanel,” The Rocks, Sydney, 2012. Originally performed at the Fashion Space Gallery, London 2012, and then re-performed at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA ) Melbourne 2014. Photo: © Alex Davis.

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12.1 Louis Vuitton products featuring the brand’s classic gold-on-brown monogram pattern. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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12.2 Customers at Louis Vuitton store in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo on September 4, 2003. The woman on the right is posing with a bag featuring Takashi Murakami’s Eye Love Monogram design. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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13.1 Zhang Huan, “North Star II .” Courtesy of Zhang Huan.

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13.2 Yan Lei, “Marilyn Monroe wearing a Dior dress.” Courtesy of Yan Lei.

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LIST OF PLATES

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Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology (2016), Upper Level Gallery View: Embroidery Case Study, Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Andy Warhol’s legendary “Souper Dress” (1966/7). Made of paper. Photo: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI /AFP /Getty Images.

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“Dot Obsession” (2012). Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Louis Vuitton. Installation view, HAM —Helsinki Art Museum. © Ota Fine Arts and Louis Vuitton. Photo: © HAM /Maija Toivanen.

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Conservator Leanne Tonkin performing an anti-static treatment on Iris Van Herpen’s silicone feather “Bird Dress” (2015, Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2015 [2016.14]) in preparation for the Manus x Machina exhibition at the Costume Institute. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Laura Mina.

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Conservator Nicole Bloomfield working on the 1917 Poiret coat in preparation for Faking It: Originals, Copies, and Counterfeits exhibition at the Museum at FIT. © The Museum at FIT. Photo: Eileen Costa.

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A model wearing a reproduction of Charles James iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown at the press preview for the exhibition Charles James: Beyond Fashion. The reproduction was created using research gathered by the conservation team and was used to demonstrate how the body and garment interacted and moved. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Sarah Scaturro.

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Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries [January 25–October 2011] “Fashion and Interiors: Late 18th–21st centuries,” display with section overview text on the platform and didactic object labels on glass railing. With the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. © ROM .

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Installation of BIG (November 3, 2012–December 2013). An evening dress and cape by Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent, Fall 2004 in the case derives its design from the 18th century Chinese Emperor’s 12-sign semiformal silk dragon robe seen in the far wall case. Two Martin Margiela garments are on the open platform, an 18th century Indian for European market painted and printed palmapore and 1970s photo screened furnishing textile are opposite. With the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. © ROM .

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Installation view of Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids at NGV International October 17, 2014–April 12, 2015. © National Gallery of Victoria. xi

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LIST OF PLATES

10 Walter Van Beirendonck. Dream the World Awake, retrospective exhibition at MoMu, Antwerp, 2011. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Ronald Stoops. 11 “Walter’s Wild Knights,” installation by SHOW studio and Walter Van Beirendonck, MoMu, Antwerp, 2011. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Ronald Stoops. 12 Exhibition view of Game Changers. Reinventing the 20th century Silhouette. MoMu, Antwerp, 2016. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Stany Dederen. 13 Installation view: Banana, Chloé. Attitudes, Palais de Tokyo, 2012. Photo: Judith Clark. © Chloé. 14 Giorgio de Chirico, The Uncertainty of the Poet, 1913. Tate Modern, London. 15 Exhibition plinth based on the decorative tiling in Brasserie Lipp in Paris where early Chloé presentations were held. Chloé. Attitudes, Palais de Tokyo, 2012, Photo: Judith Clark © Chloé. 16 Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan advertising campaign, Autumn 1979 (unpublished). Guy Bourdin Estate. 17 Minna Parikka and Jani Leinonen, “Shoe Liberation Army.” Installation view, Helsinki, 2012. Photo: Kari Siltala. © Amos Anderson Art Museum. 18 Detail of Skinhead style worn by John G. Byrne from Streetstyle exhibition. Courtesy of Shaun Cole. 19 A Queer History of Fashion exhibition at Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. With permission of Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. 20 K8 Hardy, “Bra Dress,” Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles (2016). Courtesy of the artist K8 Hardy and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, LA /NY. Photo: Jeff McClane. 21 “Black and Graphics: New Chromatic and Ornamental Codes.” 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. Rimini. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Simona Segre Reinach). Garments: Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini. 22 “Versace Iconic Dress.” 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. Rimini. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Simona Segre Reinach). (Gianni Versace end of 1980s–early 1990s). Garments: Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini. 23 Fashion Archives 1995–2009, 2010 Exhibition view, Not in Fashion: Fashion and Photography in the 90s, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. Original posters, inkjet reprints, fashion publications, miniature mock-ups, CD s. Display includes Infinitable, Portant and Cadre [PM ]. Photo © M/M (Paris). 24 Zhan Wang, “The Beginning.” Courtesy of Zhan Wang.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Editors Hazel Clark is Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, and Research Chair of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, USA . Annamari Vänskä is Adjunct Professor of Fashion Research, Department of Design, Aalto University, Finland, and Visiting Professor, SCF —Shanghai International College of Fashion and Innovation, Donghua University, Shanghai, China.

Authors Yuli Bai is Lecturer at the Art Institute of Beijing Union University, China. Peter Bengtsen is Lecturer at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University, Sweden. Judith Clark is Professor of Fashion and Museology at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK . Shaun Cole is Associate Dean, Postgraduate Communities, at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK . Kaat Debo is Director of the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum, Belgium. Robyn Healy is Professor of Fashion and Textiles and the Head of School for the School of Fashion and Textiles at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Nathalie Khan is Associate Lecturer in Fashion History and Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, and the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK . Alistair O’Neill is Professor of Fashion History and Theory, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK . Alexandra Palmer is Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Marco Pecorari is Program Director of MA Fashion Studies at the Parsons Paris School of Art and Design, Paris, France. Sarah Scaturro is Head of the Fashion Conservation Laboratory at the Costume Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA . Simona Segre Reinach is Professor of Fashion Studies at Bologna University, Italy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors are grateful for the support, guidance and professionalism of colleagues at Bloomsbury while working on this book, and in particular Pari Thomson and Hannah Crump. We also want to thank the individuals and institutions who allowed us and our authors permission to use images, especially Henrik Vibskov for the cover image. Thanks to our friends and colleagues, especially Timo Rissanen who introduced us to each other. We also appreciate the contributions of scholars to the symposia on fashion curating held over the past years, many of whom have also written for this volume. Annamari Vänskä also wishes to thank Senior Curator Kaj Martin and Technician Kari Siltala from the Amos Anderson Museum in Helsinki and Curator Ikuko Kato from Wacoal/ Spiral Art Center in Tokyo for photographs in her chapter. The authors wish to extend the following thanks: Kaat Debo thanks MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum and MoMu Library (Birgit Ansoms); Shaun Cole thanks the Centre for Fashion Curation, the University of the Arts London, Zorian Clayton at the V&A Museum, and Martin Pel at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery; Alexandra Palmer thanks those who play the key and varied roles that support the Patricia Harris Gallery exhibition program at the Royal Ontario Museum; in particular Luciana Calvet and Domenica Sforza in Design, Scott Loane and Zak Rogers in New Media, and the departments of French, Exhibition Planning and Registration, as well as all textiles staff and curatorial colleagues museum wide; Sarah Scaturro thanks Harold Koda, Andrew Bolton, and Nicole Bloomfield. Alistair O’Neill thanks Central Saint Martins, Somerset House, the Guy Bourdin Estate and Art + Commerce. Marco Pecorari thanks M/M Paris, Johannes Schwartz and Giovanni Giannoni for photographs in his chapter.

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INTRODUCTION: FASHION CURATING IN THE MUSEUM AND BEYOND Hazel Clark and Annamari Vänskä Fashion curating brought us together; first with an exhibition in New York in fall 2013, discussed in Chapter 7, then with the symposium that followed it, and now as the coeditors of this anthology, which originated in part from the symposium. This extended project has enabled us to work with some of the most able and informed curators, writers and critics of fashion, who are active today in major museums around the world, independently, and outside of museums, who have contributed to the three sections of this book. What we present in this volume is fashion curating as a collaborative enquiry, involving people occupied in shared endeavors, practically and intellectually, not simply as isolated professionals, and not only working with precious objects. The anthology resulted from a perceived need to reference fashion’s contextual relationships to identity, performance, production, consumption and art, all of which sit at the heart of critical fashion curating, and have also been extended to the individual action of curating the self. In this Introduction we provide a sense of the more recent development of fashion curating, as practice and discourse, and as part of a broader “curatorial turn” (O’Neill, 2007). During recent times, especially in the last twenty years, curating has become a means not just of presenting fashion, but also of providing a critique of an increasingly complex, interesting, and pervasive part of the lives of greater numbers of people around the world. Fashion curating is by its very nature a critical practice. Nevertheless, today there are relatively few titles that consider and analyze fashion curating directly, rather than focusing on museum practices, on historical dress, or the work of seminal designers, curators and institutions (Anderson 2000; Taylor 2002, 2004; O’Neill 2008; Steele 2008; Clark and de la Haye 2014; Riegels Melchior 2014). Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond adds to what has been written by opening up new viewpoints. Our volume builds upon and draws from what exists and continues the discourse. It also changes its course by turning a critical eye on theories and methods of curating and the professionals involved in developing it as a cultural practice. The outcome is to provide an enhanced understanding of fashion and its place in the exhibition space and 1

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also elsewhere. For fashion, curating has evolved from making historically oriented exhibitions that arrange extant garments according to epoch and style, to encompass thoughtprovoking, performative, creative and interventionist strategies, presented in museums, commercial galleries, public spaces, retail environments and other venues (see Plate 1). From their distinct and knowledgeable perspectives, the authors in this anthology consider the aims, functions and practices of fashion, while problematizing curating as a professional activity and as an increasingly popular non-professional pursuit. We feature fashion curating as a multifaceted activity, which highlights an informed and collaborative practice, which has varied and interesting etymological and professional roots. We also feature it as a way of thinking, researching and analyzing fashion and culture critically and as a means of raising aesthetic, social, political and philosophical questions. Critical fashion curating is a way of producing knowledge which can visualize, display, and popularize fashion research in an accessible, even an “edutaining,” format while creating discourse. It is also a powerful way of attracting audiences within and outside of academia and engaging them in dialogues about how fashion interacts with ordinary as well as extraordinary contexts and experiences. For some, the first encounter with the word curate came via the Anglican Church, where the curate was a junior clergyman who assisted the parish priest. He was in effect an intermediary between church and congregation, with pastoral responsibility, named from the Medieval Latin curatus and from cura, referring to spiritual oversight. His status was subservient, as was made memorably evident in the humorous illustration by George du Maurier published in the British satirical magazine Punch (1895). A meek curate is shown having breakfast with his bishop, who observes, “‘I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones,’ to which the curate replies ‘Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”’1? As a result, the phrase, “the curate’s egg” was adopted into common parlance. Interestingly, a mere ten years later it was applied to fashion in a publication called Minister’s Gazette of Fashion, which noted how, “The past spring and summer season has seen much fluctuation. Like the curate’s egg, it has been excellent in parts.” The term curator shares the Latin roots of curate, but has been used more specifically to mean “care”, especially of museum objects, and for specific tasks including the guardian of a young person who is a minor (still extant in Scottish law). In the museum those entrusted with curatorial tasks would typically be highly informed experts who were not identified individually, to the public at least. This largely remains the case today, as made evident in Section One of this book “Inside the Museum.” So while experts remain, their more contemporary role in addressing fashion is greater than only interpreting objects for an ill-informed audience. In their volume Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971 (2014) Amy de la Haye and Judith Clark trace the history of the fashion exhibition. Although museums started collecting and displaying industrial objects in the nineteenth century, fashionable dress was not considered worthy of these activities before the Second World War (de la Haye, 2014: 11; see also Taylor, 2004: 106). This was partly due to the culturally low status of fashion, and partly to the masculine nature of the profession: most curators were male. With the war, men were called to military service which opened up possibilities for women to become senior level curators in museums. Valerie Steele (2008: 7–30), on the other hand has traced the beginnings of the fashion exhibition more specifically. She shows how museums dedicated to art, design, history and ethnography were all sites where fashion has been

INTRODUCTION

3

exhibited since the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 1852. Despite the longish history of fashion and dress in museums however, it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that fashion was regarded as worthy of its own museums (Steele, 2008: 9) and not dismissed as “vulgar commerciality and valueless, ephemeral, feminine style” (Taylor, 1998: 341). What is paradoxical is that the aversion to fashion mainly applied to the contemporary. Pre-industrial dress and the clothing worn by the elite in non-Western cultures were collected and exhibited (Steele, 2008: 9). “Dress,” with the implied sense of longevity and tradition, and “fashion,” with the implication of the transitory and modern, were treated differently. Now the reception has changed. The fashion exhibition has taken precedence, and certain institutions have gained scholarly and popular acclaim for their shows. The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for instance, regularly displays historical and contemporary garments, as in the spring 2016 exhibition Manus x Machina (see Figure x.1). Despite the existence of exhibitions of fashion and dress, the contemporary fashion curator only emerged in the 1950s when the V&A hired its first curator for dress, Madeleine Blumstein (de la Haye, 2014: 18). What was significant was the way in which Blumstein and her colleague Peter Thornton changed the display of garments: they used contemporary mannequins and aimed at creating “fashion stories” that reflected contemporary times. They also paired fashion with paintings and fashion plates in order to create context around the clothes (de la Haye, 2014: 20). But it was only in 1971 when a, now more familiar type of, fashion exhibition emerged. According to Amy de la Haye (2006: 129), the first major exhibition of fashion was the Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton at the V&A. It attracted more than 90,000 visitors and exhibited modern fashions from Great Britain and abroad. What was unique in the exhibition was that dresses collected from contemporary celebrities were on display and were afforded the same criteria as afforded to paintings and other artifacts: taste and quality (de la Haye, 2006: 130). Also, British Vogue was seminal in mediating the exhibition to the audience. It published an image-led preview of the exhibition, photographed historical dress on celebrities and argued that the exhibition displayed “milestones of fashion” (de la Haye, 2006: 132–133). Such connections also changed the role of the fashion curator away from someone who historically had been defined as a “custodian” who archived, catalogued and preserved works of art, which could include historical dress within the museum. The need to identify curation as a vital and growing practice, led to the verb “to curate” and the adjective “curatorial” entering the English language where once there was only a noun (Farquharson 2003, cited in O’Neill 2007). Writing, more specifically, of the modern art museum, Grunenberg (1999: 28) argued that “innovations in museum display have generally evolved out of developments in art itself.” Thus ten years after the arrival of modern art in America came the white cube: a simple gallery space, separated from the outside world, whose white walls were visible between the artwork. In this new space, the “new art” was more conceptual, and demanded interpretation, and the curator adopted the role of informed intermediary. As the art world changed dramatically in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, so too did curating. While museums struggled increasingly with public funding and declining visitor rates (Anderson 2000), the independent curator gained more visibility as the manager of exhibitions in and outside conventional institutions. Independent curators became more

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Figure x.1 Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology (2016), Lower Level Gallery View: (Pleating), Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

prominent from the 1990s onwards, a decade in the art world that has been defined as the “curator’s moment” (Brenson 1998) and as a “curatorial turn” (O’Neill 2007). The decade also produced the so-called star-curator who became the face and spokesperson of the exhibition and the primary mediator between the exhibition and the public. This phenomenon has lately been criticized for granting curators too much power, for putting the curator center-stage instead of the artist and the artworks, and for transforming the exhibition into the curator’s work of art (Vidokle 2010). It has also produced “uncurated, un-juried, allartists accepted” exhibitions (Kazalia 2014) which attempt to critique the curator’s power and display a more democratic view of art and artists. Paradoxically such exhibitions end up undermining the role of curating as an important tool for mediating critical thinking, social engagement and cultural analysis as it is presented in this anthology. We address the

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rise of the curator as having transformed the practice positively and having widened understanding of what an exhibition or a curatorial project can mean. One of the criticized star-curators, but also arguably the most influential and prolific art curator of these times is Hans Ulrich Obrist (Balzer 2015). At the time of writing, he has curated over 250 art exhibitions internationally, expanding the field by simultaneously utilizing a range of platforms, including books, periodicals, conferences, conversations, as well as blogs and digital means to share his perspectives. Despite the range and sophistication of his work, Obrist defines the act of curating at its most basic as “simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other . . . to allow different elements to touch” (Obrist, 2014: 1). While the trajectory for the development of fashion curation has been somewhat different in origins, content and aims from what took place in art museums, it was not entirely so. Especially since the 1990s, fashion curation has also developed in response to changes in the museum sector (Anderson, 2000), in the industry (Melchior, 2014) and in the study of fashion. Fashion scholar, historian and curator, Christopher Breward, charted such developments; writing in 2008 of his own experiences in a special issue of the academic journal Fashion Theory, titled “Exhibitionism,” he noted the professional and intellectual changes between the museum and the academy in the previous ten years (Breward, 2008). One of the major and important professional distinctions that Breward witnessed and which we also highlight in this book is that of exhibition collaborations between those with distinct and complementary expertise, in terms of academic and curatorial approaches. Yet this is a relatively recent development, marked also perhaps by the fact that in the same year, 2008, Alistair O’Neill, one of the contributors to this book, edited a special issue of Fashion Theory on the subject of Fashion Curation. In that issue N.J. Stevenson wrote of the development of “The Fashion Retrospective” citing The World of Balenciaga, staged at the Costume Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1973 and curated by Diana Vreeland, as a pivotal moment, giving a fashion designer the accord formerly held for great artists (Stevenson 2008, 221–222). While the contemporary curatorial profession in the art world emerged in the 1990s along with the development of biennials and more particular art venues, the fashion curator appeared earlier, in the 1970s, with the contemporary fashion exhibition. One of its figureheads was Diana Vreeland, who helped identify the fashion curator as central to the interpretation of fashion and dress history and the creation of narratives about fashion and its culture for audiences. Previously, those working as fashion curators were more like anonymous labourers who worked behind the scenes in museums, took care of the dress collections and created exhibitions that reflected the nature of the collection. In contrast, a new type of fashion curator emerged to become an identifiable person associated more directly with particular exhibitions. Diana Vreeland is an example par excellence: she created fashion exhibitions that were dictated solely by her personal vision. In this sense, the notion of the “curatorial turn” (O’Neill 2007) and the “curator’s moment” (Brenson 1998) identified in art curation in the 1990s, had already happened in fashion curation two decades before. Vreeland insisted that the curator was not merely a mediator of fashion, but a central figure. Mrs Vreeland was not trained in curation; her background was in fashion journalism. She had been a noted columnist at Harper’s Bazaar and the editor-in-chief of American Vogue

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(1962–1971) before becoming a special consultant and a curator at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971. Vreeland’s exhibitions were exaggerated theatrical and dramatic spectacles, open to historical interpretation and flexible in attention to the symbolic meanings of dress. Instead, they aimed at speaking about the “now” (Steele, 2008: 10–11) and in doing so brought a new, and for many a controversial, approach to exhibiting fashion (Silverman 1986). A prime example is Vreeland’s designer-monograph show that succeeded Balenciaga: Twenty-five years of Saint Laurent (1983–1984). It proved especially controversial, not only in being devoted to a single designer, but to one who, unlike Balenciaga, was very much alive and active. Differing opinions apart, a line had certainly been crossed with this exhibition, but it did not prevent even greater criticism nearly twenty years later when a retrospective of the work of Giorgio Armani was staged in 2000–2001 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, which travelled to venues including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Guggenheim, Bilbao (www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/giorgio-armani–2). Rumours that the exhibition had followed a substantial gift by the company to the Guggenheim added to the critique. Writing in the UK , The Observer design critic Deyan Sudjic condemned this apparent blurring of commerce and culture in the art museum, stating that fashion was both “not art” and “parasitic” (Sudjic, 2001). Yet the curatorial pedigree of the show was stellar—although, as John Potvin (2012: 55) has noted, the curators’ names were not actually publicized at the time. The exhibition was a collaboration between famed Italian art curator Germano Celant and Harold Koda (later to become chief curator at the Costume Institute), with the inspired addition of design by avant-garde stage designer Robert Wilson. In The New York Times, art critic Herbert Muschamp, never one to heap praise for its own sake, criticized the blurring of commerce and culture, while also noting “That there has never been a fixed order between cultural institutions and private enterprise,” he described the Armani tableaux as “awesome” (Muschamp, 2000). Like it or hate it, the Armani show was also prescient in acknowledging the blurring between high art and mass culture, at a moment when, in the words of Harold Koda, “The [fashion] business becomes part of the process in a post-Warholian way where business becomes art” (Fowler, 2000). In terms of display practices, Vreeland set many of the standards still in use in fashion exhibitions by mixing clothing with all kinds of props from elephants to scent. She used them to style the clothes, rather than necessarily to give them historical or cultural context. While these imaginary narratives had evident problems, Vreeland’s importance is that she eradicated the “waxwork museum-look of corpses under glass” (Dwight cited in Steele, 2008: 12). In doing so she was able to revolutionize the display practices of fashion—and in the process she also attracted large audiences to her exhibitions. In many ways, fashion curatorial display practices still follow in the footsteps of Diana Vreeland. One example is the exhibitions staged at the ModeMuseum or MoMu in Antwerp which has become internationally known for its avant-gardist displays while still respecting history and fact. Their shows demonstrate how the aim of the contemporary fashion exhibition is clearly two-fold: to educate audiences about fashion, but also to provide them with the possibility to “drown themselves in beauty” as Diana Vreeland (Newhouse, 2006 cited in Steele, 2008: 11) put it. As part of this changing trajectory, it should be noted how increasing numbers of fine artists have also engaged with fashion. The relationship between artists and fashion is not

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new, but rather infused modernity in the twentieth century. It took the form of now famous collaborations, such as between the designer Paul Poiret and the artist Raoul Dufy, or between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali. The Surrealists had a particular fascination with fashion objects and especially with the mannequin. At the International Surrealist Exhibition held in Paris in 1938, visitors entered along a corridor where fashion house mannequins had been “curated” to be standing on an imaginary Paris street, and dressed by Surrealist artists. Fashionable clothing played a greater part in art as Pop art referenced the everyday and mass-produced clothing, with the likes of Andy Warhol’s paper “The Souper Dress” (1966–1967) (see Plate 2). Simultaneously, art moved from the gallery wall and plinth into installations, including pieces such as Joseph Beuys’ “Felt Suit” (1970); a two-piece outfit comprising a jacket and a pair of trousers made from coarse grey felt. While the paper dress was a throwaway, Beuys’ suit—or “social sculpture” as it was also called—represented his notion that everyone could be an artist. After 1970, according to an exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London in 2002, art was “seduced” by fashion (Townsend 2002) leading to more innovative and elaborative collaborations—and curation. Fashion and art have remained intertwined. Many famous designers such as Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Lang and Hussein Chalayan have started to make art. Likewise, contemporary artists have created clothes not as wearable objects, but as powerful conveyors of concepts that have referenced the likes of the body, identity, gender and global politics. In the 2010s the merging of art and fashion appeared to have reached another moment of transition, maybe even a kind of peak. In 2012 the shop windows of the fashion department store Selfridges in London, for example, were transformed with the appearance of life-sized and miniature mannequin dolls modeled after the world-famous Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Wearing red gowns patterned with Kusama’s signature white polka dots, the mannequin dolls were surrounded by Louis Vuitton handbags in different sizes and colors, similarly printed. In 2016, this window display became an art installation that was included in the artist’s solo exhibition In Infinity (October 7, 2016– January 22, 2017) at the Helsinki Art Museum (see Plate 3). At the same time as the window display at Selfridges, the London-based Saatchi Gallery exhibited another show merging fashion with art. This was a travelling exhibition entitled The Little Black Jacket, dedicated to Chanel’s signature garment, co-organized by the designer Karl Lagerfeld and former Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. The exhibition featured over a hundred, mostly black-and-white photographic portraits of Chanel’s models and other known celebrities, each interpreting the jacket to reflect their own personal style. The brand’s involvement in curation was not unprecedented. This exhibition was preceded by an altogether more ambitious Chanel collaboration a few years earlier. Described as “Art and Commerce Canoodling” (Ouroussoff, 2008) when it appeared in New York’s Central Park in the autumn of 2008, the Chanel Mobile Art pavilion was something of a pinnacle of curating fashion, art and the luxury brand. Initiated by Karl Lagerfeld, in a temporary structure designed by the architect Zaha Hadid (see Figure x.2), the project displayed commissioned artworks which referenced Chanel’s classic 2.55 quilted chain strap handbag. New York was the third stop, after Hong Kong and Tokyo, on what was intended to be a world tour. The visitor experience was completely curated. A preciousness and exclusivity was established by the free tickets having to be booked online, or by waiting in

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Figure x.2 NEW YORK —NOVEMBER 06: Chanel Mobile Art Exhibit at the Chanel Mobile Art event with XOJET Core Club at Rumsey Playfield, Central Park on November 6, 2008 in New York City. Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Chanel.

line in the park on chilly autumn days for any available spaces. Once inside, visitors were divested of personal items and fitted with MP 3 players from which the sultry voice of French actress Jeanne Moreau guided their “personal journey.” There was no question of who was in control. The brand was skilfully curating the visitors’ experience, the art works themselves, and the consumer connection by also referencing the project in the Chanel stores in the city. As The New York Times journalist Nicolai Ouroussoff commented “It’s not just that New York and much of the rest of the world are preoccupied by economic turmoil, although the timing could hardly be worse. It’s that the pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick. Surveying its selfimportant exhibits, you can’t help but hope that the era of exploiting the so-called intersection of architecture, art and fashion is finally over” (Ouroussoff 2008). His words proved prescient. The pavilion did not continue its planned tour after New York; the world economic turmoil to which he referred, served as the demise of the project, which nevertheless marked yet another watershed in fashion curating. In the twenty-first century in particular, the curation of fashion underwent a tremendous cultural shift. Haute couture exhibitions featuring houses and designers including Dior, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, Hermès, and Jean-Paul Gaultier produced spectacular globetrotting exhibitions displayed in major art museums around the world. These exhibitions merge art and commerce and also reflect fashion’s acknowledgement within the wider framework of the arts. Simultaneously fashion is playing a more significant role in culture, commerce, everyday life and entertainment. Many fashion boutiques are being described as “curated” and some include artwork (often in reproduction) in their interiors. This can serve to further to blur boundaries between fashion curating as a critical

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Figure x.3 Acne Studios, Berlin. Courtesy of Acne Studios.

means of producing knowledge and as a means of personal branding and managing consumption with a meticulously pre-selected array of commodities. In fact, a fervent critic of curation—or “curationism” (another neologism)—David Balzer (2015: 111) has noted that people who work in fashion probably curate every day: “As a model scout, as a retail worker [. . .]. In fashion, the role of stylist has emerged as a prominent curationist profession. [. . .] Stylists are in true curatorial mode, collaborators, liaising with photographers, editors, designers and the model to determine which looks work best.” In the commercial world, the term curator has come to designate someone who pulls together, sifts through and selects to create some sort of sense, be it for a fashion store, at a public event, or on a website. Already in 2004 for instance, the website Trendwatching. com referenced “curated consumption” and a “new breed of curators” who cater for the needs of the new “spoilt-for-choice, switched-on, wired-to-the-teeth” consumer who is ever more demanding and knowledgeable about what they consume and how.2 The rise of social media has enabled anyone to share their opinions, to select and present, or curate, a scenario, and thereby to function as an expert. In these new contexts, the curator is no longer the custodian of museum objects. On the contrary, s/he can even be a self-taught amateur who edits and pre-selects for others to buy, to experience, to wear, to read, to eat, to listen to . . . the list goes on. This suggests that fashion in particular has become hard currency for curating. It is a means of making value for fashionable commodities through meticulous selection and arrangement in boutiques and on shop floors (see Figure x.3).

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This type of curating is not situated in the confines of museums or galleries—on the contrary, it occurs in similar places to which art has moved from the white cube: department stores, boutiques, and online shops. In these contexts curating does not necessarily have anything to do with the traditional meanings of the word. Rather, here it is used as an effective tool for creating an offering for consumption. Here curating is intended to give more value to shopping. It aims to transform the act of consuming into a work of art. The term “curate” and its variants has clearly come to be utilized to imply a value added, to create a sense of items having been carefully and even exclusively selected by an authority for the purpose of consumption. For instance, the “Beauty Curators” spotted downtown on Sixth Avenue in New York early in 2017, was belied by the fact that it was actually offering cheap cosmetics, as “Stealin Deals” (see Figure x.4). It was also evidence that “curators” provided status in the public domain, while at the same time that the professional connotations of the word had been completely eroded. Yet it reinforced an evident desire for the curator as expert to intervene and provide standing, somewhat ironically when elsewhere expertise was seeming to be of lesser significance. Maybe what is of greater importance here is how curating continues to fulfill the need for selectivity in an increasingly complex world, the world of fashion in particular. Curating has also moved into more intangible realms, away from objects per se, to include people branding as evidenced by an expansion in the number of books devoted to personal life management, or “life curating.” One, promises that it will inform how to “learn how to embrace your curating gifts to achieve your own brand of success” (Zaslofsky 2015). Another guidebook on life curating by Shannon Ables (2014) offers to help the reader to “curate the life of your dreams. . . no matter where you live, your income, or your relationship status.” Preceding the publication of these guidebooks, the actress and model Blake Lively, was reported to have established a new company, named “Life Curating” (Beusman 2013). Its main element was “about storytelling and about living a very one-of-a-kind, curated life, and how to achieve that.” While in the popular realm, curating came to be attached to activities as diverse as constructing a members only community, to hosting an event, or choosing guests for a child’s birthday party, the reasons were not necessarily trivial. Writing in 2015, journalist Steven Rosenbaum attributed “life curation” to the Western world having become more uncertain, more subject to constant change, as well as to too much connectivity, too many options, an over-abundance of choices (Rosenbaum 2015). In the personal as well as the professional domains, in amateur and skilled activities, the curator and the “curator” found a role. Also, display practices became essential tools in the representation and dissemination of fashion knowledge through the exhibition-format and beyond it. While this is perhaps most palpable in museums, it is also evident in the presentation of garments in commercial settings and in the virtual world. The authors writing in this volume, themselves variously fashion curators, critics, scholars and teachers, discuss methods and practices of display, as well as analyzing how the fashion industry, luxury fashion brands and retailers make use of curatorial strategies in their own commercial ventures. While fashion curating is essentially a spatialized discourse, the authors in Section Three, “Beyond the Museum” underline it as critical practice and cultural analysis, which not only produces exhibitions for audiences to view but also engenders ways of thinking about and teaching fashion.

INTRODUCTION

Figure x.4 Beauty Curators, 6th Avenue, New York, December 2016. Photo: Hazel Clark.

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Fashion curation plays a critical role in managing and mediating aesthetic experience, framing cultural conditions in institutions and the fashion industry, and in constructing knowledge about fashion within academia. While “thinking” underpins critical fashion curation in fashion studies, it also references the emergence of more conceptual and intellectual approaches to fashion design. The move towards more conceptual fashion has been recognized as beginning in the 1980s, in particular with the designs of the “big three” Japanese designers, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, and Yohji Yamamoto, and as continuing into the 1990s with the work of the “Antwerp Six” fashion designers, and Martin Margiela (Clark 2012). This shift coincided simultaneously with a focus on fashion in popular culture, with the then new and avant-garde fashion magazines such as iD, Dazed and Confused, and The Face—a history that is currently continuing in the fashion magazine A Magazine Curated By. The latter claims to be a fashion magazine that “explores the universe of a chosen fashion designer” in each issue by inviting “a guest curator—an international fashion designer, group or house—to develop innovative, personalized content to express their aesthetic and cultural values.”3 As this statement clearly indicates, fashion curating is constantly transforming at the border between art and commerce. Conceptual fashion and fashion media are vehicles for mediating ideas, rather than representations of fashion as a commodity. This parallels the emergence of Fashion Studies in the academy, where traditional disciplinary boundaries were expanding to embrace diverse approaches; under the influence of the new art history, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies and other developing fields. The emergence of the field of Fashion Studies in the 1990s embraced historical (Styles 1998) and contemporary practices, and scholars from diverse backgrounds began to study, write and teach about fashion as a critical discourse. In museums and beyond, fashion not just historic dress began to be curated in ways that veered away from the predictable chronological survey— typically of exclusive garments, to embrace more considered and thoughtful approaches (Steele 2008; Teunissen 2014). At the same time the museum curator recognized how they “had to compete with the latest retail emporiums” (Palmer 2008: 50). This was increasingly true as retail became subject to curation, as a way of managing an overwhelming array of consumer goods. As a result of these recent developments, different actors, from ordinary people living their daily lives, to academic researchers and independent professionals to artists, designers, and luxury brands, have been made broadly familiar with curatorial approaches. Some have developed their interests by gaining degrees in art curation, as the number of courses and programs has increased in recent years. Fashion curating has been similarly embraced by the academy. In the 2000s, MA -level fashion curation programs started to emerge. The first was the MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion, the University of the Arts, London, which remains an internationally-respected graduate program. Courses, on fashion curation are being taught elsewhere—for example on the MA in Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design, New York. Curating fashion is thus developing as a new academic and professional opportunity for the critical study of fashion. Many of those who are involved in curating fashion today rely on sets of skills and experiences, sometimes developed over many years, but also fuelled by a critical

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perspective—the desire to “speak” about and through fashion. The contributors to this volume come into this category. While they do not necessarily share the same educational and professional backgrounds and they work in many different parts of the world, they have in common the objective of acknowledging fashion curating as a key constituent of critical cultural analysis. Far from the beleaguered curate mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction, these are dynamic professionals who are revealing new ideas and ways of looking at and thinking about fashion. Together the book’s three sections: “From Inside the Museum,” “The Independents,” and “Beyond the Museum” analyze how fashion can be exhibited, experienced and understood in its various forms, and conceptualize fashion curating as an inquiry that produces knowledge and opens up possibilities, challenging what we already know and how we think about fashion. In this sense, the anthology uses the term critical in an evaluative sense: it turns its gaze to museum exhibitions, but also to commercial spaces, to the world and to the individual as well to curatorial practices and methods of display. We invited contributors to this volume who could write with authority on fashion curating as praxis. For “Inside the Museum” we sought perspectives from different geographic locations, amounting to four countries and three continents, provided from the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Scaturro), the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (Palmer), a selection of museums in Australia (Healy), and the ModeMuseum in Antwerp, Belgium (Debo). They also occupy different institutional positions, Palmer and Debo are full-time curators, although working in very different institutions, Scaturro is a conservator at the Costume Institute, and Healy is a former museum curator turned educator, who continues to curate. In their various ways they are working within conventional museum contexts, yet each brings original perspectives on the fashion object and exhibition. Another category of professional fashion curator has also emerged over the last twenty years—that of the freelance curator, who is employed by museums and galleries in particular, for specific exhibitions. Some of “the independents” bring perspectives on particular venues: Somerset House (O’Neill) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (Cole) in London. Others (J. Clark, and Vänskä) present projects that are more international, and reference more closely fashion and commerce. All demonstrate more specifically fashion curating as praxis, which is highlighted in Cole’s focus on collecting and exhibiting LGBT fashion and dress, and Khan’s case for feminist approaches to fashion curating. Moving “Beyond the Museum” demands consideration of the relationship between fashion as museum object, commodity and brand in particular. The greater and continuing international impact of that ongoing blurring is referenced particularly in the final two chapters of our book in Section Three “Beyond the Museum”. Bengtsen and Bai show how fashion curating reflects cultural and commercial relationships. In this section Segre Reinach, and Pecorari also demonstrate how curating has become a means to extend our knowledge of fashion, and no longer rests only on the exhibition of garments. Combined, the organization and contents of this book represent a new and an original point of departure for debates about the contemporary nature and presentation of fashion and demonstrates how curation can develop a discourse. Our anthology opens new

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avenues of thinking and means of responding in interesting and innovative ways that speak about fashion to its audiences. It highlights some of the challenges ahead, as curating continues to seek to interpret and transform the complex system of fashion into an engaged practice and a valid cultural critique.

Notes 1 “True Humility” by George du Maurier, originally published in Punch, November 9, 1895. 2 See http://trendwatching.com/trends/pdf/2004_08_curatedconsumption.pdf (accessed January 15, 2017). 3 See www.amagazinecuratedby.com/about/ (accessed June 29, 2017).

References Ables, S. (2014) Choosing the Simply Luxurious Life: A Modern Woman’s Guide, Shannon Ables: Simply Luxurious Publishing. Anderson, F. (2000) “Museums as Fashion Media,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London and New York: Routledge, 371–89. Balzer, D. (2015) Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. London: Pluto Press. Beusman, C. (2013) “Blake Lively Is Launching a ‘Life Curating’ Company, Whatever That Is,” Jezebel 9/25/13, http://jezebel.com/blake-lively-is-launching-a-life-curating-companywh-1389393597 (accessed August 31, 2016). Bengtsen, P. (2018) “Fashion Curates Art: Takashi Murakami for Louis Vutton,” in A Vänskä and H. Clark (eds), Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 199–212. Brenson, M. (1998) “The Curator’s Moment—Trends in the Field of International Contemporary Art Exhibitions,” Art Journal 57(4): 16–28. Breward, C. (2008) “Between the Museum and the Academy; Fashion Research and Its Constituencies,” Fashion Theory, 12(1): 83–94. Clark, H. (2012) “Conceptual Fashion,” in A. Geczy and V. Karaminas (eds), Fashion and Art, London and New York: Berg, 67–75. Clark, J. and de la Haye, A. (2014) Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. de la Haye, A. (2006) “Vogue and the V&A Vitrine,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 10(1/2): 127–51. de la Haye, A. (2014) “Exhibiting Fashion Before 1971,” in J. Clark and A. de la Haye (eds), Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 11–21. Ewin, T.A.M. and Ewin, J.V. (2016) “In Defence of the Curator: Maximising Museum Impact,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 31(4): 322–30. Farquharson, A. (2003) “I Curate, You Curate, We Curate,” Art Monthly, 270 (September): 7–10. Fowler, D. (2000) “The Shock of the Frocks: The Guggenheim is Mounting a Retrospective of Fashion by Giorgio Armani. But is it Art?” The Independent, UK , November 9, www.independent. co.uk/incoming/the-shock-of-the-frocks–625253.html (accessed August 29, 2016). Grunenberg, C. (1999) “The Modern Art Museum,” in E. Barker (ed.), Contemporary Cultures of Display. London and New Haven: Open University. Part 1: The Changing Museum, 27–49, in

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Benny Wed, “How the Role of the Curator has Changed since the 1960s,” www.academia. edu/9672194/How_the_role_of_the_curator_has_changed_since_the_1960s (accessed July 8, 2016). Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2001) “Giorgio Armani,” www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/giorgioarmani-2 (accessed August 31, 2016). Kazalia, M. (2014) “Trends in Uncurated Unjuried All-artists-accepted Art Exhibitions,” Art Business, October 9, 2014, https://artistmarketingresources.com/2014/10/09/trends-in-uncurated-un-juried-all-artists-accepted-art-exhibitions/ (accessed August 31, 2016). Lazzarato, M. (1996) “Immaterial Labour,” in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy, Paul Colilli and Ed Emory (trans), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 132–46. A Magazine Curated By, www.amagazinecuratedby.com (accessed August 31, 2016). Melchior, M.R. (2014) “Introduction: Understanding Fashion and Dress Museology,” in M.R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums. Theory and Practice, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury. Muschamp, H. (2000) “Giorgio Armani: Where Ego Sashays in Style,” The New York Times, October 20, www.nytimes.com/2000/10/20/arts/20MUSC .html (accessed August 29, 2016). Obrist, H.U. (2014) Ways of Curating, New York: Faber and Faber. O’Neill, A. (2008) “Fashion Curation: Special issue,” Fashion Theory, 12(2) June. O’Neill, P. (2007) “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in J. Rugg and M. Sedgwick (eds), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol, UK /Chicago, USA : Intellect, 13–28. Ouroussoff, N. (2008) “Art and Commerce Canoodling,” The New York Times, October 20, www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/arts/design/21zaha.html (accessed January 30, 2017). Palmer, A. (2008) “Untouchable: Creating Desire and Knowledge in Museum Costume and Textile Exhibitions,” Fashion Theory, 12(1): 31–64. Potvin, J. (2012) “Fashion and the Art Museum: When Giorgio Armani went to the Guggenheim,” Journal of Curatorial Studies, 1(1): Intellect, 47–63. Rosenbaum, S. (2015) “A Framework for Living the Curated Life,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/ stevenrosenbaum/2015/05/10/living-the-curated-life-a-framework/#3c3ca3f25c2a (accessed August 31, 2016). Silverman, D. (1986) Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America, New York: Pantheon Books. Steele, V. (2008) “Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 12(1): 7–30. Sudjic, D. (2001) “Is the Future of Art in Their Hands?” The Observer, October 14, www. theguardian.com/theobserver/2001/oct/14/2 (accessed August 29, 2016). Taylor, L. (2002) The Study of Dress History, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Taylor, L. (2004) Establishing Dress History, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Teunissen, J. (2014) “Understanding Fashion through the Museum,” in M.R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums Theory and Practice, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 33–45. Townsend, C. (2002) Raptures Art’s Seduction by Fashion, New York: Thames and Hudson. Trendwatching.com (2004) “CuratedConsumption,” http://trendwatching.com/trends/pdf/ 2004_08_curatedconsumption.pdf (accessed August 31, 2016). Vidokle, A. (2010) “Art Without Artists?” e-flux journal #16—May, www.e-flux.com/journal/ art-without-artists// (accessed August 31, 2016). Zaslofsky, J (2015) Experience Curating: How to Gain Focus, Increase Influence, and Simplify Your Life, United States: Personal Renaissance Press.

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INSIDE THE MUSEUM This section focuses on fashion curation inside museums. In the world of museums, curating fashion has fast become hard currency since the 1990s with radical changes in the museum sector (Anderson 2000: 372) and an “overall climate change” in museums as a result of new marketing strategies (Buckley and Clark 2016: 28) as well as and new academic research methodologies and approaches (Taylor 1998, 2002, 2004; Steele 1998). Although fashion does not have its own Louvre or Guggenheim, exhibitions on fashion are drawing huge numbers of visitors and fashion museums worldwide. Yet the closer we come to the present day, the more fashion exhibitions read like a fashion-week runway schedule. Monographic shows of contemporary fashion designers trot the globe and attract huge audiences. These names include for example Chanel, Hermes, Dior, Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier. Gaultier’s The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier. From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk which was co-organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Réunion des musées nationaux—Grand Palais and Maison Jean Paul Gaultier, was seen by over a million visitors between 2013–2015 (www.grandpalais.fr/en/event/jean-paul-gaultier). The retrospective exhibition on the late Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty, first seen by over 650,000 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, became the most visited exhibition with 493,043 visitors when it was displayed in London V&A Museum in 2015 (Press Association, 2015). In the Spring–Winter of 2012, visitors also queued to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris to see the Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs exhibition, which traced the history of the brand and its successor. The Art Newspaper Report on worldwide exhibition and museum attendance figures from 2015 clearly shows that fashion exhibitions draw the biggest visitor numbers (Art Newspaper Special Report 2016: X). The popularity of fashion has also altered the museum field and museums dedicated to exhibiting fashion have started to pop up in recent years alongside the more established Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT ) in New York, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris (the Palais 17

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Galliera), V&A London and the Fashion Museum Bath, the Costume Museum of Canada, and the Kyoto Costume Institute. Perhaps Europe’s most famous fashion museum is the ModeMuseum or MoMu in Antwerp, Belgium. There are also many museums that represent a single brand or a designer. The Basque region in Spain is no longer known only for the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. In the summer of 2011 the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum opened in Getaria, a small town 100 kilometers from Bilbao. The museum presents, as its name suggests, the famous fashion designer’s oeuvre. Other similar museums include, for example, the Christian Dior Museum and Garden in Granville, France, the Ferragamo Museum and Gucci Museum in Florence, Italy and Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. All contributors but one in this section work at these major institutions and therefore have a front-seat view of fashion curating in museums. Sarah Scaturro works as the Head of the Fashion Conservation Laboratory at the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her chapter “Confronting Fashion’s Death Drive: Conservation, Ghost Labor, and the Material Turn within Fashion Curation” discusses the integral role of fashion conservators in curation. While conservation has always manifested the curatorial vision through careful and sensitive object treatments and mounting, these recent exhibitions demanded the conservator’s eye by insisting on stories closely linking theory to materiality. Labeled “the material turn” within academia, the re-merging prominence of objects, materiality, and technical analyses in telling the curatorial narrative have thrust conservators into the role previously played by the curator-connoisseur. Using recent Costume Institute exhibitions as case studies, the role of conservator as storyteller will be used in exploring the new materialities demanded within fashion curation. The second chapter is by Alexandra Palmer, who is the Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. Her chapter “Permanence and Impermanence: Curating Western Textiles & Fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum” concentrates on the current rise in fashion studies and curation, along with the plethora of websites from Pintrest, eBay, or 1stdibs has enabled everyone to “curate,” with the result that old-fashioned curating within the museum is less and less understood. Palmer discusses how, within the context of fashions and textiles, the presentation and interpretation of disparate artifacts is complicated by the fact that the objects have no permanent form. This means that the role of the designer and the curator is often also a negotiation between fashion stylist, set decorator and historian. Through examples from the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum, Palmer explains the rationale for curatorial decisions about the displays that are the result of a collaboration between the design team of curators, textile conservator, technicians and designers. The third chapter in this section is by Robyn Healy, who is the Professor of Fashion and Textiles and the Head of School for the School of Fashion and Textiles at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Her chapter “Unfamiliar Places, Local Voices: Four Emerging Curatorial Narratives in Australia (2010–2017)” is a survey of Australian curatorial practices and the growth of fashion exhibitions in major art institutions, both locally curated and travelling international fashion exhibitions including exhibitions from V&A London, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum, and the archives of Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood and Valentino. Healy shows

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how these key institutions have contributed to building up an understanding and appreciation of fashion in Australia by curators at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Powerhouse Museum Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria. Healy’s chapter investigates these emergent curatorial practices for fashion in Australia. She reflects upon a series of fashion exhibitions sited in museums or related cultural venues that articulate diverse models of fashion representation to express design process, historic modes, patterns of consumption and circulation presented over the last ten years. It notes particular trends that have emerged and focuses specifically on the following curatorial approaches: mediation of design processes by curation of a designer’s archive; representation of historic modes; circulation of ideas, performative and poetic practices; collective forms of socializing, participatory practices and discursive production; how exhibitions are accompanied by associated activities from public forums, design workshops to dress-up events; and the role of the academy and practice-based research in curation. The last chapter in this section is by Kaat Debo, who is the director of the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum in Belgium. The city is best known for the “Antwerp Six” avantgardist fashion collective, whose members include Dries van Noten, Anne Demeulemeester and Walter van Beirendonck, among others. The success of the group has changed Antwerp from a city primarily known for its native artists Rembrandt and Rubens to a fashion city of note following the likes of Paris, London and New York. But, as the chapter shows, MoMu is also at the forefront of digitalization. Debo’s chapter “Fashion Curation at MoMu: Digital Challenges” shows how digital media can be used in bringing fashion out of the white museum walls into the “information runway.” In doing so, digitalization establishes the close and powerful resonances and influences between contemporary fashion curation, professional fashion design, and the museum audience. Drawing from the experiences at MoMu, Debo explains how fashion collections are digitalized and how digitalization enables museums to become interactive with their public. Digitalization enables museums to approach wider audiences through social media applications such as Facebook or Instagram. It also enables museums to spread information about designers outside the museum’s confines. Simultaneously, digitalization comes with a price: museums are faced with new challenges and ways of conduct. They need to think of ways of securing intellectual property rights with designers, and new ways of financing digitalization and museum practices. Tracing the history of the experimental exhibiting practices at the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum, this chapter presents and analyzes the development of fashion curation in parallel with the emergence of Antwerp as a fashion city since the 1990s. It also looks to the future; specifically to 2017, when MoMuMedia opens a digital curation platform, which will give young and upcoming designers a new and extended platform to show their work.

References Anderson, F. (2000) “Museums as Fashion Media,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church-Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, 371–89, New York: Routledge.

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Buckley, C. and Clark, H. (2016) “In Search of the Everyday: Museums, Collections and Representations of Fashion in London and New York,” in H. Jenns (ed.), Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices, 25–41, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury. Press Association (2015) “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is Most Popular Show in V&A’s History,” The Guardian 3 August 2015, available online: www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/ aug/03/alexander-mcqueen-show-savage-beauty-most-popular-victoria-and-albert-history (accessed September 2, 2016). Steele, V. (1998) “A Museum of Fashion is More Than a Clothes-Bag,” Fashion Theory, 2(4): 327–35. Taylor, L. (1998) “Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History,” Fashion Theory, 2(4): 337–58. Taylor, L. (2002) The Study of Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, L. (2004) Establishing Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

1 CONFRONTING FASHION’S DEATH DRIVE: CONSERVATION, GHOST LABOR, AND THE MATERIAL TURN WITHIN FASHION CURATION Sarah Scaturro Introduction In spring 2016, Andrew Bolton, the new Curator-in-Charge for the Costume Institute in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opened the exhibition Manus x Machina as an homage to the hand and machine continuum present throughout the fashion system. He used the exhibition’s focus on object connoisseurship to declare his positioning of the Costume Institute’s curatorial direction. “I really want Manus x Machina to be like a manifesto of where I would like to take the Costume Institute . . . it’s about trying to marry connoisseurship with cultural theory” (Porter 2016). In the exhibition, evidence gleaned from object analysis conducted by the curatorial and conservation teams refuted the dichotomy of hand or machine methods of fashion production, instead pointing to a continuum of technical opportunity for both haute couture and ready-to-wear designers. Bolton’s dexterous handling of materiality with theory showed that historical and contemporary fashion issues crystallize in meaningful ways when the two approaches are mediated through the curatorial act. The robust emergence of material culture studies over the past decades has helped diminish the divide between object and theory by pointing towards a middle path that unites cultural context with materiality. As the anthropologist Daniel Miller (2005) states, the fusing of object-based methodologies with social and cultural studies creates “an alloy from which can be forged a sharper instrument whose point can strike further towards these goals of 21

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understanding.” The uptake in scholarship privileging the agency of objects within a broader contextual framework is called “the material turn.” Fashion curators, in particular, have benefited from the material turn through the reaffirmation of their object-based scholarship that can flexibly and symbiotically fuse with disparate cultural approaches. As evidenced by its rising profile in the media and the emergence of new academic programs, books, and journals, fashion curation is an exciting and evolving discipline. However, the fashion curator is not alone in benefiting from the critical turn back to materiality. The fashion conservator has also been impacted, and is slowly beginning to emerge from behind the curator’s shadow as a collaborative professional who harnesses materiality to manifest the curator’s vision. Yet, digging deeper, the material turn finds the conservator also as a creative agent whose unique knowledge and skillset alters the perception and biography of objects, going so far as to even make objects on the brink of “death” viable for display yet again. The goal of this chapter is to investigate the active role conservation plays in the curation of fashion in order to encourage a fresh look at conservators as engaged collaborators in the exhibition-making process. I will briefly discuss fashion’s material turn before dissecting the reasons conservation is still an underanalyzed aspect in fashion curation—so much so that I use the term “ghost labor” to describe the invisibility of conservation. I will then touch on ways in which this unacknowledged labor can be uncovered, and even deployed to further push the curation of fashion forward. Lastly, I will excavate the deeply philosophical and theoretical issues of agency, temporality, and creative intent that conservation brings to the fore in the curation of fashion. Foremost I hope to answer the questions, how—and why—should curators care about the conservation of fashion? (see Plate 4).

The material turn and fashion Scholars have called the increase in object-focused methodological approaches within a variety of fields such as anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies the “the material turn.” This movement comes in response to an earlier “cultural turn” within the humanities and social sciences that abandoned descriptive empirical understanding for deeper critical inquiry into cultural phenomena. The revived interest in materiality seeks to build upon insights that cultural inquiry offers through recognizing that objects have agency. The material turn’s focus on the agency of objects is illustrated through approaches such as actor-network-theory, developed by Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law; entanglement theory and its emphasis on the intractable hold that objects have on humans (Hodder 2012 and 2015); and theories of new materialism espousing the vibrancy of matter that “becomes, rather than is” (Cooke and Frost, 2010; Hodder 2012: 209). For fashion, the material turn reconciles the fact that it has both material and immaterial properties (Riello 2011). The pendulous shift from object to theory and back again in the study of fashion has been richly discussed (see Styles 1998; Taylor 1998; Anderson 2000; Cummings 2004), most notably in the 1998 special methodological issue of Fashion Theory that elucidated the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary fashion scholarship,

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positioning object-based methods in opposition to theoretical approaches. In the issue, established fashion scholars like Lou Taylor and Valerie Steele reassessed the tenuous status of object-based research after the cultural turn, while John Styles (1998: 383, 387) bluntly tackled the “potent” and “intractable” tensions “between object-based and other modes of scholarship that have dogged the history of dress and fashion,” lamenting the fact that just when fashion was becoming a viable field of scholarship, the objectoriented work of fashion curators was being “called into question by those trumpeting the superiority of theory.” Yet, almost two decades later, the pendulum has swung again, with fashion curation experiencing phenomenal growth as an attractive postdisciplinary field that encourages both practice-based methodologies and critical cultural analysis. Curators today have the opportunity to revisit “older, established fashion history methodologies” (Taylor 2010), yet are free to borrow “more sophisticated analytical approaches” (Anderson 2000: 375–376) characteristic of their academic colleagues. Undoubtedly, the material turn and its emphasis on the life of fashion objects could be receptive to the possibilities that conservation might offer. Yet, paradoxically missing within fashion’s “material turn” and the emerging scholarship on fashion curation is an exploration into the very profession in charge of the preservation and rematerialization of fashion objects. If conservation is mentioned at all in contemporary texts on fashion curation, it is typically as a routine technical practice that sets limitations on curatorial practice, for example stipulating low light levels or no touching. Extremely limited research exists, both in theoretical fashion texts and technical conservation literature, that posits conservation as an integral role in the curation of the fashion. This is regrettable, as garments do not survive decades, even centuries, looking exhibition ready—there must be some conservation agent acting upon them to encourage and simulate the appearance of stasis so that they present as they did when they emerged in society. Furthermore, objects have their own reality that may or may not fit in with the curatorial narrative. It is here, in the liminality between actual and desired objecthood that conservators step in, negotiating object reality with curatorial ambition, all the while grounding their actions within an ethical framework. So who is this ghost laborer who conserves and rematerializes fashion? Why is their role overlooked? (see Figure 1.1)

Fashion conservation as ghost labor Conservation and curatorial practices actually overlap in many areas—both professions have a responsibility to preserve artifacts, both perform object-based research to prove their arguments, and both investigate the social and cultural meanings of objects to confirm the viability and ethical “soundness” of their respective approaches. In fact, the titles “conservator” and “curator” are themselves contentious, with converging meanings and uses by specialized and generalized audiences, a factor partially attributed to the changing nature of fashion curation itself (Marchetti 2014). Yet even with this overlap, fashion conservation still remains an underexplored area. An examination as to why points to a variety of causes, including hierarchical museological structures and the nature of fashion conservation itself.

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Figure 1.1 Conservator Laura Mina treating a robe à la française (1760s, Gift of Fédération de la Soirie, 1950 [50.168.2a, b]) in preparation for the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition at the Costume Institute. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Alexandra Barlow.

Fashion conservation within a museum is constrained by two primary factors: rigid hierarchies and a labor structure that is reliant on a temporary, part-time, and primarily female workforce. Within the typical museum, there are defined hierarchies privileging curatorial directives: curators are the keepers of collections and frontward-facing storytellers of fashion histories, and conservators, collections managers, and installers are the back-of-house laborers working with objects to manifest the curatorial vision. While some curators understand conservation practices, and some conservators have curated exhibitions, the roles within museums are typically set. The curator–conservator relationship usually has a linear and hierarchical structure. The curator initiates an action, such as selecting objects for exhibition or acquisition, while the conservator reacts to this through performing their own set of responses in support of the curator’s wishes. This supporting role within a stratified process (the example par excellence is the exhibition) means the conservator’s stories and opinions are untold to the public—or if told, then they are mediated through the curatorial voice. Yet underlying the curator–conservator relationship is the fact that curators need objects for their exhibitions, and it is the conservators—in conversation with the curators—who determine whether or not, and how, the desired objects can achieve this.

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Full-time, permanent, museum-based fashion conservators are difficult to find. Fashion conservation requires deep financial resources which many museums and galleries are unlikely to have on a continually funded basis. Frequently, museum-based conservators are tasked with handling multiple media, including textiles, costumes, or other types of objects, and thus might not have a close familiarity with fashion. In fact, throughout much of North America and Europe, fashion conservation at smaller institutions is outsourced to freelance conservators on a project basis. The prevalence of fashion conservators as an ad-hoc, on-demand, primarily female labor force, and the resultant customer service relationship between the curator and conservator further alienates conservation activities and knowledge (Brooks 2014: 4). Freelance conservators typically have limited stakeholding within the exhibition process and are resigned to producing work for hire. Although freelance conservators sometimes work independently by choice, their prevalence as an unorganized and disenfranchised part of the curatorial process undermines conservation authority within fashion exhibitions. The relationship between curators and conservators is complex, and relies on clear communication and mutual respect in order to remain productive. Historically, and even still today, curators who are keepers of collections direct in a broad sense what should and should not happen to objects. However, even since the 1980s, curatorial concerns have been raised about the increasing autonomy, and by extension authority, that conservators have over a work of art (“The Role of the Scholar-Curator in Conservation” 1998). Disagreement may occur between the curator who is technically responsible for the object and the conservator who is the agent acting in the best interests of the object. Sheila Landi (1992: 5), author of the foundational Textile Conservator’s Manual stresses, “This two-sided debate is very important. Although some conservators feel that to subject their decisions to arbitration by an outsider is a slur on their sense of responsibility, this is not really so. There are other considerations to be taken into account of which the conservator may know nothing.” Indeed, conservation ethics insist that conservators should not act as lone agents, but instead focus on open communication, mutual respect, and a collaborative spirit with their curatorial counterparts (ICOM -CC 1984; Ward 1986; Cullison and Donaldson 1987). Ideally, curators would approach their relationship with conservators in the same manner (see Figure 1.2). Another reason why fashion conservation remains unrecognized is its very nature as a complicated, interdisciplinary field that recognizes success when its presence is so imperceptible that only the artwork’s essence is recognizable. Conservation is a field that fluidly combines artistic techniques, scientific inquiry, physical examination, and art historical research, all framed within an ethical and philosophical structure. Thus it is unsurprising that fashion curators, scholars, and the public itself might have difficulty understanding and engaging with a discipline that presents barriers for those uncomfortable or unfamiliar with its scientific, artistic, and ethical practices. In fact, conservation’s variable nature and reliance on situational responses to ethical and practical questions create a system that values a multiplicity of approaches, of which none are de facto “right.” The conservator must balance curatorial wishes, object reality, available resources, and their own skill level to achieve a singular “best-case” result that is not likely to be replicated. The

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Figure 1.2 Curator Jan Glier Reeder and Conservator Glenn Petersen discussing the restoration of trim on a House of Worth evening gown (ca. 1882, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of the Princess Viggo in accordance with the wishes of the Misses Hewitt, 1931 [2009.300.635a, b]) in preparation for the Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Sarah Scaturro.

best-case conservation decision is often a complicated story to tell, and if told, might only tangentially support the curatorial point of view. Conservation writing, while technically precise, does little to convey the messy vitality of the conservation profession, and may at first glance seem of little use to the fashion curator. It is often opaquely technical, aimed towards others in the conservation community who can comfortably read texts combining chemistry, ethics, and art history. Conservators may use specialized jargon (much as academics rely on theoretical parlance) to consolidate a specific type of learning practiced by certain professionals, to the exclusion of others. Further compounding this may be a deliberate effort on the conservator’s part to relay information in a way that cannot easily be appropriated by other non-conservators. This reveals an anxiety conservators have “to protect their exclusive knowledge,” which unfortunately comes “at the expense of being interesting and at the risk of being sidelined” (Jones 2002). One reason behind the field’s general anxiety is the possible misappropriation or misinterpretation of conservation-derived technical data without an understanding or acknowledgment that this information is fundamentally original research conducted by the conservator.

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However, the most obvious reason why conservation is ghost labor is its primary goal to present the object as its best self. While this intention seems simple at first, from a practical standpoint it is reliant on a complicated decision-making process balancing ethics, aesthetics, and questions of artistic and curatorial intention, with the ultimate goal being that the conservator’s hand should not be seen once the object is put on display. These “concealed interventions” (Brooks 2008: 1137) mean that invisibility is fundamentally built into the conservation process, and could be the most significant explanation as to why conservation has played a limited role in the discourse surrounding the curation of fashion. If we are doing our job well, then you will notice nothing at all.

From background to foreground An example of the lack of recognition given to the fundamental role of conservation within fashion curation is illustrated through a recently published text called Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice (Melchior and Svensson 2014). While the title suggests a comprehensive overview of the practices and methodological approaches found in the museographic display and preservation of fashion, in fact, the book neglects to interrogate issues of conservation, collections care, or the ways in which physical interventions into objects shape the practice of exhibiting fashion. Instead, in a conjuring of the object versus theory debate, it establishes separate spheres for “dress” and “fashion” museologies with the former describing traditional, object-focused exhibition work and the latter phrase evoking fashion exhibitions as image-driven spectacles utilizing fashionable objects like props for display (Melchior 2014: 4). The description of fashion museology as a “temporary, frontstage-dominated practice” (11) disregards conservation as a constant, mediating factor in both the preservation (back-stage/dress museology) and presentation (front-stage/fashion museology) of fashion objects. Indeed, conservation is the ever present and vital link between these two spheres. Alexandra Palmer (2005: 44), the senior curator of fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum, recognizes the invisibility of conservation, stating, “It is museums that deal with the detritus of historic and contemporary clothing on a daily basis. This aspect of fashion is completely unheralded and silenced in fashion exhibitions.” Her proposal to address this absence would create an exhibition and publication to “expose the scientific aspect of collections and collections care; the preparation of artefacts for exhibiting and the work that goes into daily museum work and the reality of the complexity of artefacts within the museum setting.” Although yet to be realized, her exhibition proposal aims to foreground the complicated and time-consuming work required to “salvage” fragile and deteriorating objects. It would also acknowledge that the “before-and-after of conservators’ skills can indeed be staggering” (46). There are other ways that curators can engage with conservators. From a practical perspective, conservators have access to objects, and therefore, an obvious entry point is to utilize the conservator’s proximity to objects to gather evidence about methods of construction and the ways in which objects have been used, reused, and mediated. Such material propinquity may not be available to the fashion curator-scholar who might be

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selecting and researching objects based primarily on their digitized representations. In fact, digitization itself is an act of mediation that could actually discourage the study of physical objects (Pecorari 2012: 85). Even if a curator-scholar obtains access to an object, conducting technical research efficiently is not an innate talent and therefore is a skill that needs to be developed through consistent practice (Mida and Kim 2016). Practice and proximity are daily occurrences for the conservator, thus potentially making curatorialconservation collaboration enticing for curators seeking object-based information. If deployed, the conservator’s eye—that of a professional with years of practical and scientific training in order to understand the health and life of fashion objects—can facilitate curatorial inquiry, revealing evidence that shapes the curatorial argument. When encountering an object, the conservator searches for what is “wrong” or “right” with it, performing a methodical breakdown of construction techniques, material analyses, and condition. Furthermore, the conservator seeks to understand how its past life has affected its current state, and tries to anticipate further change that might occur through exhibition, storage, treatment, and natural aging. The utilization of conservator proximity and knowledge has yielded richer understandings of fashion as seen in the following short examples carried out in two New York City fashion conservation labs—the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum at FIT (MFIT ). Significantly, all of these examples show how conservators played active—and acknowledged—roles in the curatorial and scholarly process (see Figure 1.3). A quintessential early example of the conservator-scholar is Betty Kirke, a conservator at both the Costume Institute and MFIT during the 1970s and into the 90s who had a profound impact in fashion history through her object-focused research on the techniques and process of the designer Madeleine Vionnet. As Anne Bissonnette (2015) effectively argues, Kirke is the ideal role model of an object-based conservator-scholar utilizing artifactual evidence to reconstruct a couturiere’s working methods. Insightfully, Bissonnette (2015: 273) posits Betty Kirke’s knowledge gained through her interaction with objects and her resultant “two and three-dimensional assessments,” as an intellectual activity worthy of legal protection—or at least acknowledgment. Kirke’s “reverse-engineering” of Vionnet’s methods resulted in graphic work that “could easily be appropriated by others” (Bissonnette: 301). Positioned as a cautionary example, conservators are keenly aware that their object-based research can be appropriated, or worse, misinterpreted, since it is not universally obvious that technical information is actually intellectual property generated by the conservator who deserves due credit. This lack of recognition can leave conservators feeling “taken for granted” (Jones 2002), thus further reinforcing them as “ghost labor.” As a more satisfying example, the 2014 Costume Institute exhibition Charles James: Beyond Fashion, organized by Harold Koda, Curator-in-Charge, and Jan Glier Reeder, Brooklyn costume collection curator, explicated James’ techniques using animations, light projectors, and robots. The curators threaded together conservation-generated information gleaned from stereo and polarized light microscopy, 3D scanning, 360 photography, pattern-taking, and toile-making in order to illustrate James’ artistic genius. Beyond being tasked with providing these technical and material analyses, the conservation team had to develop methods to communicate this information in a digestible

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Figure 1.3 Conservator Glenn Petersen performing stereomicroscopy on Charles James iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown (1953, Gift of Elizabeth Fairall, 1953 [C.I.53.73]). The microscopic images were sent to the exhibition designers for Charles James: Beyond Fashion as potential content for the exhibition animations. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Won Ng.

format so that the creative design team Diller, Scofidio + Renfro could produce accurate animations (High 2014). In effect, the conservation team worked as de facto translators by easing access to and increasing appreciation for the complex design techniques of this seminal Anglo-American designer. Furthermore, conservators wrote an accompanying chapter in the exhibition catalogue about the inherent vice found in James’ sculptural ballgowns owing to his construction methods that pushed the limits of materials and altered the proprioception of the human body wearing his volumetric works (Scaturro and Petersen 2014). The conservation team also collaborated with a costume designer to reproduce the iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown to illustrate its specific sway and spatial presence when worn, further underscoring the ways in which James approached the relationship between body and garment (see Figure 1.4). A last example features a conservator at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Nicole Bloomfield, and her research and treatment of a rare Paul Poiret readyto-wear coat from 1917. Bloomfield reveals in a video available on the museum’s youtube channel how her research impacted her restoration of the coat, enabling it to play an integral role in MFIT ’s 2014–2015 exhibition Faking It: Originals, Copies and Counterfeits. A serendipitous find via a vintage dealer’s Instagram account, the coat was in poor

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Figure 1.4 A robot mapping Charles James iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown (1953, Gift of Elizabeth Fairall, 1953 [C.I.53.73]) in the conservation laboratory in preparation for the Beyond Fashion: Charles James exhibition at the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Sarah Scaturro.

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condition, with numerous alterations and weak areas. In performing background research, Bloomfield discovered examples of the coat in different colorways in two NYC museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and the Museum of the City of New York. Her visits to analyze the extant objects confirmed that MFIT ’s version was not only altered, but was a singular example of early ready-to-wear designer fashion. Throughout the video, Bloomfield traces her discovery path, culminating with the conservation treatment she carried out to revert the coat back to the designer’s original intention and to ensure object stability while on display. This example illustrates that conservators must also engage in art historical and socio-cultural investigations in order to best practice their craft, and also touches upon the important role of conservation in the art authentication process. In this instance, the conservator’s work enriched the curatorial narrative by materially and temporally contextualizing the rise of ready-to-wear as a way to combat cheaper forgeries of haute couture garments (see Plate 5).

“The intuitive approach” I must emphasize that the value of conservation is not only about generating information regarding objects, although this is the easiest entry point into understanding how conservators can positively shape curatorial activities. There is a more fundamental impact that conservators have—and that is, of course, on the very materiality of the fashion object that they change through the treatment act. The conservator embarks on a process that potentially impacts the object’s immaterial interpretation by altering its physicality. However, before investigating the effects that conservators have on the materiality of objects, we must first understand the “embodied” knowledge that conservation work demonstrates (Brooks 2014). Beyond merely performing a “technical fix” or “glorified housework,” (Brooks 2014: 4–5) conservators must use what may best be summed up as an “intuitive approach” (Kirke 1982) when interacting with an object. Betty Kirke coined this phrase when discussing how to counter the growing dominance of scientific thought on the conservation field in the 1980s, which attempted to place quantifiable results and precision on an arguably messy field with “problems of infinite variety, the solutions of which have no absolutes” (Ward 1986: 29). This approach relies on qualitative and quantitative validation of conservation intuition that can only be grounded in direct embodied experience and connoisseurship. To summarize Kirke (1982), “one has to become subject to the object.” This intuition is clearly demonstrated when listening to Nicole Bloomfield (2014) recount her research and treatment of the aforementioned Poiret evening coat. Throughout the video she states that some elements “didn’t look original to me,” that the coat “appeared to me that it was heavily altered for theater” and that it “felt very clumsy” and “just didn’t feel right,” “so I suspected” that the coat’s current manifestation was not the original form the designer intended. These unquantifiable statements could only be possible if Bloomfield understood early twentieth century fashion construction techniques, silhouettes, fabrics, and theater costume design and if she was familiar with the construction and quality of Poiret’s garments in particular. This type of embodied knowledge is critical for conservators

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Figure 1.5 Before treatment photography showing shredded darts on a 1917 Poiret coat. © The Museum at FIT. Photo: Nicole Bloomfield.

in understanding what exactly the object is in front of them, and how it might have changed over its life (see Figure 1.5). While of course this knowledge is not explicit to conservators, it relies on discernment of how materials behave under different construction techniques and over the passage of time to further understand the designer’s logic and creative choices. Perhaps the best way to get this information is to actually do the work oneself. This “testing of theory by reproducing historic techniques” (Arnold 2000) is not a new idea, but it has gained traction within the material turn as a viable way to excavate unwritten knowledge. For example, in a project and book called The First Book of Fashion, cultural historian Ulinka Rublack (2013) worked with costumer Jenny Tiramani to recreate ensembles from one of the first books of fashion plates from early modern Europe. In another instance, Columbia University supports a project directed by Pamela Smith called “Making and Knowing” which brings together a variety of scholars and professionals to recreate a sixteenth-century manuscript workshop. These experiential and experimental projects are pedagogical tools aimed at injecting a different type of embodied knowledge into academic areas that have abandoned serious inquiry into the material world. While academics might scoff at experimental archaeologists or even enthused reenactors, conservators realize that embedded bodily experience is a powerful guide when analyzing objects and performing treatments. As Betty Kirke succinctly summarized when explaining her mentor

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and Costume Institute Master Restorer Liz Lawrence’s approach to conservation “you must get into the mind of the designer” (Kirke 1982: 32).

The death drive of objects and the myth of neutrality For fashion conservation to be successful, objects must be rendered as just that—fashion. To achieve this goal, conservators are charged with intervening in the lives of objects to shift them towards some predetermined aesthetic and ethical ideal. Unlike textile conservation, which typically addresses fabric on a two-dimensional plane, privileging the textile above all else, fashion conservation must look to the overall three-dimensional form as related to both body and the fashionable ideal, striving to equally achieve a balance between conservation ethics and fashionable aestheticization (Scaturro and Fung, 2017). As Sheila Landi (1992: 5–6) acknowledges, the restoration of costume is “a field fraught with problems of both ethics and aesthetics.” If one were to measure conservation treatments along a spectrum that went from no intervention (preventive conservation) to high intervention (restoration), then some fashion conservation treatments might align more closely to restoration owing to the aestheticized mandate to present the objects as fashion. In order to more deeply understand what this means, we must look to the sticky problem of artistic intent, a nebulous concept that privileges the maker’s design as the ne plus ultra. Hanna Holling (2013) describes the conservator’s gesture as “seeking the authentic moment in an artwork trajectory.” This idea is ripe for debate with fashion— does “authentic” mean the moment a garment is conceived in the designer’s mind, created in the atelier, shown on the runway, purchased in a store, or worn on the street? How can curators and conservators reconcile the slippery nature of artistic intent, especially when they are dealing with objects whose authentic fashion moment is already gone? How do conservators recreate an authentic “aura” and how does this align with artistic intent? By its very nature, the temporal life of an object in a fashion exhibition is fundamentally discordant with the designer’s intent—it has already outlived its use as a fashion “thing,” and so now is being repurposed as a fashion “object” in support of the curator’s thesis. This movement between spheres is evocative of Igor Kopytoff’s (1986: 76) concept of the “cultural biography of things” wherein fashion garments have transitioned from being fashion commodities into singularized exhibition objects. This idea is also articulated by cultural sociologist, Fernando Dominguez Rubio (2016: 62), who describes the “relentlessness of things” that must inescapably transition into “objects” outlasting their original temporal intentions, thus creating a “divergence between what these things actually are and the kind of objects they are supposed to be.” This means that as fashion “things” become “objects,” they cease being fashion. Once musealization (Desvallées and Mairesse 2010) occurs, conservation protocols and ethics forbid the fashion object from ever residing again on the human body. The removal of the human element for preservation reasons has challenging impacts for the curation of fashion and yet, paradoxically, it is the

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conservators who must step in to renegotiate and rematerialize upon a surrogate body a moment in fashion which no longer—and can never again—exist (see Plate 6). There is another critical temporal discordance within the exhibiting of fashion: the difference in intention between curators and conservators. The curator wants the object now, looking a certain way, as a key ingredient to fulfill their exhibition thesis. The conservator works both to enable the object to play its prescribed role in the curator’s story, but they want even more for the object to outlast this one role, to instead give the object as useful a material life as possible. Conservation work can seem futile, almost fetishized, since the conservator never knows whether or not their efforts have had a lasting effect. Their intentions are fixed upon a distant future that will outlast their own lifetime. This, in some ways, is the intrinsic tension between conservators and curators. The exhibition curator is more concerned with the immediate result—how the past can be represented and accessed today as proof of their argument—while the conservator’s work is directly linked to the physical reality and longevity of the object—how past, present and future physical actions and reactions leave stratigraphic traces of evidence affecting the “usability” and translation of this “living” artifact. The relentless requirement to negotiate realities backwards, present, and forwards is a heavy yoke, dictating the conservator’s actions and intentions in ways which the curator may not realize. Objects have a death-drive that conservators seek to keep at bay in a never-ending system of reification (Holling 2016; Rubio 2016). Both objects and conservators are engaged in a perpetual process of becoming, with the object’s dematerialization altered through the conservator’s rematerialization. For conservators and curators, the moment an object is unexhibitable, it undergoes a type of death. Perhaps it is no longer able to relate fully to the human form, or has a devastating untreatable aesthetic issue that detracts from its fashionable ideal. In order to avoid this, the conservator turns to ever more aggressive, restorative, and creative interventions. These cumulative treatments ultimately create something other than the original, as each “subsequent intrusion moves the object farther from its original state” (Ward 1986: 20). At what point during which treatment does the object stop being its authentic self? The conservator reacts to the reality of the object that is ever changing. And while fundamentally, the conservator does do this based on information they have gleaned through their condition exam, technical analyses, curatorial consults, and art historical research, there comes a point when the object must be enacted upon by the conservator. At this moment, the conservator becomes the surrogate creator through performing the conservation action. The conservator is no longer the bystander, but a direct creator of the object’s future life. Poet Ben Lerner (2016) cogently explains the creative mandate of conservation: “In the absence of explicit and complete instruction—that is, most of the time—conservation is fundamentally an interpretive act.” This creative agency, and by extension, authority, means that conservation no longer consists of “the objective acts of an impartial conservator engaged in truth enforcing activity” (Laurenson 2006). Conservators make and remake objects through applying their craftsmanship, skill, taste, and sympathies modulated within an ethical framework in singularized and relative situations. As Philip Ward wrote in his seminal text The Nature of Conservation (1986) “despite the advances that scientific research has brought to restoration, it remains an art.”

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One way in which conservators attempt to reconcile the myth of neutrality is to bolster the stratigraphic material traces they leave in objects by creating an extraneous system of documentation intended to supplement the object in its future journeys. Premised on the hope that this proxy material will follow and perhaps even outlast the object itself, written, photographic, and illustrative documentation literally excavates layers of interventions and intentions. Documentation is the truth-imparting assurance that conservators need in order to permit them ethically to move forward and change the future of the object. Although the object might be physically changed, its former life has been captured and recorded so that—somehow—its original essence is retained. Although, yet again, creating documentation itself is a generative, non-neutral action, giving a semiotic and subjective dimension to any recoverable material past. Closely linked to this ambition of recovery is the realization that conservation acts are never fully “reversible,” rather the best that can be hoped for is “retreatability.” Through performing and documenting the conservation act, conservators aim to leave the object in such a state that it can be rematerialized again and again by future conservators.

Conclusion The material turn’s encouragement to critically unite materiality with cultural context has reaffirmed the object-based practices of fashion curators. However, left behind in the emerging discourse on fashion curation is an essential examination of the role conservation plays in the rematerializing of objects during the curatorial process. Conservation’s “ghost labor” goes unacknowledged for several reasons, including museological hierarchies and the complex interdisciplinary nature of conservation itself. Yet, I propose that fashion conservation—with its demand for ethical and aesthetic solutions carried out through practice, science, and theory—provides an engaged and promising frontier through which to explore and advance the curation of fashion. Clothing is fragile, and requires extraordinary physical efforts to preserve and present it as a fashionable moment in time. Conservation, although firmly embedded within the sensual world, hinges on deeply philosophical and theoretical issues of agency, temporality, and creative intent. The material turn invites a deeper look at the cultural and symbolic meaning of conservation and its never-ending quest to halt the death-drive of objects. As the decades, and soon centuries pass, the role of the conservator as the re-creator of fashion will become even more pertinent and important within the curatorial process.

References Anderson, Fiona (2000) “Museums as Fashion Media,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, 371–89, London: Routledge. Arnold, Janet (2000) “Make or Break: The Testing of Theory by Reproducing Historic Techniques,” in Mary M. Brooks (ed.), Textiles Revealed: Object Lessons in Historic Textile and Costume Research, 39–47, London: Archetype Publications.

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Bloomfield, Nicole (2014) “Poiret Coat—Conservation Treatment,” https://youtu.be/KfawrJ8HhkI (accessed June 19, 2016). Brooks, Mary M. (2008) “Talking to Ourselves: Why Do Conservators Find It So hard to Convince Others of the Significance of Conservation?” in Janet Bridgland (ed.), 15th Triennial Conference, New Delhi, September 22–26, 2008, ICOM Committee for Conservation: Preprints, Vol. 2, 1135–40, New Delhi: Allied Publications. Brooks, Mary M. (2014) “Sustaining Tacit and Embedded Knowledge in Textile Conservation and Textile and Dress Collections,” in The Textile Specialty Group Postprints, Vol. 24, May 2014, 1–10, San Francisco: American Institute for Conservation. Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Cullison, Bonnie Jo and Jean Donaldson (1987) “Conservators and Curators: A Cooperative Approach to Treatment Specifications,” in Library Trends, 36(1): 229–40, http://hdl.handle. net/2142/7511 (accessed June 30, 2016). Cumming, Valerie (2004) Understanding Fashion History, New York: Costume and Fashion Press. Desvallées, André and François Mairesse, (2010) Key Concepts of Museology, Paris: Armand Colin, http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Key_Concepts_of_Museology/ Museologie_Anglais_BD .pdf (accessed June 30, 2016). Entwistle, Joanne (2016) “Bruno Latour: Actor-Network-Theory and Fashion,” in Thinking through Fashion, by Agnes Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds), 269–84, London: I.B. Tauris. Granata, Francesca (2012) “Fashion Studies In-between: A Methodological Case Study and an Inquiry into the State of Fashion Studies,” in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 16(1): 67–82. Hicks, Dan (2010) “The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect” in Dan Hicks and Mary Carolyn Beaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 25–98, Oxford: Oxford University Press. High, Rachel (2014) “Charles James: Beyond Fashion—Interview with Conservators Sarah Scaturro and Glenn Petersen,” www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2014/charlesjames-conservation (accessed June 21, 2016). Hodder, Ian (2012) Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things, Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell. Hodder, Ian (2016) Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement, Creative Commons, available online www.ian-hodder.com/s/Hodder_2016_Studies_in_Human_Thing_Entanglement.pdf (accessed June 21, 2016). Holling, Hanna (2013) “Re: Paik: On Time, Changeability and Identity in the Conservation of Nam Jun Paik Multimedia Installations,” PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam (publication forthcoming, University of California Press). Holling, Hanna (2016) “The Aesthetics of Change: On the Relative Durations of the Impermanent,” in Authenticity in Transition, by Erma Hermens and Frances Robertson (eds), 13–24, London: Archetype Publications, www.archetype.co.uk/publication-details.php?id=229 International Council of Museums—Committee for Conservation (1984) “The ConservatorRestorer: A Definition of the Profession,” adopted at ICOM -CC Copenhagen Triennial meeting. Jones, Helen (2002) “The Importance of Being Less Earnest: Communicating Conservation,” Conservation Journal, 41 (Summer). Kirke, Betty (1982) “The Intuitive Approach to Restoration: A Tribute to Elizabeth Lawrence,” Dress, 8: 32–5. Kopytoff, Igor (1986) “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.),The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 64–91, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Landi, Sheila (1992) The Textile Conservator’s Manual, Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.

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Laurenson, Pip (2006) “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations,” Tate Papers, 6 (Autumn). Lerner, Ben (2016) “The Custodians,” New Yorker, January 11, 50–9. Marchetti, Luca (2014) “Fashion Curating. Issues in Theory and Practice of Fashion Exhibited,” in A. Dell’Acqua-Bellavitis, A. Cappellieri and R. Gaddi (eds), 2nd International Fashion and Design Congress, 689–96, November 2014. Melchior, Marie Riegels (2015) “Introduction: Understanding Fashion and Dress Museology,” in Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, 1–18, London: Bloomsbury. Melchior, Marie Riegels and Birgitta Svensson (2015) Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, London: Bloomsbury. Miller, Daniel (2005) “Introduction,” in Susanne Küchler and Daniel Miller (eds), Clothing as Material Culture, Oxford: Berg, 1–20, www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/academic_staff/d_miller/ mil–7 (accessed July 18, 2016). Muñoz Viñas, Salvador (2013) Contemporary Theory of Conservation, Amsterdam: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. Palmer, Alexandra (2005) “ ‘A Bomb in the Collection’: Researching and Exhibiting Early 20thcentury Fashion,” in Cordelia Rogerson and Paul Garside (eds), The Future of the 20th Century: Collecting, Interpreting and Conserving Modern Materials, London: Archetype Publications, 41–7. Pecorari, Marco (2011) “The Berg Fashion Library: Archiving the Future?” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 16(1): 83–6. Pecorari, Marco (2015) “Contemporary Fashion History in Museums,” in Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, 46–60, London: Bloomsbury. Porter, Charlie (2016) “Andrew Bolton: The Man at the Met,” in Financial Times, April 30, http://on. ft.com/1TkvwRL (accessed June 30, 2016). Riello, Giorgio (2011) “The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 3, ISSN 2000–4214 Riello, Giorgio and Anne Gerritsen (2015) Writing Material Culture History, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rocamora, Agnes (2016) “Pierre Bourdieu: The Field of Fashion,” in Agnes Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds), Thinking Through Fashion, London: I.B. Tauris, 233–50. “The Role of the Scholar-Curator in Conservation” (1998) Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 323–5. Rubio, Fernando Dominguez (2016) “On the Discrepancy between Objects and Things: An Ecological Approach,” Journal of Material Culture, 21(1): 59–86. Rublack, Ulinka (2013) “The First Book of Fashion,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=91hysO_suRo (accessed June 21, 2016). Scaturro, Sarah and Glenn Petersen (2014) “Inherent Vice,” in Harold Koda and Jan Glier Reeder (eds), Charles James: Beyond Fashion, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scaturro, Sarah and Joyce Fung (2017) “A Delicate Balance: Ethics and Aesthetics at The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,” in Dinah Eastop and Mary Brooks (eds), Refashioning and Redress: Conserving and Displaying Dress, Marina del Rey, CA : Getty Conservation Institute. Seo, Hilary T. and Tanya Zanish-Belcher (2006) “Pitfalls, Progress, and Partnership: Collaboration between Special Collections and Preservation in Academic Libraries,” Preservation Publications and Papers, Paper 4, http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/pres_pubs/4 (accessed June 30, 2016). Steele, Valerie (1998) “A Museum of Fashion is More than a Clothes Bag,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Methodology Issue), 2(4): 327–35. Steele, Valerie (2015) “Letter from the Editor,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 19(3): 277–9.

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Styles, John (1998) “Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Methodology Issue), 2(4): 383–92. Taylor, Lou (1998) “Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-Based Dress History,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Methodology Issue), 2(4): 337–58. Taylor, Lou (2010) “Fashion, Historical Studies of,” in Valerie Steele (ed.), The Berg Companion to Fashion, Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, https://0-www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com.library. metmuseum.org/products/berg-fashion-library/encyclopedia/the-berg-companion-to-fashion/ fashion-historical-studies-of (accessed July 2, 2016). Ward, Philip (1986) The Nature of Conservation: A Race Against Time, Marina del Rey, CA : Getty Conservation Institute.

2 PERMANENCE AND IMPERMANENCE: CURATING WESTERN TEXTILES AND FASHION AT THE ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM Alexandra Palmer The rise in fashion studies and fashion curation, along with the plethora of websites from Pinterest, 1stdibs and Instagram enables everyone to “curate,” with the result that the old-fashioned role of curating within the museum is less and less understood, and frequently associated with exhibition-making that is the most public-facing part of the curatorial role. The day-to-day work of a fashion and textile curator attached to an institution and shepherding a collection results in new research and innovative exhibitions that animate the storage and result in permanent records. The impermanent work of exhibitions results in a limited number of visitors seeing objects, understanding texture, scale, sheen and volume and it is more than likely that the object/s they see will never be mounted the same way, nor seen in the same context exhibitions are temporal research projects. The impermanent exhibitions may be recorded in video, online or in publications that offer an alternative record to the temporal exhibition. Learning, knowing and understanding what is in storage can take years, and is the first step in being able to curate a collection for an exhibition. Curators build collections through donations and acquisitions, documentation, storage, and donor relations and facilitate access to the collection for researchers and the public through private appointments, exhibitions, publications and now the Internet. Adding artifacts necessitates ongoing thinking about relationships between singular artifacts and the overall collection. This may be large or small groups, materials, individual pieces, ensembles, or cross-cultural and social links or opposites. Only by continued thinking about the strengths and weakness of a collection, moving between macro and micro details and histories, is it possible to conceive new research to interpret and build the collection with meaning and relevance and to then devise exhibitions that amplify the collection. 39

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Object research, selection, interpretation and exhibitions Exhibitions are limiting and rich formats for knowledge. Books, articles and accompanying catalogues allow for a level of discussion and detail that is not possible in a gallery. The thesis has to be simply and succinctly explained. Information is imparted in both visual—the object and accompanying still or moving images—and textual ways to accomplish this goal. The curator and designer guides the visitors’ eye to gather key information, drawing out only the most salient point/s for the specific exhibit. What each object signifies within the narrow context of the exhibition, and what information the curator would like the visitor to leave with is a constant exercise in editing. It is understood that not all text will necessarily be read, or even in a particular sequence. Developing the theme is accomplished by parsing out information throughout the exhibition. This can be a classical museological textual approach or can include visuals and new technology. Objects can spark questions, but they do not speak to you, they need to be interpreted and can be, in a myriad of ways (Palmer 2013). This is achieved through research, and meanings and interpretations shift according to researcher and context. This was recently reinforced when I was at the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A) and staff were organizing the loan of a beautiful Florentine late fifteenth-century cloth of gold chausable fragment (V&A 8345–1863) to The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined (October 13, 2016–February 5, 2017) exhibition at the Barbican. Ironically, it had previously been on loan to the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, for an exhibit with the working title Precious, that later became In the Making: Ruskin, Creativity and Craftsmanship (January 23, 2016–June 5, 2016). Selecting what object is included is not always straightforward but based on multiple considerations including the visual effect, scale, visibility, and color within the display. However, other more mundane factors usually influence the final decision, particularly the condition and how much conservation may or may not be required, staff workload and budgets. How the piece can be displayed—flat, hung or mounted on a form—also influences the curators’ selection and is often resolved by discussion with conservation. The type of mount, even from what angle it is viewed, the emphasis and angle of presentation (i.e. a bustle dress front, side or back) can change its interpretation. As textile and costume artifacts are limp and lifeless in storage, the curator relies upon past research to be able to imagine, for instance, a four-piece 1880s bustle dress lying in a drawer as a three-dimensional form that requires a 3' × 4' footprint. Also, the location of the object within the display, singled out or within a context, influences its relevance for the exhibition. Fragile and sensitive objects may be damaged on open display, making location determined by placement in an existing case. This may not be ideal for the story line that then has to be adjusted. Displaying artifacts on open platforms requires that they be placed approximately three to four feet back to create a “no touch” setback. This reduces the exhibition space and makes it hard or impossible to see details and technique. Thus, a textile or costume that is intricately worked or small is best seen close up encased, even

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though this may not be the first choice of location in terms of the narrative. This selection process is a balancing act that involves knowledge and research, and time in the museum holdings so that the most suitable example is chosen to function in a specific role for the exhibition thesis. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that current aesthetics and design considerations do play an important role in curatorial choices to create an attractive display that engages visitors. The visual impact of the exhibition and of individual objects drives the visitors’ curiosity, stimulates enquiry to read the information that is offered. Many exhibitions are successful due to a strong and powerful display. The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA ) and the V&A’s Alexander McQueen exhibition are classic case studies. Both had large budgets and both were custom designed for the galleries in the main rotating exhibition galleries. Such exhibits also foreground the fact that the role of the fashion curator as a designer and stylist is an important one that has been more directly and actively articulated, by curators such as Olivier Saillard and Andrew Bolton and who directly take on the role of art director (Swindon and Saillard 2015; The First Monday in May 2016 [film]). Fashion and textile curators have historically combined academic research with visual display skills because they have to be able to envision and prepare the unstructured aretfacts. Most art objects have a fixed form that cannot be changed. Because of the nature of the material, curators are required to change and manipulate the way an artifact physically looks. This is an exceptional aspect of the field that brings the curator into an intimate involvement with the material from the outset; so fashion and textile curators have always had to be acutely aware of the look of the exhibition as they are curating and envisioning it. This aspect of the curatorial role has for years been a constant negotiation between historian and stylist that is mediated by the reality of a collection, conservation, budgets, staffing, imagination and time. Well before Mrs Vreeland’s tenure at the MMA , Polaire Weissman had for years developed exciting exhibitions and ideas of display (Palmer 2012). In 1958, when the Costume Institute was to be renovated for 1 million dollars, Weissman noted: “we have to think of this as a theater . . . we will handle each enclosure [closed display] as though it were a stage. And we intend to put on one of the best shows in town” (Weinman 1958). Her pivotal 1967 exhibition, The Art of Fashion, was reviewed with the exhibits at the Guggenheim, and Carnegie Institute. It was noted that: Of the three, the Metropolitan’s show, is by far and away the most beautiful, partly, because of its superb installation, but mostly because these costumes . . . [are] displayed, not as period pieces but purely as works of art, mounted like jewels or like sculpture . . . arranged against abstract semi-architectural background . . . this exhibition should change the whole idea of what costume and costume display should be for a museum. It was also pointed out that even though it included “hideous . . . fashion mistakes . . . as concessions to historical completeness . . . This is a beautiful show” (Canaday 1967).

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Building the collection, philosophy and research Each museum and collection is unique but they share similar histories (Taylor 2004). The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM ) of art, archaeology, science and nature is based upon nineteenth-century museum models. Officially, the museum was created in the Ontario Legislature by the 1912 ROM Act. The doors opened to the public on March 19, 1914. The limestone walls of the 1933 wing flanking the old main wooden entrance doors are carved with the words: “The Record of Nature Through Countless Ages . . . The Arts of Man Through All the Years.” The founding curator, director and archaeologist Charles Trick Currelly (1876–1957), was a visionary museum-builder. He was concerned that, “the crafts of the country [Canada] would be forever held back if [designers and craftsmen] were not provided with the stimulus that comes from the sight of important workmanship” (The Royal Ontario Museum 1922). He firmly believed that museums had an educational purpose to display the material achievements of humanity through all time in order to inspire designers and the public with models of good taste. He was particularly inspired by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the early years all the artifacts were placed on view so the entire collection was available to the public. The science specimens were organized with a detailed system of labeling, while the arts collections were not shown in a scientific system of classification “so as to give the spectator an idea that he is looking, not at a mere collection, but rather at things which form an artistic and harmonious whole” (Sir Edmund Walker 2014). The “non-scientific” labels were physically smaller so as to be less intrusive. Thus the concept of art collections decorating galleries through attractive displays that visually intrigue and delight visitors has been imbedded in the ROM , and other museum exhibitions, from their beginnings. The present-day collections and galleries still include this wide range of specimens from dinosaurs, mammals, birds, fish and minerals and internationally important collections of global art and design. Textiles and fashions were part of the museum collection from its inception. Currelly was very cognizant of the public interest and success of the textile and costume galleries he had observed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He actively strove to emulate them and was constantly on the lookout for key pieces and collections, such as eighteenth-century costume, lace, Imperial Chinese robes, and archaeological textiles (Currelly 1956). The Textile Department was founded as its own area with a dedicated staff in 1940, and has had brilliant curators. Dorothy MacDonald (who became Burnham [1911–2004]) was the first textile curator overseeing more than 7,000 objects. Her long career at the ROM began in 1929 as a draftswoman at the age of eighteen. Her job was to register each ROM specimen with small scale and precise ink drawing, that at the time, was more efficient and cost effective than photography. In 1949 she left the museum to raise her family but returned in 1959 to work part time as a research assistant alongside her husband Harold Burnham. Harold Burnham (1912–1973) left his twenty-five-year career as a banker in 1954 to become a weaver, and together they opened a rural weaving

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studio in Jordan, Ontario. Harold won prizes for his hand-woven textiles including a 1957 Canadian National Industrial Design Council award for Good Design. His modernist weaving [ROM 962.126.1–3] was exhibited at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, the first world’s fair in eighteen years following World War II . In 1958 Harold joined the ROM as a curator and head of the Textile department until 1969 (Burnham, H. 1959; 1965a, b). The Burnhams were both practical makers, thinkers and internationally recognized textile scholars. In 1973 after Harold’s untimely death, Dorothy returned to the ROM as a fulltime Textile curator and continued to research and publish after her retirement in 1977. Dorothy Burnham’s way of thinking about textiles and fashions, her exhibitions and publications, repeatedly demonstrate the many layers of meaning that can be revealed through object-centered research by looking at animal skin, woven, knitted, embroidered, quilted and stitched objects from world cultures. She devised rigorous and systematic methodologies for analysis of the origins of technique and forms and her inventive studies clearly document how the use of skin and cloth distinguish and bridge cultures, continents and time. Her work foreshadowed and influenced material culture studies, textile and costume history, design and technology history as well as anthropology, and ethnology. The Burnhams’ work on Canadian hand-weaving led to the her ground-breaking research on coverlets and an outstanding documented collection that culminated in the exhibition Keep Me Warm One Night (1972), and associated book, that was based on thirty-five years of research and won international acclaim. Her brilliant exhibition and publication, Cut My Cote (1973) linked clothing cultures across time and geography. It is amongst the museum’s best-sellers internationally, remains in print and, as with so much of her work, continues to influence scholars and makers alike. She also conducted the first study of the dress of Western Canada’s Doukhobor communities (1986), as well as a groundbreaking publication on painted skin Naskapi coats (1992). Her international textile vocabulary, Warp and Weft (1980) is still used in museums, classrooms and by makers today. Both Dorothy and Harold Burnham left an important legacy of ways of thinking, collecting, exhibitions and publications. They mentored ROM curators Veronika Gervers, John Vollmer, Louise Mackie and Dr Adrienne Hood. Less recognized is the significance of Katharine B. Brett (née Maw, 1910–1994) who worked at the museum for over thirtyseven years (1938–1975). Like Dorothy Burnham, she was a trained artist. She profoundly shaped the Western costume and textile collection and curated dozens of exhibitions. She was also a pioneering author on Canadian textiles and fashion (1966a, b; 1967), and co-author of the landmark book, Origins of Chintz (Irwin and Brett 1970), a joint project between the ROM and V&A. Brett also built the collection of early English needlework (1972), and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fashion and textiles. In 1957 she turned her attention to haute couture (1969). It is thanks to Brett’s prescient collecting that my interest and questions about haute couture was piqued. Today the ROM textile and costume collection comprises over 55,000 artifacts from around the world and across time. The collection is thus a rich and complex matrix from which to conduct research and create exhibitions, with a large footprint of curatorial scholarship and publications to inherit. My professional work at the ROM began in 1986 with a contract to research mannequins for a new, dedicated European textile and costume gallery conceived by the

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soon-retiring costume curator, Mary Holford (who was trained by and took over from Brett), and European textile curator, Dr Brigitta Schmedding (Palmer 1988a, b). This was the first gallery dedicated to textiles and costume since the museum’s 1978 renovation. At the time the galleries reopened in 1984 they were reorganized by culture, leaving the material-based textile collection scattered throughout the museum. Without a dedicated gallery or focused exhibitions, public interest and knowledge about the extensive textile and fashion collection dwindled. I was familiar with the museum as I had attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate, and taken all the courses in Art History taught by ROM staff, wandered the galleries and clearly remember the experience of seeing the stunning 1977 exhibition and publication, In the Presence of the Dragon Throne curated by John E. Vollmer (1977). When Mary Holford became ill, I was hired to work on the gallery design and curate the exhibition with Dr Schmedding (Palmer 1990). But I had the opportunity to work alongside Mary Holford for several months, and now understand that she was not only introducing me to the vast collection and her concept for the exhibition, but also inculcating the ROM Burnham-Brett traditions in me. It was during this time that I began to see and learn the holdings by making constant visits to storage, with her and alone. It sparked my curiosity about Brett’s prescient acquisitions of paper dresses (Palmer 1991) and I began to ask myself questions about the collection of post-war haute couture, collected by Brett and Holford (Palmer, H.A. 1994). When I took up the permanent ROM position of costume curator in 1996, the textile and fashion European gallery had been turned over to furniture and there was again no permanent gallery dedicated to textiles. The collection was dormant. A 100-year-old museum collection cannot be reinvented, but it can be invigorated with new research, publications, exhibitions, and new acquisitions that respond to existing artifacts. The question was how to build and distinguish the collection, how to revitalize it and have it resonate with the public. The textile collection is encyclopedic, with some great strengths; and the storage order, by technique and culture, underscores the thinking about how it was created, researched and published. The Western fashion and textile collection had to be considered within the museum’s global collection of textiles and fashions and within the museum’s history (Palmer 2008a). The first exhibition I undertook, Au Courant: Contemporary Canadian Fashion (April 1997–January 1998), added pieces to the collection from the exhibition made up entirely of loans. Located in the Institute of Contemporary Culture, the exhibit approached fashion with a small “f”, a theme that has continued in my research that has largely eschewed reinforcing the notion of the iconic. Because Canada has no clear design identity, a range of work that explored the fashion industry was included. It could not be a “who’s who” of designer names because there were so few the public could identify. Just, as an exhibition on contemporary design might include a fridge and other industrial products, I wanted to show the range of the fashion industry. I set up an advisory committee of educators and fashion professionals who helped with the selection of designers. I was aware of the concern from the industry and designers as to who was “in” or “out” and the national agenda to represent each province, but I wanted to move beyond local and parochial agendas and not be bound by geography but by design. The final list was inevitably limited given that it was a 4,000 square feet

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gallery, so products had to be representative of current trends and innovations, and I wanted to include both established and new companies to underscore the ongoing business of fashion. For instance included was Brian Bailey’s new line of fashion forward designs for large women, Haida designer Dorothy Grant designs based on indigenous West coast traditions, recycled fur accessories by Harricana and a T-shirt printed with an image of a white, blue-eyed Jesus (shown front) and “HELL NO !” (shown back) by too black guys, which addressed contemporary cultural issues. Also included was the powerful Viva Glam ad campaign to raise money and awareness for AIDS . This was M.A.C.’s only advertising for the cosmetic company founded in 1984 by Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo of Toronto. M.A.C. had just launched Viva Glam II featuring famous Canadian singer and non-lipstick lesbian, k.d. Lang on the heels of their first hugely successful campaign starring drag queen RuPaul. The exhibition also included workwear by Dayton Boots and Terra and Roots urban riff on ski boots. New kinds of sports clothing were represented by a Sugoi, Double Espresso cycling shirt for the urban yuppie, and a snowboarding jacket by Westbeach Snowboard Ltd developed by boarder Kevin Young with entrepreneur Chip Wilson, who went on to found Lululemon and revolutionize yoga wear. Westbeach offered cool, hi-tech performance snowboarding gear for athletes and were adapting skiing equipment to the new sport. This was an example of “strek,” coined by Wilson, to describe a design movement unifying street style and technology. Also included were shoes by Patrick Cox, a designer who was not internationally identified as Canadian. This exhibition did not have a catalogue per se. A sponsorship arrangement was made with Flare, a national Canadian fashion magazine for a sixteen-page pull out supplement that was inserted into subscribers’ April issue. Flare also provided copies of the supplement for visitors to the gallery (Palmer 1997). This directly embedded the exhibition and the museum with the design industry and the fashion press. It also offered a quick, affordable and modern solution to a formal catalogue that was not possible in the given time frame. The wide framework for thinking about fashion as a working, inventive and broad industry in Au Courant was a theme that continued the ROM fashion and textile tradition linking disparate kinds of fashion and textile objects that has also flowed into subsequent exhibitions and publications.

Exhibitions in the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume In 2000 the generous financial donation by Patricia and William Harris secured space in the museum for a permanent Textile & Costume gallery. This was finally realized as part of the 2007 Renaissance ROM (RenROM ) renovation, an addition to the museum designed by architect, Daniel Libeskind. The 5,000 square feet Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume opened to the public in April 2008 on the top floor of the Michael Lee Chin Crystal. The Libeskind Patricia Harris Gallery is a unique volume for displays. It is an irregularly shaped room with only one vertical wall, and a steeply pitched 43-foot ceiling that brokenly angles down to the gallery floor. This envelope creates very limited wall space for hanging

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textiles. The large and numerous skylights are now covered with blinds to protect the light-sensitive artifacts. The hallways leading to the gallery are confusing, so visitors sometimes miss the main entrance and use the emergency exit as an entrance and/or exit. Designing the permanent gallery for the ongoing displays from the ROM ’s diverse global collection that ranges from tiny, delicate, and fragile to enormous and bold material of two and three-dimensional volumes was a challenge. The gallery and case hardware had to be designed to accommodate not only the physical range of the collection of textiles and costumes, but also the text and graphics. Open platforms and cases predetermine the location of many objects. For instance delicate laces or embroideries that need to be seen close up are assigned cases, while large-scale textiles need tall walls and to be seen from a vista. The undetermined circulation pattern results in visitors approaching the displays from multiple directions. Therefore exhibitions are devised without a chronological narrative, as each section must be able to stand alone, visually and intellectually, without the rest of the exhibition for context. A large case at the entrance serves as an introduction to exhibitions. The irregular slanted walls are mediated with tabletop cases for small objects such as laces or embroideries with study drawers below for more small objects, tall shallow vertical cases for textiles, coverlets or costume mounted in low relief and shorter deep cases for more threedimensional objects or delicate objects, such as archaeological textiles that need to be shown relatively flat. Two of the three central platforms are built with magnetic walls and a roller system the Textile department developed for hanging textiles and reducing installation time. The walls have more recently been used for video projections within the displays themselves. One of the platforms has one case (6ʹ × 6ʹ × 7ʹ10ʺ), and another has two for the display of costume or delicate objects. Each platform is equipped with a video monitor. At the entrance, a slanted wall is used for large projections or video that also serves as an introduction to the exhibition. To help organize the intellectual program permanent section text panels were installed, that also fulfilled the placement of donor recognition. The fixed location of overview information also influences the curatorial story line and object location. Group and object labels on moveable magnetic label carriers run around a glass rail at the platform edge, and a similar design is in case interiors. With each exhibition over the past ten years the textiles team, together with the ROM ’s in-house 2D and 3D designers, have learned how to use the space differently, how to accommodate the conservation requirements of the collection, and how to give exhibitions a unique look within this pre-determined template.

Making it different: exhibitions in a permanent gallery The first exhibition in the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume (opened April 16, 2008) was complex because we were simultaneously designing the gallery casework and the mounting systems for a space we had not used before. Curated by Assistant Curator Anu Liivandi, consulting curator John Vollmer and myself, the opening exhibition did not prioritize fashion over textiles, or western over non-western. This has been an ongoing

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Figure 2.1 Opening installation in the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume [April 16, 2008]. The Screen Printing section. Vivienne Westwood toga-dress hand-screened printed with Henri Matisse’s Femmes et singes (Fall 1992) and Zandra Rhodes Zig-Zag Shell (1994) gown in front of a mid-century Canadian commercially screen printed furnishing textile, Cedar Canyon (1954) by Thor Hansen. With the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM .

theme that continues the Burnham-Brett thinking about socio-cultural and technological links and meanings of making cloth and clothes. This allows us to showcase the breadth and global history of textiles and fashion. The objects, time periods, techniques and cultures represented by over 200 artifacts were organized in three themes Clothing, Weaving and Printing (see Figure 2.1). Costume and textile displays have traditionally followed classic art historical models with little interpretation. The object label gives the title of the work, artist name, date and medium. In the case of costume the medium or color is often used to identify the design, (i.e. Ball gown by Worth, (date), red silk satin), so that the viewer can figure out what dress it is referencing. Extended and interpretive labels may slow down the visitor. Harold Koda noted for Poiret, King of Fashion (May 9–August 5, 2007) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that they used minimal text as, anticipating large crowds they did not want to hinder visitor flow (Koda 2007).

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Curatorial thinking for text, graphics and video for the Harris Gallery was influenced by the interpretive program developed for a previous exhibition I curated, Elite Elegance: Couture in the Feminine Fifties (November 23, 2002–May 4, 2003) (Palmer 2008a; Petrov 2014: 82–83, Figliano 2011), which used three kinds of information on the object label (1) period quotes from fashion publications and press; (2) information and interpretation of the garment; (3) several images related to the garment—fashion sketch, photograph of it being worn, and/or details the interior/exterior of the garment to enhance interpretation and information. The exhibit stemmed from my doctoral dissertation so I had a rich pool of information, but the budget for this special exhibition also allowed for expensive photograph reproductions that were time consuming to acquire and for layout. Images are now much more financially accessible due to digital photography. For the opening exhibition in the Harris Gallery the first case featured a newly acquired 1801 formal overdress and was a case study of how and why objects are considered for acquisition. There were multiple labels for the dress, each with associated contextual images explaining how the dress came to be offered to the museum, its provenance traced a history from Egypt to England to Canada, its historical significance and how it was dated by construction. The context for this dress in the museum was shown with two 1790s dresses and a man’s red wool civil uniform coat 1805–1806. Each label included dated fashion plates or details of construction and related historical images. This rich text and visual labeling was employed in a similar format throughout the other displays. The exhibition continued until Fall 2009 with two rotations in the large introductory case. Out of the Vaults: Marie-Antoinette (October 9, 2008–February 23, 2009) featured the formal court gown attributed to Marie Antoinette. After this the dress was sent on loan to Versailles for the exhibition Fastes de cour et cérémonies royales—Le costume de cour en Europe, 1650–1800 (March 16–June 14, 2009) so the curatorial research, conservation, mounting and photography for the loan were used directly within the museum. Importantly too the dress was published in the catalogue (Fastes de cour et cérémonies royales 2009: 86–87, cat. 112). This is not usually the case with external loans that are largely an invisible, unpublicized aspect of museum work. The dress was replaced with a neoclassical silk lampas acquired and curated by Liivandi. Both displays were in-depth looks at a single object with multiple labels discussing provenance, manufacture, iconography and the contemporary context for the designs and for the museum today. These small minidisplays served to animate the gallery, bring in new visitors and, allowed us time to plan and work on the next exhibition. They also provided an opportunity to showcase our research and explain the work that we do by discussing a single object in a rounded way that is not usually possible when it is within a larger story of an exhibition. The second complete new exhibition in the Harris Gallery, Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries (January 25, 2011–September 2012) showed over 120 printed and painted textile and costumes from the global collection (see Plate 7). This was a more cohesive exhibition than the first as we very consciously selected artifacts that we felt were visually harmonious. It was organized by printing and dyeing techniques, from eighteenth-century chintz to the latest digital printing, thus date and cultures were juxtaposed and linked, just as trade has historically connected experiments in production and design. It continued the didactic program of interpretation with overviews

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by section and detailed contextual labels with images of people making and wearing the same or similar object, maps and context offering a richness that was previously not possible for a rotating gallery budget years ago. Close-up images of the object on the label also assisted in directing the visitor’s eye to details. The next exhibition, BIG, took a new approach.

BIG, Fashion Follows Form and ¡Viva México!: 2012–2016 BIG (November 3, 2012–January 25, 2014) was a deliberately less complex installation with only forty objects from the permanent global collection ranging from a three-meter Kuba cloth wrapper, a Peruvian feather mantle from the Nasca mantle, to contemporary haute couture. The idea was to radically re-think the interpretive program and the look of the gallery. Normally, the easiest and most cost-efficient transformation is by changing the wall color; but this was not an option because of the architecture. Instead, change was signaled by the installation and the experimental approach to labeling. The focus of the exhibition was on eight macro meanings of textiles. The BIG theme was reinforced with oversize object labels. The exhibition had minimal text to explain conceptual meanings of BIG (emphasized by capital letters). The introduction showed the concept and rubric on the object labels: LESS CAN BE MORE. Even the smallest textile can have a BIG personal, social, and cultural value that shifts according to context. SIZE: oversized to small connotes elite status, wealth EVENT: commemorates nations, royalty, religion, family, the individual TIME: making, transporting, survival INNOVATION: ground breaking design, chemical formulae NAME: maker, designer, wearer MESSAGE: erotic, exotic, esoteric, artistic, propaganda VALUE: monetary, political, spiritual IMPACT: global, national, social, personal The resulting graphic for each object label was a circular image that was easy to understand at a glance, and importantly, did not create a hierarchy of significance of meaning or value of the eight categories. Co-curators, Sarah Fee, Anu Liivandi and myself, selected only three to four for each artifact to explain key ideas of its history, meaning and value. The large text panels, normally used for section overviews, were covered with super blow-up details of artifacts. The permanent video monitors showed close-up details of the nearby objects and contextual images (see Figure 2.2). BIG successfully broke down the hierarchical intellectual and visual canon of textiles and fashions by leveling interior furnishings, western (tailored) and non-western fashion (draped and T cut) as worn cloth that all had powerful meanings. Visitors readily understood the simple labels of sound bite or tweet length text. They were surprised by the variety of

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Figure 2.2 Plan of the permanent case and platform layout in the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume, ROM for BIG 2012. © ROM .

objects and the discovered new socio-cultural, economic and technological histories, different ways of seeing and thinking about fashion and textiles. Because the theme was not temporal or cultural, they were intrigued and surprised by not knowing what they would be seeing or reading next (see Plate 8). BIG was followed by two simultaneous exhibitions in the same space. Anu Liivandi planned an exhibit on the ROM ’s important collection of early Islamic textiles to coincide with the September 2014 opening of the new Aga Kahn Museum in Toronto. The beautiful and delicate archaeological fragments in, Cairo Under Wraps: Early Islamic Textiles (June 21, 2014–January 25, 2015) required all the cases and drawers around the periphery of the gallery, but not the three central open platforms. They also needed a great deal of conservation and staff could only work on one intensive exhibit. Therefore, it was not practical to have an exhibit on the platforms that also needed conservation or complex custom mounting. We had no immediate solution to the problem of how to use the central platforms. One day I noticed a new fashion store in an up-and-coming Toronto neighborhood. In the window was a cool, cut away leather jacket, so I went in to see what was going on. I was greeted by the designer, Izzy Camilleri, who explained that her store was a bit different from the kind I was probably expecting as she designed clothing for people seated in wheelchairs. As Izzy began to explain and show me her line, the significance of her work and my concept of fashion permanently shifted. I was astounded that I had not once considered the complexity of fashion for people with disabilities. A little black dress hung on a curve, a man’s suit jacket flared out at the sides, and pants were cut with a very short

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Figure 2.3 Fashion Follows Form Designs for Sitting (June 21, 2014–January 25, 2015). Seated and standing trench coats next to late nineteenth-century bustle, cape and dolman in case. Photo: Brian Boyle, with the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. © ROM . Photo: Izzy Camilleri.

front rise and a long, curved crotch seam in the back that immediately recalled—to my historical fashion mind—the cut of eighteenth-century breeches or early nineteenthcentury trousers. In front of me was a new twenty-first century trouser cut that had, unwittingly, returned to a 200-year-old pattern to achieve a full cut for the seat and ignored the development of tailoring that struggled to eliminate bulk in the buttocks required for sitting but that bagged when standing. All her cuts were innovative and perfect when in a seated position and carefully thought through from the wearers’ perspective. I tried on the clothes in order to understand them better and began to formulate an exhibition, Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting (June 21, 2014–January 25, 2015) (see Figure 2.3). Exhibitions focusing on a single artist are, perhaps, the most straightforward and potentially formulaic, as well as the most familiar and comforting for visitors. The theme is readily established through the biography, time line and celebrity of the artist, and there is usually a consistency or clear “evolution” in the work. This was the first such exhibition I curated, and the first at the ROM dedicated to a Canadian. The challenges were complex. Disability is not a sexy topic. Disability and fashion seems like an oxymoron. The clothes were brilliant technical innovations in cut and design for clients who had no access to fashionable wardrobe staples that fit. Details of construction carefully considered placement for the client who cannot feel abrasive lumps in darts or seams that can result in life threatening sores. But the innovation was difficult to explain because the clothes are

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classic garments—a man’s suit, a trench coat, jeans, a white shirt, a denim skirt. The challenge was first to entice visitors, who likely had no disabilities and little understanding of pattern making, into the museum; then to explain to them why and how these seemingly simple and conventional clothes were revolutionary in cut, construction and transformative for wearers and care givers. We devised two key strategies: images and video, and displaying the same garment twice, as when seated it looked ordinary, and when standing the cut was obviously “wrong” or like an avant-garde Japanese or Belgian design, deliberately deconstructed and askew. This was effective, as one reviewer noted: “The oddness of the silhouette as draped on the standing form mirrored the ill fit of mainstream clothes on a wheelchair user’s form. Rather, main-stream clothes require calculated alterations to fit the wheelchair user in a streamlined and comfortable manner” (Halliday 2015: 531). Two platforms were organized by the upper and lower body with a fashion sketch for each that was a simple explanation of the fashion problem all experience when seated in garments designed for standing—low riding pants in the back and shortened hems in the front. Extra-large labels placed on the platforms discussed the cultural histories of the IZ Adaptive iconic basics, such as the maxi skirt, trench coat or leather jacket and positioned the modern classics within a fashion continuum. The cases on these platforms held historical fashions from the collection, riding habits, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century men’s breeches and trousers, and late nineteenth-century dolmans that were all designed to accommodate sitting for sociocultural—not practical—requirements. They offered historical context, integrated the ROM collection and made the history of fashion relevant today. The third platform contextualized Izzy’s seated line and her fashion experience by showing her past highend fashion work. The leather lines aimed to explain that it was her years of work and her understanding of technique that enabled her to create her disabled fashions. A review noted that “To place standing mannequins . . . at the center of the space pulled visual focus and threatened to prioritize the standing form . . . The promotional short detailing the launch of IZ Adaptive, far more integral to the central narrative, ran on a much smaller screen in front of this installation” (Halliday 2015: 530–531). This point is a good one and was completely obvious to me when I read it. Interestingly, no one on the design team and interpretive team, nor myself nor Izzy, had thought of this during our hours of discussions and production. It highlights how hard it is to think through exhibitions, the complexities of servicing and filling a permanent gallery, meeting timelines and budgets; and underscores how important critical reviews can be (Palmer 2008b). Included were biographies of six clients with different lifestyles, interests and disabilities. Also screened was the Pro Infirmis, “Because who is perfect?” video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8umFV 69fNg), next to a Mannequal®, an abstract fibreglass wheelchair for store display designed to integrate disability into fashion retailing. It was designed by Sophie Morgan, a British TV presenter, artist, campaigner, and model who became a paraplegic at the age of eighteen after crashing her car. These stories offered different windows into the life and practicalities of the disabled who are seated. The increased use of documentary video in exhibitions in the Harris Gallery has become more central to our practice. Film gets across large concepts, complex techniques and

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skills that produce the amazing textiles and fashions. The permanent video monitors on each platform initially showed commissioned animations that explained techniques of transforming thread into cloth and flat cloth into three dimensions. The sitting area allows visitors to select from a number of ROM videos related to mounting costume, interviews with donors, and a documentary featuring Toronto tailor, Stavros, making a custom suit for William Harris, and now in the permanent collection. In-depth documentation of artifacts is one of the strengths of the ROM collection that continues departmental scholarship and helps to distinguish the collection. In 2011, a couture dress by John Galliano for Christian Dior Couture (Spring 2011) was commissioned together with a documentary on the coat-dress being made, from concept, to creation in the ateliers through to the runway. For BIG the film was screened next to the dress. This two-part acquisition was proposed as a continuation of my research on haute couture (Palmer, 2001). It beautifully captures the sense of time, care and planning required to realize the creation (over 500 hours). It engendered a new understanding and respect for couture by explaining the intricacies, experience and skills required that no number of words could achieve. These films, and interviews with donors, all add to a matrix of video documentation that is augmenting the archives. Video was central to explain IZ Adaptive fashions and engage visitors. The introduction to the exhibition was a simple animation created to show that fashion is designed with a vertical pull and push of gravity on the body and how Izzy changed this by thinking about an L-shaped body. The platform videos, showing seated clients getting into and wearing IZ Adaptive, demonstrated why and how the clothes were so successful and innovative. They animated the static display. In addition, a video of sketching Izzy’s leather jacket that was projected on the large wall on the upper body platform underscored the art and craft of fashion design. The third platform screened 2011 IZMA fashion show, an elegant luxury fur fashion collection and one of her past technically difficult and fashion forward leather lines designed before embarking on her seated fashions. The over-human scale projections animated the entire static gallery. This exhibition made me review my “expert” knowledge of fashion and curating. A blogger, who was not a fashionista, wrote, “I left having learned more about my own seated body and, though I don’t consider fashion as part of how I express myself, I understood more about how those who do. Leaving any exhibit thinking means it’s a good exhibit” (Hingsburger 2014). This is the ultimate goal, and difficult to realize. The following exhibition, ¡Viva México! Clothing & Culture (May 9, 2015–May 23, 2016) featured the ROM ’s significant Mexican costume and textile collection curated by Mexican scholar and ROM Research Associate, Chloe Sayer, and myself as co-curator (see Figure  2.4). It was the first exhibition in the gallery focused on one cultural group, but included a diversity of colonial and indigenous textiles and fashions from the eighteenth century to the present day. It united the accumulated experience of, where and how to use the collection and contextualize it with film, text and images. Sayer and I went to Mexico in 2014 to interview and film artists. I was the videographer. The eight videos in the gallery showed artists spinning, dyeing, setting up looms, weaving, and embroidering as well as the geography, people, festivals and rich socio-cultural context. The large wall on a platform showed a movie-size film of dyeing and weaving rebozos. It was screened

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Figure 2.4 ¡Viva México! Clothing & Culture (May 9, 2015–May 23, 2016) featured indigenous and European influenced Mexican costume and textile from eighteenth century to present. © ROM . Photo: Alexandra Palmer.

amongst the artifacts it depicted being made, and the small monitor showed women plaiting the fringes. The multiple videos, throughout the exhibit explained the complexity of making textiles and stood in for laborious technical labels. The exhibition echoed the organization graphics and text of the first earlier classic exhibitions. The added videos, large graphic and the various didactic components explained the huge range of textiles, techniques and richness of the regional cultures and varied skills of the artists. Visitors lingered in the galley, watched the videos and appreciated the contextual information. Clearly fashions and textiles have powerful meanings that can be animated through research, publications, still and moving images and static exhibitions. Curators steward museum collections that are the physical remains weaving a messy, kaleidoscopic and fragmented history. Impermanent exhibitions and permanent publications attempt to make these disparate remnants of our past meaningful today. Each interpretation by a scholar, in any format, can only present a sliver of history and so has to focus tightly to offer new ways of seeing, learning and thinking. Through research and interpretation of the old and new, we can explore our multiple identities woven in textiles and fashions and offer inspiration and thought about our history and future, and continue to animate these remnants with new exhibitions and publications.

Note Dr Sarah Fee is Associate Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Textiles and oversees approximately 15,000 artifacts from Asia, Africa and the Islamic world. Anu Liivandi, Assistant Curator, manages information and visual resources, maintains the collections database, performs weave analysis, and oversees a collection of approximately 3,780

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Antique-Medieval textiles and European figured silks. Dr Alexandra Palmer, Senior Curator, oversees Western fashion and textiles—approximately 44,000 artifacts. Two collections managers, Karla Livingston and Kristiina Lahde oversee the collection and storage. The Textile Conservator is Chris Paulocik, who works on the museum’s entire collection across departments.

References Brett, K.B. (1966a) Women’s Costume in Early Ontario, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Brett, K.B. (1966b) Ontario Handwoven Textiles: An Introduction to Handweaving in Ontario in the Nineteenth Century, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, University of Toronto. Brett, K.B. (1967) Modesty to Mod: Dress and Underdress in Canada, 1780–1967, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, University of Toronto. Brett, K.B. (1969) Haute Couture: Notes on Designers and their Clothes in the Collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, Fashion Group Inc. of Toronto. Brett, K.B. (1972) English Embroidery: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, D.K. (1972) Keep Me Warm One Night: Early Handweaving in Eastern Canada, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, D.K. (1973) Cut My Cote, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, D.K. (1980) Warp and Weft: A Textile Terminology, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, D.K. (1986) Unlike the Lilies: Doukhobur Textiles, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, D.K. (1992) To Please the Caribou: Painted Caribou-skin Coats Worn by the Naskapi, Montaignai, and Cree Hunters of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, H. (1959) Chinese Velvets: A Technical Study, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, H. (1965) Catalogue of the Exhibition of Japanese Country Textiles, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Burnham, H. (1965) Canadian Textiles, 1750–1900: An Exhibition, Toronto: Sigmund Samuel Canadiana Gallery, University of Toronto Press, Royal Ontario Museum. Canaday, J. (1967) “Art: Art, Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Clothes,” New York Times, October 29: D33. Currelly, C.T. (1956) I Brought the Ages Home, Toronto: The Ryerson Press. Fastes de cour et cérémonies royales: le costume de cour en Europe, 1650–1800 (2009) sous la direction scientifique de Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel et Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros, Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux; Versailles: Château de Versailles. Filgiano, L. (2011) “Squeezing In and Zipping Up: Canada’s Involvement in the late 20th and 21st Century Trend of Fashion Exhibition,” MA diss., Concordia University, Montreal. The First Monday in May (2016) [Film] Dir. Andrew Rossi, USA : Magnolia Pictures. Halliday, R. (2015) “Four Exhibitions in Toronto,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 19(4): 519–39. Hingsburger, D. (2014) “Fashion Follows Form: The Exhibit,” Of Battered Aspect, 6 July, available online: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.ca/2014/07/fashion-follows-form-exhibit.html (accessed June 29, 2017). Irwin, J. and Brett, K.B. (1970) Origins of Chintz: With a Catalogue of Indo-European Cottonpaintings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, London: HMSO . Koda, H. (2007) “Making the Exhibition ‘Paul Poiret: King of Fashion’,” May seminar hosted by Costume Society of America at Costume Institute, New York.

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Palmer, A. (1988a) “Mannequins for the Royal Ontario Museum Costume Gallery,” Textile Conservation Newsletter, Supplement Spring. Palmer, A. (1988b) “Exhibiting Costume,” Museum Quarterly, 16(4): 9–13, 30. Palmer, A. (1990) “The Royal Ontario Museum: Costume and Textile Gallery,” Costume, 24: 113–16. Palmer, A. (1991) “Paper Dresses: Not Just a Fad,” in Cunningham and Lab (eds), Dress and Popular Culture, Bowling Green, OH : Bowling Green State University Press, 85–105. Palmer, A. (1997) “Au Courant: Contemporary Canadian Fashion,” Flare, April Supplement. Palmer, A. (2001) Couture & Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press and Royal Ontario Museum. Palmer, A. (2008a) “Untouchable: Creating Desire and Knowledge in Museum Costume and Textile Exhibitions,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 12(1): 31–64. Palmer, A. (2008b) “Costume and Textile Exhibitions,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 12(1): 121–6. Palmer, A. (2012) “The Costume Institute before Diana Vreeland,” unpublished paper presented at Diana Vreeland after Diana Vreeland: The discipline of fashion between the museum and curating, Venice, March 10, 2012 The Università Iuav di Venezia and the London College of Fashion (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with the Centre for Fashion Studies (Stockholm University). Palmer, A. (2013) “Looking at Fashion: The Material Object as Subject,” in S. Black, A. de la Haye, J. Entwistle, R. Root, H. Thomas, A. Rocamora (eds), The Handbook of Fashion Studies, London: Bloomsbury. Palmer, H.A. (1994) “The Myth and Reality of Haute Couture: Consumption, Social Function and Taste in Toronto, 1945–1963,” PhD Thesis, University of Brighton. Petrov. J. (2014) “Gender Considerations in Fashion Exhibitions,” in M.R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, London: Bloomsbury. Pro Infirmis (2013) “Because Who is Perfect?, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8umFV 69fNg (accessed June 29, 2017). “The Royal Ontario Museum: Its Mission and Needs,” (1922) Globe and Mail, January 31: 4. Swinton, T. and Saillard, O. (2015) Impossible Wardrobes, New York: Rizzoli. “Sir Edmund Walker is given due credit,” (1914) Toronto Star, March 20: 5. Taylor, L. (2004) Establishing Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vollmer, J.E. (1977) In the Presence of the Dragon Throne: Ch’ing dynasty costume (1644–1911) in the Royal Ontario Museum. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Weinman, Martha (1958) “New Dress for the Metropolitan’s Costumes”, New York Times, Nov. 23: X12.

3 UNFAMILIAR PLACES, LOCAL VOICES: FOUR EMERGING CURATORIAL NARRATIVES IN AUSTRALIA (2010–2016) Robyn Healy Curating an exhibition about fashion practices in Australia is thought-provoking in drawing attention to design qualities and experiences that are less obvious or familiar than the grand narratives of Western fashion history and culture. The advantage of an emerging fashion industry and local setting, without the legacy of a centuries-old industry, is important in the development and understanding of a local fashion culture. Australia’s cultural and regional diversity, lesser known fashion history and design practices, and unknown or rarely acknowledged individuals and communities, set the scene for this chapter. With an industry of predominantly small to micro-scale creative enterprises, the museum provides an experience of local fashion that can be reflective and critical. This chapter discusses four scenarios of fashion curation in Australia: the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences’ survey of Australian designer Collette Dinnigan, ready-to-wear designers Romance Was Born acting as curators for children, designers D&K performing critical narratives on fashion via curatorial projects, and the transformation of place for a regional venue at the Bendigo Art Gallery. Amidst an increasingly homogenized and branded global environment, each of these examples contributes to an understanding of fashion in the context of a niche geographical setting. Recent exhibitions curated in Australia propose ideas and ways of working relevant beyond specific localities, and highlight how traditional models of haute couture and high fashion systems can offer a point of departure for curatorial approaches. These projects conceived by collective curatorial teams, radiate from the traditional model of a single institutional curator. These examples underscore the value of collaborative and cross-disciplinary methods of practice to uncover other narratives and forms of curatorship in light of increasing exhibition circulation of haute couture and high-end fashion, and the ensuing publicity, critical consideration and public interest of these touring exhibitions. 57

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Traditional understandings of fashion relating to the exemplar of haute couture as an enduring twentieth-century format were introduced to Australia with major fashion exhibitions touring in the 1980s. These events displayed an industry model of high fashion constructed on original design, exclusive production, specialized skills and bespoke garments. Attributes associated with power and glamor that are particularly aligned with the authority and prestige of French culture (Adams 1987). Fabulous Fashion 1907–67: From The Costume Institute was the first major exhibition of twentieth-century European fashion to tour Australia in 1981. Curated by Stella Blum, garments were drawn from The Costume Institute’s collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition displayed luminaries of fashion history with “creations from such masters of fashion as Worth, Poiret, Chanel, Fortuny and Schiaparelli” (Blum and Hamer 1981: 7) and was presented at major state institutions the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Costume Institute model was framed around an extensive repository of fashion housed within a major art museum and supported by their research and conservation facilities, as well as being endorsed by the fashion industry. In 1987, the landmark Yves Saint Laurent: Retrospective, curated by Stephen De Petri at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney (Meek 1987) gave access to clothing sourced from design house archives and private wardrobes of the “rich and famous.” These exhibitions allowed for unprecedented scrutiny that enabled familiarity with garments rarely found en masse in museum collections. Although the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition was drawn from the original Diana Vreeland show,1 it was not orchestrated by a major museum. Instead, artistic and commercial control came directly from the luxury company Yves Saint Laurent International. Previously exhibited in Russia and China, promotion for the Yves Saint Laurent: Retrospective focused on the representation of an influential model of fashion design practice and toured across the world to encourage development of local fashion in countries with emergent industries (Watson 1987). These exhibitions stimulated conversations about fashion representation in art institutions and the relevance of European luxury fashion as models for local practice. Their effect was provocative in demonstrating the potency of fashion for debate and cultural exchange in Australia. As discussed, the grand fashion narrative opens up public accessibility to exclusive fashion brands (Blanchard 2015), and generates serious acknowledgement of fashion design practices (Wilson 2005). Criticisms directed towards this style of exhibition are well documented and relate to the corporate advantages of the replication of art values (Sudjic 2001); fashion houses curating “vanity” exhibitions (Blanchard 2015); memorialization and hagiography (Craik 1994; Steele 2005; Stevenson 2008); and conservatism (Breward 2003). Furthermore, with a constant flow of international touring exhibitions of fashion to Australia there appears to be less emphasis on the development of museum fashion collections and supporting curatorial positions. There are, however, other qualities that emerging curatorial practices in Australia offer in terms of global positioning, narratives of wear and representation of the discipline. These are illustrated in the selection of key recent exhibition projects discussed in this chapter. Craig Douglas’ survey of Australian curatorial practices of the past sixty years (Douglas 2010) succinctly documented the growth of fashion collections and display in major institutions representing fashion; the National Gallery of Australia, the National

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Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum (now known as Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Sydney), acknowledging particular shifts in curatorial practice over the decades.2 This chapter focuses on a new period of curatorial practice studying a series of recent fashion exhibitions sited in museums or related cultural venues. These projects employ creative and critical strategies that have mediated local design, circulation of ideas, collective forms of socializing (O’Neill and Wilson 2010: 19) and place branding.

Local heroes—curating an Australian designer survey Once rare events (Menkes 2011; Horsley 2014: 172–245),3 exhibitions about a single brand or fashion house are now regular museum occasions worldwide. Not surprisingly, in recent years there has been a regular flow of touring international fashion exhibitions to Australia.4 Peter McNeil has described this influx as “a golden age of couture” (McNeil 2014: 33), cautioning against the limited fashion dialogues presented, rather than critical analysis or support for local curatorial endeavors. In an environment of large-scale, wellresourced global touring fashion exhibitions, it is important to consider alternative curatorial practices addressing other models and expressions of fashion. Grand fashion narratives about Australian designers are rare. So the presentation of the first major exhibition of designer Collette Dinnigan’s5 twenty-five year oeuvre in 2016 was meaningful in offering a local subject in this format. Described by Vogue Australia’s editor-in-chief Edwina McCann as the country’s most internationally-acclaimed fashion designer (McCann 2016), Collette Dinnigan’s design practice and eponymous brand reflected the emergence of an industry over a formative period—one that was instrumental in changing the perception of Australian fashion. For example, Australian Fashion Week (AFW ) was established in 1996 to take advantage of the extensive international media coverage generated by designers like Dinnigan, providing an opportune moment to showcase local design (Healy 2010: 175). Dinnigan’s retrospective, Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced with Glynis Jones as lead curator, showcased the designer’s distinctive creative process, production techniques and sustainable approaches to design within an independent fashion house. Dinnigan’s enterprise was significant for embracing practices not commonly aligned with Australia. For instance, her background and specialization in lingerie design, the fine craftsmanship of her garments—often made from lace and decorated with embroidery and her limited edition production. Today, Australian designers increasingly show collections at fashion weeks around the world, but in 1995 Dinnigan became Australia’s first designer invited by the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode to show on the Paris ready-to-wear schedule. The notoriety of this act impacted the perception of Australian design with the recognition of fashion design skills aligned with the reputation of the French fashion industry. For Dinnigan, this offered unprecedented accessibility to global markets and industry critique. Nevertheless, growing an Australiabased practice was challenging for the designer: Dinnigan initially struggled with the limitations of an emerging fashion environment facing a diminished manufacturing sector

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and growth of disposable fashion, as well as limited investment and recognition of creative industry at this time. She shared her beliefs with journalist Joe Fisher during a visit to Australian Fashion Week in 1999: We haven’t got a national fashion culture [. . .] This country doesn’t invest enough in this industry at the grassroots level—it’s very much in the quick-to-market publicity sense of branding as opposed to the quality of the product. FISHER 1999 The exhibition Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced (2015–2016) at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney surveyed her career—established in 1990—bringing together material from the museum collection and designer’s archive over eight gallery spaces. The challenge in curating the exhibition was to move beyond simply displaying “beautiful” clothing and relate the impact of her practice as one emerging from the cultural and economic landscape of Australian fashion. In addition, the exhibition, and Dinnigan’s practice, was appropriated as an exemplar at the exhibition launch in the wake of recent changes in national government policy and museum resources. This reflected the cultural and political shifts in the identity of Australian fashion in the public sphere, which has made significant progress since Dinnigan began her practice in the early 1990s. At the launch of the exhibition, Julie Bishop, Australia’s Federal Government Minister for Foreign Affairs spoke about Australia’s fashion diplomacy strategy (Traill-Nash 2015). This plan, proposed by the Australian Government for 2014– 2016, promoted Australia’s creative industry—particularly fashion—by forging cultural partnerships abroad (Australian Government 2014). This undertaking positioned fashion as part of an economic and foreign policy that aimed to support local talent internationally through the government’s overseas embassies, providing funding for Australian designers to take part in international events like Paris Fashion Week. This was significant in terms of Dinnigan’s past participation with the European fashion calendar as a pioneer in engaging with a global industry, while based in Australia. At the same event, the museum’s commitment to the representation and scholarship of fashion was acknowledged with the newly established Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Centre for Fashion, which houses an extensive fashion archive of more than 30,000 international and Australian pieces. In representing Dinnigan’s work, the exhibition constructed dialogues about her design process: from ideation to dressing practices. The curatorial team, led by museum curator Glynis Jones, included Dinnigan as well as set designer Anna Tregloan. Each introduced different exhibition perspectives and contributed to spatial and didactic elements of the show. Dinnigan continued to design throughout the development phase of the exhibition exploring how garments were to be arranged, Tregloan created spatial atmospheres to house garments and empower viewing conditions, and Jones’ role was to establish the cultural and historical context of Dinnigan’s design practice.6 Designing in the museum environment was a new experience for Tregloan, who has worked largely in the performing arts as an established set designer, installation artist and director. Her approach was to study the everyday narratives of Dinnigan’s garments—ones that we curate ourselves—to

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Figure 3.1 Installation Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced. Photo: Marino Kojdanovski © Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney 2016.

invite a more engaged participation between viewer and object, manipulating space with devices like mirrors or veiling.7 Tregloan considered the entire composition, breaking up the exhibition into eight specific atmospheres, or mise-en-scènes, that each enabled multiple ways of experiencing Dinnigan’s practice. For example, the central gallery space, titled “25 Years of Collette Dinnigan,” featured mirrors on both ceilings and floors to create dynamic visual movement that collaged multiple garments into an abstract pattern. Saturated with these various vistas, the viewer would encounter random details of craftsmanship with each new angle. Video production company Flying Machine Films8 created a projection wall of one hundred looks from the ready-to-wear collections digitally displayed across the principle exhibition room. Creatively and technically demanding, the projection footage was filmed over ten hours using ten models walking on treadmills to create a virtual runway show. The result was an immersive experience where models appeared to be walking towards the viewer. This enlivened space showcased clothing from the designer’s archive (unrestricted by museum conditions) in motion, complementing the garments selected for static display (see Figure  3.1). More contemplative environments were constructed to represent sources of inspiration and development of ideas; for example how color palettes emerged, such as a flower image or travel shot that would prompt the beginnings of a range. Curator Glynis Jones observed that the exhibition’s appeal and popularity revealed a unique working process that prompted new appreciation of Dinnigan’s designs. The exhibition also prompted reflection on familiar associations of the designer’s work, many female visitors recalled their personal narratives of wear,9 unlike the experience of a touring

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international exhibition of high fashion where garments were known commonly through media imagery. Similar to the travelling Yves Saint Laurent exhibition, which exposed an influential model of French fashion intended to encourage young designers and open up opportunities for foreign investment, the Collette Dinnigan exhibition exemplified an outward-looking model of an Australian practice that navigated the tension between local and global. In contrast to the curation of a retrospective exhibition representing a designer’s output, Australian designers have also curated exhibitions as an extension of their practice, often within a commercially-active fashion enterprise.

Fashion playgrounds—curating for children The recent growth of child-centered creative programs in Australian museums has facilitated curatorial approaches which focus upon collaborative, interactive and flexible experiences with art and design (Piscitelli 2011). For instance, in 2013 the National Gallery of Victoria launched an innovative children’s program as part of their annual exhibition schedule. Supported by the Truby and Florence Williams Charitable Trust grant (Stephens 2013), the initiative aimed at creating more diverse gallery experiences. The grant supported specially-commissioned interactive artworks and exhibitions by national and international artists and designers. These commissions encouraged practitioners to share their creativity through children’s eyes by creating design experiences that were playful and interactive. Under this premise fashion designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales of the ready-to-wear fashion house Romance Was Born were invited to curate the first show in the new children’s gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria10 with the exhibition Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids (2014–2015) (see Plate 9). Sales and Plunkett established their house in 2005 and have become renowned for their immersive and collaborative design practice. Their collections are typically imaginative and overblown with eclectic cultural references; from Australian flora and fauna, traditional craft techniques to kitsch elements of popular culture. Collections are presented in theatrical settings, either on runways or in gallery spaces, where meticulously crafted environments are constructed into an alternative world. Designers working with museum collections have grappled with concerns related to representation of contemporary design practices and explored the potential of the exhibition medium as a powerful marketing tool and extension of practice. In this example, the close working relationship between Sydney-based Romance Was Born and the National Gallery of Victoria demonstrates transference of practice between designer and museum collection and highlights the potential for fashion as a playful medium to engage with children (see Figure 3.2). The exhibition brought together an abundant selection of sources relevant to the designers’ idiosyncratic creative perspective. By looking behind their creative process, the designers reflected on childhood experiences and iconography influencing their work. This accumulation of materials made visible their creative process in order to encourage creative design and making for children. References included the classic Australian children’s book The Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs (1918), a culturally influential picture book inspired by Australian flora and fauna. In developing the exhibition,

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Figure 3.2 A model displays a creation of Romance Was Born’s collection during Rosemount Australian Fashion Week in Sydney, April 30, 2009. Photo: Marianna Massey. © Getty Images.

Sales and Plunkett were given freedom to access the National Gallery of Victoria’s holdings with the mission to invite children into the museum environment through a highly decorative and interactive exhibition display. The immersive environments in each of the gallery spaces were saturated with surface pattern, juxtaposing artworks, everyday objects and games technology over four rooms. The gallery’s collection was mixed with items acquired on eBay and gleaned from the designers’ personal archive. Displays featured artworks from Australian painters like Rupert Bunny and Albert Tucker, garments designed by Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee, to found cultural relics like My Little Pony toys and Milo tins. The aim was to spark curiosity in children: Sales explained their ambition was to “make our museum within the museum” (Stephens 2014). In the context of an exhibition for children, customary distinctions between object and value were able to be overturned, breaking down the hierarchy of museum selection in the eclectic display of objects. Children and adults were invited to experience the museum collection in a fanciful way that encouraged diverse readings reflecting the designers’ colloquial aesthetic and way of working (see Figure 3.3). These spaces in the exhibition facilitated dynamic engagement with the content. For example, the “Bush Magic” room featured commissioned interior elements by Australian artists and designers transforming how objects were viewed and understood in the space. Paper engineer Benja Harney11 designed a paper foliage canopy with tendrils that hung from the ceiling, while games company Many Monkeys created a projected floor feature with two interactive billabongs12 filled with magical water creatures. Wallpapers throughout

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Figure 3.3 Installation view of Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids at NGV International October 17, 2014–April 12, 2015. © National Gallery of Victoria.

the exhibition were created from designs by artist Del Kathryn Barton and 1950s textile designer Bee Taplin. Express Yourself was an exhibition specifically designed for children, however, unlike the blockbuster-style format of Collette Dinnigan, it was not a historical retrospective of a designer’s body of work. Instead, the exhibition was curated around a fictional narrative intended to conjure up a magical world for children. Informed by the designers’ childhood memories of growing up in regional Australia, Romance Was Born’s ready-to-wear collections, and commissioned collaborations with contemporary artists and designers, Plunkett and Sales revealed their curatorial approach and insights into their design process. The relationship between a commercial and curatorial practice were merged with Sales and Plunkett developing the exhibition in tandem with their autumn/winter collection that season. Also titled “Bush Magic,” the collection was directly inspired by themes of childhood memories and dreams relating to the exhibition. References to the National Gallery’s collection manifested in the design details of these garments. For example, designs by Australia’s pre-eminent mid-century couturier, Hall Ludlow, influenced the mod silhouettes, many of which featured the decorative motif of a 1960s gold filigree button by the designer. Curating the exhibition involved a collaborative dialogue with the gallery, Romance Was Born interrogated the sources that inspired their practice with a younger audience. Although immersive environments are typical for Romance Was Born, the transference of knowledge and interactivity with objects was a departure from how Sales and Plunkett

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customarily communicate their fashion collections each season. The exhibition opened up art and design artifacts to a new audience and used the creative process as the premise of the arrangement of displays. This move towards diversification of content and more participatory approaches, is reflected in other recent examples of curation in Australia.

Performative curator—critique of fashion in the exhibition space Outside of the major state or national museums in Australia there are some highly innovative curatorial practices that address fashion. These have emerged, largely, from artist-run, independent or institutional exhibition platforms that support emerging curators and artists in forums that are by nature experimental and interdisciplinary. Here, museum conditions are less relevant and instead critical and creative narratives on fashion—often intersecting with art practice—are played out. Within these spaces, an ongoing enquiry for curators and practitioners is to explore and critique the social, cultural and political role of fashion systems and production. Critical interventions associated with literary and art practices are explored to establish new, more dynamic fashion practices and interactions. For example, creative practitioners might employ a more speculative stance using performative expressions that privilege fiction over objectivity to present multiple voices and points of view that are not necessarily standard critical styles (Frichot et al 2012). The Melbourne-based fashion project D&K (Dolci & Kabana), established in 2013 by Ricarda Bigolin and Nella Themelios,13 adopts fictional actions to critique commercial traditions of fashion by subverting established museum environments or luxury retail spaces. Simulated scenarios that mimic design processes and communication strategies of high fashion are played out in gallery spaces that, in this context, encourage critical reflection on accepted commercial behavior and traditions. Bigolin and Themelios create participatory environments such as sales showrooms, photoshoot set ups, or party events, where audiences are immersed in quintessential fashion settings. In titling their label D&K, the designers played with branding and aspirations attached to the luxury Italian company Dolce & Gabbana, with D&G being the diffusion range of the brand. As practitioners Bigolin and Themelios are embedded in an academic environment of practice-based research at RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in Melbourne. Bigolin leads the Master of Fashion (Design) program and coordinates fourth year honours in Bachelor of Fashion (Design), while Themelios is creative producer at RMIT Design Hub, a critical platform for design exhibitions and events. The pair’s practice is thus embedded in academic research and their output—which traverses curatorial projects to garment making—critically explores the production and communication of commercial high fashion. The designers explain their practice in the following terms: [. . .] there is an inherent curatorial practice within the very structure of D&K. It is through the critical potential of fashion that we develop all projects, and we question both the role of the curator and the producer within art and design. In particular, D&K thinks

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through the ways that fashion practice can and does comment upon the conditions of its own production and dissemination. The history of institutional critique has been particularly influential in this regard, which highlighted the political and economic conditions of display within art. Many of the exhibitionary modes and strategies that D&K has adopted mines this history, self-reflexively foregrounding the space of presentation and mediation as part of the content of the work.14 An example of this approach is the exhibition #thathautecouturefeeling, curated by D&K and staged at Bus Projects in Melbourne15 in 2013. The exhibition explored consumers’ subjective relationship with high fashion. In the show, Bigolin and Themelios played with the idea of “high” as a highly-charged state of emotion experienced through consumption of fashion. The space was curated to mimic expressions of high fashion, from display techniques to performative events, such as their poetry readings of “haute couture feelings.” Display devices referenced the aesthetics of showroom and retail spaces and were blended within the gallery space where tear sheets and other fashion-related ephemera were cast about. The installation suggested a disruption and reappropriation of fashion production and communication strategies. 1. #thathautecouturefeeling Is all I will ever get just this feeling? Sitting with this feeling, Jump-cutting, hashtagging, and overexposing a feeling. Feeling high is just a few keystrokes away from feeling low. The closest I’ll ever get to haute couture is the packaging. The excerpt above is from the poem “#thathautecouturefeeling” by D&K from 2013, created for the exhibition. Read aloud by audience members at the opening of the exhibition, it mused on producing and curating sensations of haute couture clothing from the context of a niche geographical setting. D&K’s reflection and critique of design practice, and how fashion is communicated by luxury brands underpins their curatorial approach and reflects a local response to the grand narratives of Western fashion history and culture. D&K’s installations and events are performative with unresolved boundaries that invite slippage with participants. Their exhibitions do not follow traditional formulas or scheduling and instead offer momentary encounters that are sometimes limited to one day or several weeks. Luca Marchetti and Emanuele Quinz have noted the power of fashion and garments as a social medium, “Clothes have become an instrument for meeting, exchanging, giving and acknowledging. And the performance is no longer defined as a show, destined for the eyes of an audience, but as a lived experience that no longer needs a witness” (Marchetti and Quinz 2009: 122). This essential relationship with clothes, dressing and fashion communication is conveyed across D&K’s projects. With a range of printed media—in the form of poetry or scripts, as well as digital elements, like film—the

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exhibition invited visitor engagement with the installation. The designers curated the space and became part of the exhibition environment, breaking up formalities of spatial layouts. Dressed in D&K branded garments, they moved between performing the exhibition and socializing with the crowd. Through curatorial projects and their fashion design output, D&K critique the activities of the high fashion system by deconstructing its formats of display. D&K adopt curatorial practices that recontextualize fashion tropes via acts of self-curation and performance. In this context Bigolin and Themelios become an embodied part of the exhibition, as a living artifact or prop. As previously discussed, the historical precedent of international haute couture exhibitions touring to Australia was significant. However, with public discussion mainly generating homage or mimicry of international design, D&K reflect a departure from this paradigm.

Fashion destinations—exhibition as place branding Given the history of debate on fashion exhibition practice, and in the context of a niche cultural setting, one compelling narrative on this phenomenon relates to how a program of touring global fashion exhibitions changed the identity of a local Australian town. Bendigo, a small regional town in central Victoria with population of 146,424,16 has emerged as a cultural destination facilitated by the exhibition program of the regional public gallery. Since 2010, Bendigo Art Gallery has hosted a series of major fashion exhibitions collaborating with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London to deliver The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–1957 (2008–2009), The White Wedding Dress: 200 years of wedding fashions (2011) and Undressed: 350 years of underwear in fashion (2014), as well as Modern Love: Fashion visionaries from the FIDM Museum Los Angeles (2013–2014). In addition, the gallery has curated fashion-related exhibitions centered on known celebrities like Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. Once an important nineteenth-century gold mining destination, Bendigo attracted émigrés from Wales, England, America, Europe and China to make their fortune on the goldfields; now the small regional center draws crowds more interested in viewing fashion than searching for gold. Journalist Michael Shmith identified Bendigo’s changing character through the relationship between high-profile events, exhibitions and community relations, in the following terms: It is known in the trade as “the Bendigo effect,” and is the antipodean cousin to “the Bilbao effect.” This describes the transformative process whereby a regional gallery becomes so different, so adventurous and so popular that it puts its city firmly on the international cultural map and brings in millions of dollars in tourist revenue. SHMITH 2014 Like the impact of art culture on the former manufacturing center Bilbao in Northern Spain with the establishment of the Guggenheim Museum in 1997, the role of a cultural institution

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has been pivotal for Bendigo in developing the relationship between fashion and destination. This was transformative in developing new audiences and re-branding the regional town “as stylish, creative and cultured” (Williams 2015: 148). Poignantly there is no permanent fashion collection at Bendigo Art Gallery; nor are there plans to develop one. Instead the gallery has an established Australian art collection from the 1850s to today, including work from the Bendigo goldfields alongside nineteenth-century European paintings, sculptures and decorative arts. Fashion is well represented at Bendigo Art Gallery with travelling exhibitions. When director Karen Quinlan first negotiated an Australian tour with The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–1957 from the V&A, this was the most ambitious undertaking in the gallery’s history. By nature, fashion exhibitions require specialized conditions, monitored environments and exhibition infrastructure—like mannequins, glass showcases and adjustable lighting systems—along with increased levels of staff to support large attendance figures and public programs. These resources are not standard in regional museums. For major urban centers, delivering exhibitions on this scale might seem routine, but for Bendigo this undertaking was momentous. Given this, staging a major touring international fashion exhibition might seem potentially risky and overly ambitious, however, the nimbleness of a smaller institution has advantages in their ability to negotiate and program exhibitions to fit around touring schedules of global exhibitions.17 The alignment of fashion with Bendigo Art Gallery also generated other qualities: Fiona Anderson has argued that museums are drawn to staging fashion exhibitions to strategically position themselves alongside certain cultural associations related to entertainment, celebrity, status, morality, consumerism, sexuality and image (Anderson 2000). The impact of fashion on Bendigo has undoubtedly enriched the community and economy, attracting tourism in the area that has uplifted the image of a regional town. The V&A has had a substantial effect on Bendigo. The regular touring program from the museum to the Bendigo Art Gallery established an association for this small regional institution with the larger city-based galleries, like the National Gallery of Victoria, and attracted national media attention. Notoriety was also achieved by Bendigo Art Gallery for being an exclusive Australian venue, often premiering V&A exhibitions before London, as was the case with The White Wedding Dress and Undressed. Curatorial manager Tansy Curtin describes their approach to be holistic and immersive: the town is themed for each major show, with the exhibition content permeating into the everyday activities of the community. Where critics might be concerned with the premise of cultural invasion and marketing hype above critical appraisal of these international touring exhibitions (McNeil 2014: 34), the impact in Bendigo has in fact been one of regional stimulation. Local business initiatives, such as accommodation and travel packages, are designed to complement each show, even the regional trains are decorated in support of each exhibition.18 The curators at Bendigo also focus on making local connections with each exhibition, for example, The White Wedding Dress included an Australian section with garments from 1822 to 2011, including contemporary designers such as Toni Maticevski, Romance Was Born and MaterialByProduct. The number and regularity of these major fashion events now staged in regional centers has shifted customary alliances with state gallery venues as host, drawing audiences outside urban centers. Though critics have debated populist tactics of selecting fashion

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to draw crowds, Bendigo Art Gallery has used its exhibition program dynamically to make strong audience connections, first visits, repeat visitations and accumulated knowledge on a more diverse range of fashion practices, aligning themselves with established museum institutions like the V&A.

Conclusion The emerging curatorial practices profiled here display the potency of place to shift perceptions of fashion. The significance of these local practices as facilitating participatory and collaborative experiences that dynamically display fashion, or critique its systems. These four scenarios of fashion curation in Australia have produced narratives which capture an emerging fashion culture and curatorial profession. These curatorial approaches offer platforms for local voices and new encounters in relation to high fashion systems. By exposing practices, people and venues that are globally less familiar or niche, expresses the diversity of the curatorial field and the impact of larger global initiatives, such as travelling exhibitions.

Notes 1

Exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 14, 1983 to September 2, 1984.

2

There are two principle Australian institutions that actively collect fashion: the National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. This is no longer a collection priority for the National Gallery of Australia.

3

Jeffrey Horseley’s Incomplete Inventory of Fashion Exhibitions Since 1971 includes a selection of exhibitions curated in, or toured to, Australia.

4

Touring international exhibitions of the last six years, excluding the Bendigo Art Gallery which is discussed in the text, are: Queensland’s Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA ) with Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones March 27 to June 27, 2010 (from the V&A); Valentino Retrospective: Past/present/future August 7, to November 14, 2010 (developed by Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris); Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion November 1, 2014 to February 15, 2015 (originally conceived by the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Kyoto Costume Institute); National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne with The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to Catwalk October 17, 2014 to February 8, 2015 (organized by The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with Maison Jean Paul Gaultier) and Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide with Fashion Icons: masterpieces from the Collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs October 25, 2014 to February 15, 2015.

5

Collette Dinnigan, Sydney (fashion house), 1990 to 2013, Collette Dinnigan (designer) born South Africa 1965, arrived in Australia 1985.

6

Interview with Glynis Jones, curator of Fashion and Dress at The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, April 27, 2016.

7

Interview with Anna Tregloan, April 29, 2016.

8

Flying Machine Films footage from the Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced exhibition see .

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Interview with Glynis Jones Curator of Fashion and Dress at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, April 27, 2016.

10 Invited by Katie Somerville, Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles, National Gallery of Victoria. 11 Paperform, Sydney, est. 2004 by Benja Harney. 12 Many Monkeys, Melbourne, an independent games studio, established in 2012 by Matthew Ditton. See . 13 D&K were one of six winners of 2014 Han Nefkens “Fashion on the Edge Award” and were commissioned to design a specific work for the exhibition (Teunissen 2015). D&K also participated in The Future of Fashion is Now exhibition curated by José Teunissen from October 11, 2014 to January 18, 2015 at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and their work is included in the permanent collection of the museum. 14 D&K email interview, May 4, 2016. 15 Bus Projects located in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia and is an independent, not-for-profit artist run initiative. Bus Projects fosters critical, conceptual and interdisciplinary practices of Australian artists through exhibitions, events and residencies. 16 According to population statistics from 2013. 17 Ibid. 18 Interview Tansy Curtin, April 26, 2016.

References Adams, B. (1987) “YSL : Resurrection of a Desired World,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 23: 47. Anderson, F. (2000) “Museums as Fashion Media,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures, Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London and New York: Routledge: 371–89. Australian Government. (2014) Public Diplomacy Strategy 2014–16, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, available online: http://dfat.gov.au/people-to-people/public-diplomacy/Pages/ public-diplomacy-strategy.aspx (accessed July 12, 2016). Blanchard, T. (2015) “Forget Fashion Shops: How Designers Embraced Art Exhibitions,” The Guardian, Australian edition, September 20, available online: www.theguardian.com/fashion/ 2015/sep/19/why-fashion-houses-are-staging-their-own-exhibitions (accessed April 1, 2016). Blum, S. and Hamer, L. (1981) Fabulous Fashion 1907–67: From the Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia Limited. Bishop, J. (2016) “Address to Opening of Collette Dinnigan Retrospective Exhibition,” Minister for Foreign Affairs the Hon Julie Bishop MP, September 2, available online: http://foreignminister. gov.au/speeches/Pages/2015/jb_sp_150902.aspx?w=tb1CaGpkPX %2FlS0K%2Bg9ZKE g%3 D%3D (accessed April 1, 2016). Breward, C. (2003) “Shock of the Frock—Accusations of Commercialism and Dumbing Down,” The Guardian, October 18. Craik, J. (1994) The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, London and New York: Routledge, 6. Douglas, C. (2010) “The Spectacle of Fashion: Museum Collection, Display and Exhibition,” in Australian Fashion Unstitched: The Last 60 Years, Port Melbourne, Victoria: Cambridge University Press: 128–50. Fisher, J. (1999) “Designing Aussies Come of Age with No National Fashion History to Draw from—Australian Designers are Starting Fresh and Creating some Eye-catching Work in the Process,” National Post, July 10.

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Frichot, H. et al. (2012) “An Antipodean Imaginary for Architecture + Philosophy: Fictocritical Approaches to Design Practice Research,” Architecture Culture and the Question of Knowledge: Doctoral Research Today, Spring: 69–96. Healy, R. (2010) “Global Positioning of Australian Fashion,” in M. Maynard (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Volume 7 Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers: 174–9. Horsley, J. (2014) “An Incomplete Inventory of Fashion Exhibitions Since 1971,” in J. Clark, A. de la Haye and J. Horsley (eds), Exhibiting Fashion: Before and Now, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press: 177–245. Laing, J. and Frost, W. (2014) “Using Fashion to Reimagine Destination Image,” in K.W. Williams, J. Laing, and W. Frost (eds), Fashion, Design and Events, Oxon and New York: Routledge: 148–59. Marchetti, L. and Quinz, E. (2010) “Invisible Fashion. From the Interface to Re-embodiment: Experience Beyond Clothes,” in J. Brand and J. Teunissen (eds), Fashion and Imagination, Arnhem: ArtEZ Press: 116–26. McCann, E. (2016) Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced, press release, available online: https://maas. museum/event/collette-dinnigan-unlaced/ (accessed April 16, 2016). McNeil, P. (2014) “The Fashion Phenomenon—Fashion in the Gallery and Museum,” in Art Monthly Australia, 275(November): 28–35. Meek, J. (ed.) (1987) Yves Saint Laurent: Retrospective, Sydney: Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Menkes, S. (2011) “Gone Global: Fashion as Art,” The New York Times, available online: www. nytimes.com/2011/07/05/fashion/is-fashion-really-museum-art.html?_r=0 (accessed April 16, 2016). O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (eds) (2010) Curating and the Educational Turn, London: Open Editions, 19. Phillips, A. (2010) “Education Aesthetics,” in P. O’Neill and M. Wilson (eds), Curating and the Educational Turn, London: Open Editions, 83–96. Piscitelli, B. (2011) “What’s Driving Children’s Cultural Participation?,” in Understanding Museums: Australian Museums and Museology, Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien (eds), National Museum of Australia, available online: nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/BP iscitelli_2011. html (accessed July 14, 2016). Shmith, M. (2014) “Bendigo Art Gallery Thrives on the Quinlan Effects,” The Age, March 21, available online: www.theage.com.au/victoria/bendigo-art-gallery-thrives-on-the-quinlaneffects–20140320-355ov.html#ixzz46uxLyVR b (accessed April 15, 2016). Steele, V. (2005) “Fashion Museums and Collections,” in V. Steele, (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Clothing and Fashion, Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Vol 2: 60–1. Stephens, A. (2013) “Romance of Art Finds New Birthplace,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 9, available online: www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/romance-of-art-finds-newbirthplace-among-children-20130809-2rm17.html (accessed June 3, 2016). Stephens, A. (2014) “Fashion Stars Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales of ‘Romance Was Born’ Put on a Show,” Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October, available online: www.smh.com.au/ entertainment/fashion-stars-anna-plunkett-and-luke-sales-of-romance-was-born-put-on-ashow-20141006-10q4ra.html (accessed May 1, 2016). Stevenson, N.J. (2008) “The Fashion Retrospective,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 12(2): 219–35. Sudjic, D. (2001) “Is the Future of Art in their Hands?” The Observer, October 14. Teunissen, J. (2014) “D&K Ricarda Bigolin and Nella Themelios,” The Future of Fashion is Now, Rotterdam: Museums Boijmans van Beuningen, 174–5. Traill-Nash, G. (2015) “DFAT, Australian Fashion Chamber launch fashion diplomacy, Bishop-style,” The Australian, September 1, available online: www.theaustralian.com.au/life/fashion/dfat-

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australian-fashion-chamber-launch-fashion-diplomacy-bishopstyle/news-story/988bcbe6637a9 09a53ac769b02def793 (accessed July 12, 2016). Watson, B. (1987) “From Chic to Cheek,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 15: 3. Williams, K.W., Laing, J. and Frost, W. (2013) Fashion, Design and Events, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 148–59. Wilson, E. (2005) “Costuming Clio,” History Workshop Journal, 60: 229–32.

4 FASHION CURATION AT MOMU: DIGITAL CHALLENGES Kaat Debo

This chapter discusses the ways in which the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum curates contemporary fashion and how digital changes and opportunities have thoroughly influenced this practice in the past fifteen years. The meteoric rise of digital communication and the growing importance of digital imagery in fashion since the end of the 1990s have created new challenges and opportunities for museums. In recent years, the MoMu has looked for relevant solutions, both in its collection and in its exhibition policy, to the many challenges posed by the rapid upsurge of digital production in the world of fashion. In coming years, the digital sphere will remain an important priority in the MoMu’s projects. The museum wants to grant itself the liberty to experiment with new technologies. This means that the MoMu will also have to realign its budgets and team, with new roles, linked to the new technologies and increased audience participation, which will require staff members in all strata of the museum’s organization to change attitudes and perspectives.

Background The MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum opened its doors in September of 2002. It was the brainchild of Linda Loppa, who was installed as director by the Antwerp Provincial Government at the end of the 1990s and was asked to guide the museum into the twentyfirst century. Loppa oversaw its relocation from Oelegem, a village on the outskirts of Antwerp, to the historic city center and initiated a new outlook, with a stronger emphasis on contemporary (Belgian) fashion. In the early 2000s, the museum took up residence in a nineteenth-century building renovated by the Ghent architect Marie-Josée Van Hee. The location was christened the “ModeNatie”1 and now houses the fashion museum as well as the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and the Flanders Fashion Institute,2 with the aim of bringing together a range of agents from the world of fashion in one building in order to facilitate and encourage collaborations and crosspollination.3 The ModeNatie’s architecture reflects this vision. An atrium with an impressive stairwell (see Figure 4.1), providing access to all the separate spaces, was installed in the 73

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Figure 4.1 Atrium of ModeNatie by architect Marie-Josée Van Hee. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Sonja Dewolf.

middle of the building. Ingeniously devised views ensure that the image of the atrium is always present in the building as a whole (Borret 2002: 169), stimulating optimal interaction between the diverse users of the building. The staircase slowly tapers as one gets closer to the top floor, which houses the fashion department, thereby cleverly expressing the boundaries between public and closed areas. The MoMu, with its publicly accessible exhibition spaces and the education studio, is located on the ground floor and the second floor, where the stairs are at their widest. On the fourth floor, we find semi-public spaces housing the museum’s offices and library, and the offices of the Flanders Fashion Institute. The classrooms and studios of the fashion department,4 which are not open to the general public, are located on the top floor. In symbolic terms one could state that the fashion department, as the site of nurturing of young, design talent, is the top of a pyramid. This beating heart of the ModeNatie is firmly set on broad foundations, made up of the museum, which safeguards art-historical reflection and analysis, and the FFI , which acts as economic representative of fashion as a creative industry. In other words, the structure carries and expresses all aspects of fashion as an applied art, and with its creative, arthistorical and economic branches, the ModeNatie is unique in the world.

MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum When Linda Loppa was installed as director, this vision served as the guiding principle of the museum’s collection and exhibition policies. The collection policy doesn’t focus

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exclusively on garment, but pays broad attention to and also collects the ephemera produced by contemporary designers, such as look books/catalogues, invitations to runway shows, press releases, runway video recordings, etc. But the museum also acquires highly creative or particularly well-designed promotional materials, such as T-shirts and perfume bottles. Such objects have an important part to play in the marketing and commercial strategies effected by fashion houses, but they are, at the same time, a carrier of the designer’s artistic DNA and form an integral component of their creative universe. In his doctoral dissertation on this specific sub-collection at the MoMu, Marco Pecorari describes this category of objects as artifacts that often outlive the fashion practice but are rarely central to the conservation of fashion; nor do they feature prominently on the collection conservator’s agenda: “The outcome of durative collaborations between famous fashion designers, graphic designers, photographers and other actors, these objects are nevertheless frequently discarded by the industry and generally undervalued by both fashion museums and academia” (Pecorari 2015: 16). Although the acquisition of such ephemera has become a common practice in some museums and archives, only a handful of fashion museums have collected them consistently. Using the MoMu’s ephemera collection, Pecorari investigates “the ways in which fashion ephemera represent garments, and [he explores] in depth what type of knowledge about garments these ephemera enable, and what their epistemic potentials suggest about the ontology of dress” (Pecorari 2015: 185). In its exhibition policy as well, the MoMu has always regarded the garment as one of the many products that are engendered by the creative process of designers and fashion houses. An exhibition’s mise-en-scène is therefore almost never merely décor, but is often used to generate a visual context for the garments and objects on display. In 2004 the museum presented “Goddess. The Classical Mode,” an exhibition on loan from the Met’s Costume Institute. “Goddess” focused on the longstanding influence of Greek Antiquity on contemporary fashion. However, through the centuries fashion has added elements that were not present in the original Hellenic attire. Many elements of what today are known as classical styles, are historically incorrect (e.g. the idea that classical dress is white is historically incorrect and probably derived from the faded Greek statuary, which was originally polychrome in nature). Exactly this idea is stressed by the exhibition design, which was created especially for the exhibition at MoMu. The basis for the design was the notion of the “ruin,” though in a contemporary context. The garments were presented amidst, on and in front of a “ruin” of old furniture that formed a natural barrier between the items on display and the visitor (see Figure 4.2). The furniture—a ragbag of neo-classical styles—was painted white, blurring any reference to a specific historical period. Additionally the five thematic sections of the exhibition were separated from each other by large canvases on which (fashion) were images printed. That same year the MoMu invited curator Judith Clark to create the exhibition “Malign Muses. When Fashion Turns Back,” which later travelled to the V&A Museum in London with a new title “Spectres. When Fashion Turns Back.” The collaboration with Clark resulted in an exhibition with an exceptionally open structure. As a curator she provided different “suggestions,” possible ways to exhibit dress, thereby assisted by an architect (Yuri Avvakumov), an academic (Caroline Evans), a jeweller (Naomi Filmer) and a fashion illustrator (Ruben Toledo). The exhibition design, for which Clark collaborated with Russian

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Figure 4.2 Exhibition view of Goddess. The Classical Mode, MoMu, Antwerp, 2004. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Tim Stoops.

Figure 4.3 Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back, MoMu, Antwerp, 2004. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Ronald Stoops.

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constructivist architect Yuri Avvakumov, resulted in a scaffold-like structure that was the physical expression of Clark’s narratives (see Figure 4.3). “[. . .] Clark could see the exciting potential of designing an exhibition space that suggested the aesthetic imperatives of Constructivist theory, freeing up room for objects to communicate with each other and utilizing flat planes of decoration in a theatrical idiom” (Breward 2004: 13).

Digital archives In her essay “Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities,” Caroline Evans writes: “Current fashion participates in an economic system that is developing very differently from its nineteenth-century origins, which pioneered the techniques of retail and advertising to promote the garment. Now the fashioned garment circulates in a contemporary economy as part of a network of signs, of which the actual garment is but one. From its very existence primarily as an object, the fashion commodity has evolved into a mutant form with the capacity to insert itself into a wider network of signs, operating simultaneously in many registers” (Evans 2000: 85). Looking for relevant and visually interesting ways to open up the complex “network of signs” of which the fashion object is an aspect, is perhaps one of the most complicated challenges contemporary fashion curators are facing. But, in their collection policies, museums must also address the question of whether and how such networks can be displayed and opened up. From 2002 until 2007, MoMu and four other European organizations5 comprised the Contemporary Fashion Archive (CFA ), a European project that was funded through the European Commission’s cultural program, Culture 2000. This aimed to create “a unique information network, which detected and presented current positions and developments in fashion design. This information network took the form of an Internet platform with a digital archive and local documentation centers located at the different institutions of the partners in question [. . .] The focus lies on the impulses, aesthetic concepts and network strategies of a new generation of designers that shaped 90s fashion, e.g. Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela and Walter van Beirendonck, later followed by Raf Simons, Viktor & Rolf, Bless and Balenciaga.”6 One of the goals of the CFA was to reveal the networks within contemporary fashion and to highlight the links with neighboring creative fields. The idea was to link fashion designers to the make-up artists, stylists, fashion photographers, graphic designers, architects or musicians with whom they collaborate in order to develop their collections, fashion shows, photo shoots, or shop interiors. The archive included catwalk images, fashion photographs, as well as ephemera such as invitations for fashion shows. At that time the CFA platform was not used in exhibitions, nor was there a direct link to curation. The CFA was an ambitious project that made one of the first serious digital attempts at mapping the creative networks surrounding designers and fashion houses. Simultaneously, however, the project ran into technological constraints7 and the limits of copyright legislation, and the CFA came to a standstill when the public funds dried up in 2007. Even though the website is still online, a lack of maintenance and updates meant that it quickly became outdated, which clearly underlines the vulnerability of such widereaching and labor-intensive projects.

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In 2010–2011, the museum’s library team initiated the “Open Fashion” online database. “Open Fashion” was a collaboration between the MoMu and the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, which assembled the library’s collection, the collection database, the exhibition records and the fashion department’s graduation projects into a single database. Over 50,000 records were opened up to the general public via an online database on the MoMu website, using a uniform interface. The project was realized with very limited funds, meaning that the interface is still very basic and only available in Dutch. However, the data model developed for “Open Fashion” has enabled the museum to reflect on the complexity and interconnectedness of fashion and to take a next step towards unlocking fashion’s networks. In other words, it brings diverse digital archives together in an attempt to allow the visitor to establish links and connections. March 2012 saw the launch of the Europeana Fashion project, a three-year CIP ICT PSP project (Best Practice Network)8 and a network of twenty-two partners from twelve European countries, representing the leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain. Europeana Fashion is part of Europeana, which is the EU digital platform for cultural heritage. Europeana is a portal site that brings together the digitized collections of a large selection of European cultural and scientific institutions. Europeana went online in 2008 and at that time hosted around two million objects. Currently more than thirty million objects from Europe’s biggest cultural institutions, including the Rijksmuseum and the British Library, can be accessed online. The MoMu was one of the founding partners of Europeana Fashion and acted as a content provider, in this way bringing a big part of its digital archive online. Furthermore, MoMu staff also worked on ways to curate the content of the Europeana Fashion platform in more dynamic ways through the development of a tumblr page. Europeana Fashion’s objective was to provide single-portal access (www.europeanafashion.eu) to 700,000 digital fashion-related objects, ranging from historical dress to accessories, photographs, posters, drawings, sketches, videos, and fashion catalogues, stemming from the collections of over twenty-five European museums, libraries and (private) archives. The Europeana Fashion project has been key to fostering awareness in the MoMu team of the need to develop a strategy on how to position the museum within an ever-faster evolving digital fashion world. Another, subsequent result was the realization that collecting digital information in a database without providing some kind of curation did not adequately meet the demands of contemporary (digital) audiences, and that the museum would need to develop new modes of digital curation. In a period of fifteen years, the museum, prompted by the library team, took part in three different projects for the conservation and disclosing of digital data. This same period saw an enormous boom in the production of digital content in the fashion world— via photographs, videos and fashion films—and the dissemination of content through websites, digital platforms, social media (such as Instagram and Facebook), and digital publishing such as fashion blogs and online magazines. Caroline Evans sees this development as the rise of a visual economy that is founded on instability and constant change, two of the most central concepts of fashion. She describes how the status of the image was transformed. The image has become just as much of a “product” as the object itself:

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Thus, in the technological and information revolution of the late twentieth century, the role of the image in fashion shifted. No longer mere representation, the image frequently became the commodity itself, in the form of exclusive fashion shows, internet websites, television programmes and a new kind of fashion magazine, such as Tank, Purple and Visionaire. New media and increased fashion coverage made previously elite fashion accessible to a mass audience, but only as image, never as object. EVANS 2000: 86 Today, more than ever, the garment in itself cannot express fashion’s nature. Therefore, fashion curation should be about more than the display of dress.

The digital introduced in MoMu’s exhibitions The evolutions described above inspired the MoMu to also consider digital possibilities in the museum’s exhibition policy. Where the digital aspect was first limited to integrating materials such as videos from runway shows into exhibitions, there was a graduallygrowing realization that digital products could also provide solutions to the many restrictions one encounters when displaying fashion. Using mannequins or busts usually results in static configurations, making it extremely difficult to showcase the visual dynamics that are so integral to contemporary fashion. The standard mannequin body furthermore puts restrictions on the diversity of body types that can be exhibited. Mannequins can be customized to create new body images, but this is a highly laborintensive operation that doesn’t always yield the results one hopes for. In 2011, the museum organized a retrospective exhibition on Belgian fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck (see Plate 10). Crucial to an understanding of Van Beirendonck’s oeuvre is how he questions the ways we think about beauty, sexuality and sexual stereotypes and how he seeks out alternative images of the male body. He works with a wide range of different body types in different sexual subcultures, from muscular body builders and robust “bear” types to delicate young boys, frail Japanese girls and completely imaginary characters. The museum saw itself confronted with the restrictions of the traditional ways of displaying clothing. Working with standard mannequins made it virtually impossible to include all these different types of bodies and characters or even caricatures. And even though, as mentioned above, there are ways to adapt a mannequin to fake a more muscular body, bigger volumes don’t necessarily communicate the body type you’re dealing with. Van Beirendonck often works with the so-called bear type from male gay culture: large men with hairy chests and beards. The museum decided to approach SHOW studio9 in order to create a fashion film. Nick Knight, in collaboration with stylist Simon Foxton, produced the fashion film “Walter’s Wild Knights.”10 They used a selection of garments from different seasons, which Foxton selected from Van Beirendonck’s archives. The result was a fashion film that communicates the dynamics, the energy and humor essential to Van Beirendonck’s work and the different body types that feature in his oeuvre. During the exhibition, the project was presented as a photo series and as a film (see Plate 11). The making of the fashion film at the SHOW studio in London, some

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Figure 4.4 “Dresses Undressed” by Bart Hess, 2012.

months before the opening of the exhibition in Antwerp, was live-streamed by SHOW studio. When the exhibition opened, the photoshoot was an exclusive feature in the September issue of GQ magazine, which also assisted in financing the film. During this project we not only discovered the possibilities of the medium of fashion film, but also learned how to set up an interesting interaction between the museum’s communication and exhibitions. In 2012, MoMu acquired a large historical collection from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a Dutch private collector, Jacoba de Jonge. This collection was presented for the first time in the exhibition “Living Fashion. Women’s Daily Wear 1750–1950.” Starting from questions such as “What’s underneath a pregnancy dress from the late nineteenth century?” and “Can you imagine what women wore when riding a horse at the beginning of the twentieth century?”, MoMu commissioned Dutch video artist Bart Hess to create a fashion film (see Figure  4.4). For reasons of conservation, these dresses couldn’t be worn by models. Hess therefore created digitally-manipulated images of the dresses, resulting in the poetic production “Dresses Undressed.”11 The film was screened through large projections in the exhibition space, creating an interesting visual contrast with the objects on display, and also extensively featured in MoMu’s communication. In 2014, MoMu hosted “A Shaded View of Fashion Film” (ASVOFF ), a fashion film festival curated by Diane Pernet. On the occasion of this festival, MoMu commissioned two Antwerp-based artists, Frederik Heyman and Wout Bosschaert, to create three fashion films,12 using objects from the museum’s collection from the eighteenth century up to the present, and according to three themes: embroidery, prints, and skirts. Heymans and Bosschaert translated the objects into digitally manipulated décors that are very

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Figure 4.5 Fashion films with objects from the MoMu collection by Frederik Heyman, 2014.

much part of Heymans own creative DNA (see Figure 4.5). The objects were photographed in the museum’s studio and were later digitally manipulated by the artists. The Londonbased Golden Hum sound collective designed a soundscape for these films. This resulted in digital environments where sound and light determine the rhythm of the films and underline the beauty and craftsmanship of the objects. The chiaroscuro effects created by the different neon lights are an important structuring element in the films. Both artists

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Figure 4.6 Installation view of “Human Sanctuary” by Daniel Sannwald, 2016. Photo: Dennis Ravays.

translated references to the historical periods in an abstract way into the soundscape and the décor. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the defining transition from craftsmanship to industrial production are translated into a soundscape that’s threatening and mechanical. For objects from the twentieth century, the artists refer to the atmosphere and style of the 1920s. The soundscape plays with transparency and with glass effects, echoing the glass embroidery on one of the dresses. Contemporary objects are placed in a décor where materials and bright colors refer to postmodern styles, accompanied by a more electronic soundscape. In the spring of 2016, the museum presented the exhibition “Game Changers. Reinventing the 20th century silhouette,” curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven and Miren Arzalluz (see Plate 12). The exhibition focused on designers who radically transformed the female silhouette in the twentieth century and proposed alternatives to the hour-glass silhouette that had dominated women’s fashion for centuries. “Game Changers” presented pioneers from the early twentieth century such as Chanel, Vionet and Poiret, innovators from the mid-twentieth century such as Balenciaga, as well as the avant-garde stars of the 1980s and 1990s with Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons and Maison Martin Margiela. The exhibition didn’t try to present these form (r)evolutions as a linear process, but more as a cyclical movement. In order to visualize this concept, the MoMu commissioned photographer Daniel Sannwald to create a holographic film that placed the body at center stage. A choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Eastman) called “Human Sanctuary”13 (see Figure 4.6) features a selection of Balenciaga archive pieces combined with objects by designers such as Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela,

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Figure 4.7 MoMu’s interactive multi-touchscreen, inviting visitors to browse the collection, 2015. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: David Dos Santos.

Ann Demeulemeester and Vetements.14 The choreography united the garments with the bodies of Belgian model Hannelore Knuts, her son and a dancer. The moving, naked bodies and sculptural shapes were brought to life by Cherkaoui. In an evocation of the pre-linguistic phase of human life (until a child reaches the age of thirteen months), in which there is no “I” and no distinction between the child’s own body, the mother’s body and the external world, the abstract garments and living bodies merged into new constellations. An exclusive mystical soundtrack was developed for this endeavour, consisting of a remix of an Iranian song about the origin of heaven and earth by musician James Kelly.15 The film aimed at introducing dynamics within the very static nature of the exhibition. It is the only installation in the exhibition where one can see the garments on a body. As the body is so crucial in the theme of this exhibition, it was thought important to have at least one installation in which the body is present.

Conclusion Besides commissioning fashion films tailor-made for the museum, the MoMu has continued the digital project of opening up its collection. In February 2015, the museum launched a digital image wall (see Figure 4.7), the first phase of an ambitious project that will be rolled out in the next five years under the working title “MoMuMedia.” The image wall is a large, interactive multi-touchscreen placed at the museum’s entrance. It consists

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of eight 55-inch screens that allow fifteen visitors to interact with the wall simultaneously. Visitors can touch the screen to open images and videos. Each file is labelled with several tags, allowing visitors to explore the collection, events and exhibitions in a vast number of different ways. Besides information on the MoMu, the image wall offers information on the other ModeNatie partners as well, being the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and the Flanders Fashion Institute. When entering the images into the database, each image receives a priority rating, from very low to very high, which determines the frequency with which an image will appear on the wall. This allows the museum to actively promote certain content, activities and events. The wall furthermore offers educational opportunities, which have already included a workshop experiment in which children learned to program their own digital prints, which were projected on the wall in real-time. Visitors can moreover “like” images, providing the museum with an interesting insight into the preferences of its audience, which can be used in the MoMu’s communication strategies. Coming phases of the “MoMuMedia” project will see the development of new applications for the image wall, which will allow for a greater integration of interactivity for specific target audiences. For instance, it is currently being investigated how the wall can be linked to the museum’s website and social media presence, and how visitors could easily upload images using their own smartphone or tablet. Other potential initiatives include inviting guest curators to curate the content of the digital wall or linking the wall to the museum’s display of its permanent collection. The presentation of the permanent collection, the final piece of the MoMuMedia project, will be further developed in 2019–2020 in two new exhibition spaces on the ModeNatie’s ground floor. In the past five years, the MoMu has investigated, in the digital productions created for the exhibitions, how the relatively novel medium of the fashion film can be used in a museum context. Such productions, always launched in collaboration with a network of fashion field agents, ranging from photographers and directors to stylists, musicians and creative directors, have helped the museum discover new vistas to communicate the dynamics of contemporary fashion and the context of objects, be they contemporary or historical, to audiences in visually interesting ways. Moreover, several projects were instituted to digitally open up the museum’s collection. These projects were always guided by the drive to map the (creative) networks surrounding an object. Interactive engagements with the audience were more recent additions. One of the greatest challenges that the museum faces today is bringing new digital developments together, in exhibitions, collections and communication, to make sure that these facets do not operate as isolated islands within the museum’s organization but enable the museum team to discover relevant (digital) cross-pollinations between the museum’s departments.

Notes 1

The term “ModeNatie” (“Fashion Nation”) refers to the old Antwerp “nations,” a type of cooperative guild that operated in the harbour. These guilds handled the loading, unloading

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and transport of goods between the quays and the warehouses, and were organized around a single domain or product (e.g. the Cotton Nation or the Tobacco Nation). 2

The Flanders Fashion Institute (FFI ) is funded by the Flemish Government. The FFI disseminates information about Belgian fashion, advises fashion designers and labels on business topics, promotes Belgian fashion abroad, and coaches a selection of young, high-potential designers.

3

When the building opened in 2002, Linda Loppa was director of all three institutes.

4

The fashion department’s sewing studio is housed in a glass structure on the ModeNatie’s roof. It is the building’s most transparent space, bathing in daylight and offering an extraordinary view on the historic city center.

5

The five CFA fashion institutes were: the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (London), the Dutch Fashion Foundation (Amsterdam), the Flanders Fashion Institute (in collaboration with MoMu) (Antwerp), the Hochschule für Gestaltung Technik und Wirtschaft (Pforzheim) and Unit F Association for Contemporary Fashion (Vienna).

6

See www.unit-f.at/archive/cfa/index.php/none/none/0/uk/about.html.

7

One of the CFA’s projects was to show an overview of the collections of a number of designers, but there was a limit of twelve images that could be uploaded per collection, meaning that overviews could never be exhaustive. Uploading videos was also not part of the technological possibilities and images overall were of poor quality. Commercial websites, such as Condé Nast’s Style.com, which has been active since 2000, do have such a comprehensive approach. Besides full look images, Style.com publishes a number of detailed views for every look, offers visitors the possibility to zoom in, and since a few years also shows some short clips of the model in motion.

8

The ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP ) is one of the three specific programs of the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP ) and runs for the years 2007–2013. The ICT PSP aims at stimulating smart sustainable and inclusive growth by accelerating the wider uptake and best use of innovative digital technologies and content by citizens, governments and businesses. It provides EU funding to support the realization of the Digital agenda for Europe (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/ict_psp/about/ index_en.htm).

9

In 2000, photographer Nick Knight launched his SHOW studio website, a digital platform that Knight primarily used for developing the young genre of the fashion film. “From SHOW studio’s inception, Nick Knight and his first editor Penny Martin understood the creative potential of moving image for fashion. [. . .] Rather than simply reporting, however, the website set up its own projects with emerging designers, photographers and models. Its projects were frequently interactive, and it encouraged its audience to respond and contribute creatively to its projects, documenting, communicating and evaluating the results” (Evans 2000: 79).

10 See http://waltervanbeirendonck.momu.be/nl/showstudio.php. 11 See https://vimeo.com/38996498. 12 See https://vimeo.com/76849619. 13 Trailer “Human Sanctuary”: https://vimeo.com/158928395. 14 The selected designers represented the Japanese and Belgian avant-garde schools of the 1980s and 1990s. The design collective Vetements was selected because its chief designer Demna Gvasalia was recently appointed creative director at the house of Balenciaga. As he previously worked as an assistant for Martin Margiela, and clearly referring with Vêtements to the heritage of Maison Martin Margiela, this served as a beautiful link. 15 Press file “Game Changers. Reinventing the 20th century silhouette,” March 2016.

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References Borret, K. (2002) “MoMuArch,” in K. Debo (ed.), The Fashion Museum Backstage, Ghent: Ludion. Breward, C. (2004) “Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back,” in J. Clark (ed.), Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, London: V&A Publications. Evans, C. (2000) “Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Gibson (eds), Fashion Culture, Oxford: Routledge. Pecorari, M. (2015) “Fashion Remains. The Epistemic Potential of Fashion Ephemera,” Dissertation, Stockholm: Stockholm University.

SECTION TWO

THE INDEPENDENTS In the 1990s some curators began to focus on the critical curating of fashion. These were not just “guest curators” who were invited to work within public museums, galleries, and other established institutions, but may be considered a new genre of curator, working independently outside of major institutions, occupying new “fashion spaces” and coming from diverse professional backgrounds. They helped fashion curating to develop its own audiences for exhibitions that were often staged in venues formerly unassociated with fashion and which were underpinned by innovative modes of interpretation. This section of the book features the work of four fashion curators who work independently, as well as four fashion curators and one critic who work independently. All the contributions demonstrate the significance of fashion curating as a critical practice outside of the (white) box; by offering approaches and venues previously unassociated with the conventions of fashion display. The first contributor to this section, Judith Clark, made a significant approach to fashion curating with her Judith Clark Costume Gallery, a non-profit experimental space in West London. In its five-year duration (1997–2003) it held over twenty shows, each accompanied by a leaflet or catalogue, as well as seminars that brought together designers, journalists, academic and curators, and in the process had a substantial influence on the potentials and possibilities of fashion curating. Since the gallery closed, Judith Clark has continued to curate fashion exhibitions internationally, although she is still perhaps best known for the ground-breaking exhibition Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back, staged first at the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum in 2004–2005, and then at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in early 2005, under the title Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back. Influenced by the work of fashion theorist and academic Caroline Evans, this collaboration also enhanced the close ties that have come to be formed between critical fashion curating and the academy, especially the field of fashion studies. It is perhaps no surprise therefore that all the contributors to this section also teach in universities, with Judith Clark serving as Professor of Fashion and Museology at the London College of Fashion. In Chapter  5, “Props and Other Attributes: Fashion and Exhibition-making,” Judith Clark draws on her substantial curatorial experience to shed light on the practical and material realities of producing popular fashion exhibitions. She discusses new ways of constructing and mediating knowledge and asks how information that museums usually 87

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present on labels can be transformed into “meaning-heavy props.” She poses the question, “instead of reading the labels, why not encourage people to see?” From her own curatorial practices she selects, for example, a banana prop from Chloé Attitudes the exhibition she curated at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Exhibited alongside Chloé’s classically styled garments and an accompanying video, she makes comparisons with the bananas juxtaposed with classical imagery in Giorgio De Chirico’s painting Uncertainty of the Poet (1913). Clark argues that props aid viewers in their mediation of fashion. She employs props to contextualize garments, as a form of visual aid to increase the viewer’s knowledge about fashion, art and culture. Through the example of the practice of creating props, the chapter urges fashion curators to be creative and innovative in their work and offers audiences new and unforeseen ways of encountering the exhibition without adopting standard conventions. The next chapter, “Staging Fashion in Somerset House, London” (Chapter 6) is based on Alistair O’Neill’s substantial experience as curator of fashion exhibitions including: Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices between Fashion and Architecture (2008), SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution (2009), Maison Martin Margiela “20” (2010), Valentino: Master of Couture (2012), Tim Walker: Story Teller (2012), Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013), and Guy Bourdin: Image Maker (2014). O’Neill extends Christopher Breward’s identification of the relationship “Between the Museum and the Academy” (Breward 2008) as an interdisciplinary approach for fashion research, and features the centrality of fashion exhibitions (many curated by O’Neill) to the development of Somerset House in London as a space of contemporary design exhibitions program since 2008. Described by Wallpaper magazine as “a thriving commercial and creative hub” with tenants including the British Fashion Council who also stage London Fashion Week at the site, such relationships are not without tensions. Working as an independent curator, as well as an academic, O’Neill is keenly aware of the power dynamics of funding from and collaboration with the commercial fashion sector. While this form of financial sponsorship has courted controversy in the past amongst scholars and curators, the reduction in public funding for UK museums and galleries and the considerable costs in staging major fashion exhibitions has altered this view. Annamari Vänskä’s chapter also addresses the complexities of collaboration as a form of curatorial practice, and its global dimensions, in Chapter 7. Discussing the exhibition which she originated and curated, “Boutique—Where Art and Fashion Meet. Curating as Collaboration and Cultural Critique,” Vänskä uncovers the pragmatic and intellectual challenges of a show which was collaborative and also traveled, from Helsinki (2012), to New York (2013), then Tokyo (2014) and finally to Berlin (2016). The chapter draws attention to the demands and constraints of the curatorial process, seen from the experience of an independent curator, while introducing methodological strategies, which develop our thinking on critical approaches to fashion curating beyond the object to indicate collaboration as an essential working method of curating, and fashion curating as a means of cultural critique. What has also been new is the way that independent curators are often in a place to be able to offer ideas and exhibition concepts that have challenged assumptions about the subjects and delivery of the “fashion” exhibition. This is made evident in Chapter 8,

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where Shaun Cole takes as his subject, “From Lesbian and Gay to Queer: Challenging the Hegemony in Collecting and Exhibiting LGBT Fashion and Dress.” As a point of departure, Cole cites Streetstyle (1994) the groundbreaking exhibition at the V&A Museum that investigated subcultural styles and their influence on high fashion, but also included a section on lesbian and gay dress and fashion. As part of a symposium (1995) associated with the exhibition Cole presented a paper entitled “What a Queer Collection” that addressed the gay and lesbian materials displayed in the context of wider concerns around collecting materials relating to lesbian, gay and bisexual lives, art and design both in the V&A and in other museums and galleries. Nineteen years later, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT ) in New York held Queer Style (2013) the first major exhibition to deal exclusively with fashion and dress of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people. In the intervening period there has been an increasing amount of writing on LGBT fashion and dress, but still very little written on its presence in museums and archive collections. This chapter considers this in light of debates raised around the collection and display of LGBT art and other collections in museums, galleries and archives in the UK , the US and Australia. Finally in this section, in Chapter  9, Nathalie Khan reinforces some of the concerns raised by Cole, in “Intervening Fashion: A Case for Feminist Approaches to Fashion Curation.” The chapter discusses the way in which fashion curators and institutions have responded to fashion becoming a central theme within the practice of a number of prominent female artists. It traces fashion in sculpture, video and performance art in order to examine the role of female artists such as K8 Hardy, the collective Chicks on Speed and Josephine Meekseper in responding to this shift and to the postmodern notions of intertextuality. Khan reflects on the way that different independent approaches and practices have destabilized any notion of fashion as a mere uncritical indicator of social history or of style, to present fashion as an agent for criticality.

Reference Breward, C. (2008) Between the Museum and the Academy: Fashion Research and Its Constituencies, Fashion Theory, 12(1): 83–94.

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5 PROPS AND OTHER ATTRIBUTES: FASHION AND EXHIBITION-MAKING Judith Clark If a man uses “symbols” he must use them such that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic sense of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.1 POUND 1968 [1918]

Artistic personification is inexhaustible to rational analysis. It is to this that it owes what might be called its vitality or simply its vividness . . . Potentially personifications can always come to life again. GOMBRICH 1971

Exactness forecloses the problem of the subject of painting. DIDI -HUBERMAN 1989

Note: This chapter records and expands upon a paper given at the Fashion: Curating In Context conference held in New York in Autumn 2013. The title of my presentation Props and Other Attributes, suggested a re-naming of various elements of exhibition-making that until then might have been referred to as exhibition prosthetics. The notes that were central to the paper in 2013 that looked back at an exhibition project held at the University of the Arts, London (UAL ) in 2011, The Judgement of Paris (in the Fashion Space Gallery, UAL ); and Chloé. Attitudes held at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris the following year, have been extended here to include subsequent interventions in La Galerie, Louis Vuitton at Asnières, Paris, which opened in July 2015. The thoughts that were illustrated and punctuated by the many slides that formed the paper given in New York, have now been numbered,2 relying on the few images reproduced here. 91

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1. The image reproduced here (see Figure  5.1) is gloriously dramatic, but despite its visual power it is not familiar to many people today. Twenty years ago this year, in 1996, I travelled to Florence to see Il Tempo e La Moda, the first biennial dedicated to fashion.3 The brainchild of Luigi Settembrini, working on behalf of the City of Florence (Centro di Firenze per la Moda Italiana) he co-directed the events with curator Germano Celant, then senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum, and brought on board the late Ingrid Sishy amongst other curators and editors—including Vogue Italia’s editor in chief Franca Sozzani—all of whom took on different aspects of the project. The exhibitions looked at where art and fashion perhaps could be seen to collide or collude, and installations overseen by architect Gae Aulenti amongst others, were staged by leading fashion designers in many of the cultural institutions in the city in a project entitled Visitors (Celant 1996b). They were visitors to the city, but also visitors to the century privileged by the institution. The designers were paired up variously with institutions and/or artists according to a perceived resonance to do with references within their work, for example: Dolce e Gabbana staged a humorous installation in the Ethnographic Museum of their “Sicilian Dress” which would be an early incarnation of what would become the most enduring attribute of their collections and ad campaigns, that of their collection’s explicit debt to Sicilian traditional dress. The installations were criticized in the press for the audacity or vulgarity of placing fashion in the hallowed spaces of high culture, the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Museo deli Argenti at Palazzo Pitti, Museo della Scienza, Casa Buonarroti to name but a few. The major exhibition that occupied the Belvedere in Florence, travelled to New York the following year and was installed in the Guggenheim (SoHo) as an exhibition that explicitly tracked the relationship between art and fashion over the past century beginning with Italian Futurism’s love affair with dress and its dynamic imperative to change. Photographs of the installations were not published and often remained largely undocumented other than conceptual preparatory sketches. 2. Il Tempo e la Moda was relentlessly mocked for fashion’s artistic aspirations that it was believed to promote. In her September 15, 1996 New York Times piece “Fashion as Art. Or Maybe not.” reviewing the events, fashion critic Amy Spindler (1996) wrote: “Frankly, fashion, when it takes itself too seriously, really bugs people.” 3. Curator Germano Celant has claimed that exhibition-making is a medium in its own right,4 and by that he means holistic curating: the space and exhibition prosthetics, so to speak, are given more responsibility to carry the narrative, or give it emphasis (Celant 1996c: 515). There is still however an implicit hierarchy: an object, surrounded by secondary explanatory exhibition elements, be they spatial, textual, or indeed digital. 4. Interventions such as this one by Gianfranco Ferré (see Figure  5.1) installed in the Medici Cappella dei Principi in Florence harnesses the idea of exhibition-making in a different way. The historic [replica] skirts were created not to human scale but instead they responded to the grandeur of the cupola beyond it, somehow bridging the two, heaven and earth; and though (on the surface) this could have been described as a history of

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Figure 5.1 Gianfranco Ferré installed in the Medici Cappella dei Principi, Florence. Italy, 2016. Archivio della Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré.

caged silhouettes from the crinoline, to the bustle, they measured up to three meters wide. They were hung twenty-four meters above the floor, undulating slightly due to the installation of an air machine, and they were as Ferré’s press release from 1996 reads: “expressing an ideal,” “deliberately caricatured” and moving to “gusts of an imaginary wind enhancing the sensation and image of lightness.” They were not made by Ferré’s atelier, but by Brancati Costume Teatrali, the costumiers. They were in fact props.

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5. It might be interesting to look at this more subtle legacy: the experimental opportunities afforded by exhibition-making, rather than perhaps getting caught up with what might be a distraction and that is the attempt to re-classify fashion as art. 6. What are we exhibiting? What constitutes an object? Can a prop ever be classified as an object in its own right in a museum? If we are not freezing time but instead harnessing dress to speak of more abstract qualities or concepts what are we doing? How better might Ferré have exhibited the attribute “lightness” than by that tiny movement created by his imaginary wind? When this technique was repeated in Seoul in 2010 at the Prada Skirt exhibition designed by architects OMA , what, if anything, was being quoted? Props are helpful. In the history of fashion exhibition-making props contextualize dress: they place it within a fauxhistoric living room, for example; they give the nineteenth-century walking dress an umbrella or a bonnet to complete the silhouette; they give a riding outfit a crop. Having agreed upon the historic fiction created by the exhibited dress, props give us the detail. 7. Sometimes a prop and an attribute are the same: a specific king wears a crown, but the crown also identifies the king as such. How might we extend the idea of a prop, and use its more complicated counterpart—the attribute—for clues. We might invent a kind of built iconography. We might try to build something that is a cross between Anna Piaggi’s rebus created from items of clothing and the identifying object carried by a saint in a Renaissance painting, Saint Peter’s keys for example: keys that hold within them Mathew 16:17.5 8. Attributes explain and complicate at the same time. They compete for attention, they allude to another episode that happened outside the frame, and in that sense they are always abstract. 9. Episodes from Metamorphoses populate iconographic source books. To take one example of a much-used attribute in the making, we might look at representations of the popular Pan. Our first encounter with Pan in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, cited below, from “Io” (Book I) describes the emergence and transformation of the reeds into pipes that will be his enduringly memorable attribute, but it also went unwitnessed. It was hidden. Argus’s famous eyes were closed. Mercury told this story: Once there lived On the cold mountains of Arcady A Naiad, who among the forest sprites Of lofty Nonacris was most renowned. Syrinx the Naiads called her. Many a time She foiled the chasing satyrs and those gods Who haunt the shady copses and the coverts Of the lush countryside. In her pursuits And in her chastity-Syrinx revered Diana; girt like she well might seem (so easy to mistake) Diana’s self,

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Were not her bow of horn, Diana’s gold. Indeed she was mistaken. Pan returning From Mount Lycaeus, crowned with his wreath of pine, Saw Syrinx once and said—but what he said Remained to tell, and how the scornful nymph Fled through the wilderness and came at last To Ladon’s peaceful sandy stream, and there, Her flight barred by the river, begged her sisters, The water-nymphs, to change her; and when Pan Thought he had captured her, he held instead Only the tall marsh reeds, and, while he sighed, The soft wind stirring in the reeds sent forth A thin and plaintive sound; and he, entranced By this new music and its witching tones, Cried “You and I shall stay in unison!” And waxed together reeds of different lengths6 And made the pipes that keep his darling’s name. The tale remained untold; for Mercury saw All Argus’ eyelids closed and every eye Vanquished in sleep. OVID [9 CE ] 1986: l.685–717 Attributes contribute to systems of communication and representation which include within them the idea of obscurity. This—at least in part—is their function, as well as their narrative conciseness and identifying roles. Diana’s bow is of Gold, Syrinx’s of horn we are told—this is how we are to tell them apart. Attributes are as art historian Ernst Gombrich (1972: 3) tells us “distinctive features which permit easy identification” but here they are the cause of the possibility of mistaken identity. What happens if an attribute is not properly understood? What are the consequences? They create an ambiguity as to what is the main narrative and what is a clause, what can be witnessed and what is essentially not witnessed. We meet Pan four times in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. By the second time it is in the story of Midas: in this telling, Pan’s pipes would suffice to evoke and remember the whole story, they had been incorporated into an extension of his figure. They will live with him forever.7 . . . dwells among the mountain caves. But crass his wits* remained, in folly set To bring their master trouble as before. The crags of Tmolus, steep and wide and high, Gazing across the sea, at one side fall To Sardis, at the other reach their end At small Hypaepae. There Pan sang his songs, Flaunting among the nymphs, and played Light airs upon his pipes, and dared to boast Apollo’s music second to his own,

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Essaying with old Tmolus as the judge Unequal contest. On his mountain top* The judge was seated; from his ears he freed The forest trees; only a wreath of oak Fringed his green locks, with acorns dangling round His hollow temples. Then, looking towards The shepherd-god, he said, “The judge attends.” So Pan made music on his rustic reeds And with his uncouth song entranced the king. OVID [9 CE ] 1986: xi 101–195 10. Props and attributes allow for myths being both repositories for the concealed wisdom of past ages and a vehicle for communicating truths. But what if we don’t recognize them? Guy de Tervarent’s study Attributs et symboles dans l’art profane: Dictionnaire d’un langage perdu (1450–1600) was as my first reading of a working definition of an attribute. Writing in 1958 for an audience of art historians, he still finds it necessary to explain his title. “By attribute, one means an accessory that characterises and helps in the identification of the central figure: Hercules’ club, Jupiter’s eagle, Cupid’s arrow” (de Tervarent 1958: XX ).8 He goes on to distinguish between an attribute and a symbol: “Symbols are the representation of one thing by another . . . loyalty with a dog; justice represented by a woman holding scales, when it finds its expression in a group of figures it is an allegory” (de Tervarent 1958: XX ).9 Guy de Tervarent’s text immediately addresses the fact that the meaning of a great number of attributes (and an even greater number of symbols) has been lost. Is it therefore too late to use attributes now? 11. How might they be applied to the exhibitions of dress? 12. Attributes disrupt time. We are used to looking at them in paintings, taken from a limited number of Renaissance source books, famously those of late-sixteenth-century iconographers Cesare Ripa or Vincenzo Cartari, and passed down to extend and explain the figures. For exhibition-making we need to add another fiction. We need to bring them to life in the present, so to speak, and through them concisely insert another dimension of time into the mise-en-scène. Triple time is created though props and attributes: the present, the time that is consistent with the object/dress, and the time/event remembered by the attribute/prop added to the scene. It is about Time. Props are intended to be continuous with the central represented time, with the landscape if we are talking of a painting; attributes allude to another remembered moment that made the figure memorable, to reinforce his or her impact on the visitor. To complicate it further when we study the universe of attributes, sometimes they refer to the past, but even more perplexing, sometimes they gesture to the future of the scene represented (i.e. the moment of the martyrdom of the saint represented for example). Like strange mood boards, or Aby Warburg’s mobile panels from his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924– 1929) we learn to run the relays of reference.

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Figure 5.2 The Judgement of Paris, Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London, 2011. Photo: Judith Clark.

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13. The Judgement of Paris Judith Clark Studio, 2011. A project that began as a small exhibition in the Fashion Space Gallery situated at the London College of Fashion (University of the Arts, London) in 2011 entitled The Judgement of Paris has become central to my research. The exhibition was commissioned to look at fashion museology itself as its subject. It took as its case study the well-known story from Greek mythology. The myth is commonly represented as the figure of Paris (recognized by the fact he is dressed as a shepherd and is holding a golden apple) standing in front of the three goddesses Juno, Minerva and Venus. Which is which? We often do not see their features clearly and they are often unclothed, but they are painted clearly enough to represent their competing qualities. It is imperative that we are able to distinguish one from another. It is up to Paris, the tale goes, to choose the most desirable of the three. How might fashion exhibition-making respond to this well-known myth? And what might it show us about the uses of attributes within this our own discipline? The exhibition at the Fashion Space Gallery (UAL ) asked the question: if the naked figures were museum mannequins, how would we recognize them as the goddesses? Three museum cabinets were installed to represent different forms of recognition. The first was dedicated to the head, the second to the body/posture, and the third to the attribute. Possibly the three most fundamental elements in exhibiting dress were turned into the subject of the display: (a) the head (attached to the mannequin and not to the historic dress it is exhibiting) has to negotiate the difficult task of the inevitable anachronism, often revealing the curator’s attitude to both history and styling; (b) the posture, or orientation of the body which decides which aspect to reveal; and (c) any props added to the scene, and how meaningful or essential they might be to the exhibition’s narrative. The exhibition at the Fashion Space Gallery (UAL ) therefore re-imagined the figures of Juno, Minerva and Venus, and their drama, as a template for museology. The first cabinet contained three heads: one styled (Juno is always represented with fashionable headdress to represent her riches), one with golden locks (Venus) and the last with a Greek helmet (representing Minerva). The second cabinet contained three mannequin torsos: one looking at the viewer, one in profile and the third seen from the back. The goddesses are given character by their relation to Paris; Venus most often shown in profile as this is considered the most flattering point of view. The last cabinet contained their associated attributes translated into 3D props: a shield (Minerva), the figure of Cupid (Venus) and a peacock (Juno). 14. When we place a peacock next to a figure do we have to do so knowingly, if so, of knowing what? If we put a peacock next to a mannequin does it always make her Juno? No. And which are the references that haunt fashion exhibition-making? The last example, the peacock, has a well-known alternative history within the history of exhibiting dress (amongst others). A peacock was exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of the Ch’ing Dynasty, 1644–1912 exhibition in 1980. In Diana Vreeland’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum it is also specific, of course: it refers to her own notion of the fantasy of exoticism. Whatever one might make of that fact, it is now fixed as a reference within fashion exhibition history: that of the extravagance of the styling of her exhibitions. In an exhibition I designed and co-curated with Venicebased curator and Director of IUAV (Università Iuav di Venezia) Maria Luisa Frisa at the

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Palazzo Fortuny, the placing of the stuffed peacock became a very precise reference to D.V.’s very imprecise references, and what they added to exhibition history as we now know it. In other words: it has become an attribute of dramatic exhibition design. So Vreeland’s curatorial drama or extravagance, accompanied by the vagueness of fantasy, was itself the subject—not oriental dress. Three disparate robes were placed together in the exhibition in Venice, one Chinese, one Japanese and one Korean. The hair created by virtuoso hair stylist Angelo Seminara bringing, like Vreeland, a precise desirability into the present moment with imprecise references to hairstyles that might have been coupled with the historic gowns. This had echoes of Juno’s styling, the fashionableness being the point, the important bridge between frame and viewer, or in our case the museum plinth and viewer. What do we do with the possible obscurity of these associations, like the obscurity of so many attributes? In other exhibitions I have presented the wardrobes of Anna Piaggi (Anna Piaggi: Fashionology, V&A, 2006), Simonetta di Cesarò (Simonetta. La Prima Donna della Moda Italiana, Palazzo Pitti, 2008), and recently Frida Kahlo (Frida Kahlo. Appearances can be Deceiving, Museo Frida Kahlo 2012). They are examples of women with striking identifying features, like Vreeland herself, and with uniform-like consistency of style: Anna Piaggi’s “blue wave” fringe (crowned by Stephen Jones hats) was stuck onto the mannequins by her favorite illustrator Richard Grey, creating a double reference. With Simonetta it was about pose and gesture; the mannequins’ necks were extended to be slightly longer than natural proportions to underline her aristocratic posture; the gesture of her forearm balanced her many bangles; and a cigarette was cast into a mannequin’s articulated arm. There is a fine line between styling and exhibition-making and it might be worth holding onto the distinction. 15. I want to use as an example of how this might relate to another recent project, based on archival research for the house of Chloé in Paris to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the brand, and presented as an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2012. The example I would like to cite here begins with a catwalk show invitation I came across in the archive, housed in their headquarters in Paris, that stood out; it was very different in mood to a lot of the rather more coy representations of the Chloé girl that appeared in a lot of the contemporary campaigns. It had a different kind of wit, which resonated with the irreverent quotations within different parts of the archive (see Plate 13). A huge blow-up banana had been photographed for an ad campaigns in different cities, placed amusingly in pizzerias, near the Eiffel tower, adjacent to a Tokyo street sign as a found object—so I thought it might also be “found” so to speak in the exhibition. The banana was meticulously cast in resin to exactly replicate the original. The installation became an extension of a joke started in the archive. The second part of the same display stems from two dresses. There were no direct references stored with them, as there were with so many of the designs by Karl Lagerfeld who designed for Chloé in the 1980s. I came to think of the dresses in my mind as a cross between Leon Bakst’s 1912 ballet costumes for Debussy’s L’aprés-midi d’un faune and Giorgio De Chirico’s painted classicist folds. My associations, not his. When I thought of De Chirico’s 1913 painting, The Uncertainty of the Poet (see Plate 14) it seemed to organize the two events in the archive across time—the neoclassicism of

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the dresses, and the bananas inhabiting urban spaces—and so this became the image that influenced the exhibition design for the dresses. Bakst’s ballet production of the preceding year was alluded to in the hair. Like the visual punning in this tableau or floor and flore (see Plate 15), motifs recur time and again in Chloe’s archive—the floor was reproduced from the Brasserie Lipp architectural panels where in fact early collections were staged—and even the love of words stated and shown by Chloé founder Gaby Aghion in the naming of her collections. 15. Restlessness. Looking through the paper archives of the Patrimoine Chloé, you get an unparalleled glimpse into the way each season’s wave of new dresses is accompanied by a wave of new names ascribed by the founder Gaby Aghion. In his catalogue essay in 2012 Hugh Haughton wrote: In 1966, we find, among many other names, Torche, Totem, Tokyo, Tendre, Tivoli, and Tertulia. These name an Olympic-style or technological light-source or flame; an anthropological object or a system, recently given huge intellectual currency by Claude Levi-Strauss in Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962); the capital of Japan; an intimate amorous adjective; the site of the Italian Renaissance Villa d’Este with its famous gardens as well as name for many more recent spin-offs including the Jardin de Tivoli in Paris; and, finally, a Spanish word for a social gathering with literary, musical and cultural overtones, rather like a salon. Here, ethnography, art history, romance, travel, geography, nature, leisure, foreign languages, and cultural sociability are all subliminally yoked together in terms of the alphabet, with the O’s and P’s of Autumn 1964 giving way to the T’s of 1966. Thereafter, though geography and high culture continue to feature, each season’s offerings framed in terms of the alphabet, with a series of “A”s followed by a series of “B”s and so on. There were a couple of interruptions when in 1982 there was a set of bird names (Messiaen-style), and in 1983 a list of flowers (including Anemone, Calla, Dahlia, Edelweiss, Iris, Lilac, and in more literary vein, Fleurs du Mal). Otherwise the over-riding alphabetical principle is that invoked in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures, where we are told the creatures “drew all manner of things—everything that started with an M.” “Why with an M?”, said Alice. “Why not?”, said the March Hare. HAUGHTON 2012: 42–43 It would be impossible not to be made restless by these allusive lists. Restlessness is fashion’s fundamental attribute. If we look at Figure 5.3 entitled “The Spirit of Travel” from left to right, for the inaugural exhibition at La Galerie, Asnières, the setting for the origins of the company we can see how that the idea of travel permeates the archive across the decades, a design house dedicated to crafting trunks: trunks for planes, trains, automobiles has been in this installation translated into a conversation across time. In the middle of the image, Art Deco, a recurring motif in the archive at Louis Vuitton is translated into a figure: there is a tiny necklace from recent collections that hangs from the figure’s neck, but it was important to acknowledge that those motifs were recurring in the

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Figure 5.3 Spirit of Travel, La Galerie, Louis Vuitton, Asnieres, Paris, 2015. Photo: Judith Clark.

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archive, perhaps in an inlaid book belonging to Gaston Louis Vuitton, perhaps in a detail of a piece of furniture, I took the artistic license to commission embroidery on the mannequin to reinforce the graphic theme; and right, what I will refer to as the Marchesa Casati story. The conversation I had with milliner Stephen Jones was about what haunts the archive, what are the asides that are so fundamental but remain unrecorded and un-stored. In this case the famous finale ensemble worn by model Edie Campbell from Marc Jacob’s last collection for Vuitton in 2014. The headdress was originally created by Jones for the catwalk presentation. He re-created it for the exhibition partly in calico so it became rooted in the exhibition as well as in the archive. But next to it is a mannequin where I took a step further. I asked Stephen Jones to create the entire silhouette of the costume worn by Marchesa Casati that was the inspiration for the catwalk piece, posing questions around the freedom of curators to create objects, not only collect and exhibit them. The overriding attribute at Vuitton, despite the confidence of their aesthetic is change itself. Looking at the photograph again you can see that the plinths are on wheels not committed to their position and to which Vogue International editor Suzy Menkes gave the title “Restless Heritage on the Move” in her review of the installation. In April 2016 I returned to Asnières to rotate the plinths on their axis—something curators very rarely get to do—to quite literally see something from another perspective to allow more various associations. 12. Perhaps it is the mobility of the presentation that should engage us. It alerts the viewer to the importance of what is evoked rather than what they are being informed of. Are we coercing attention or opening it up?

Notes 1 From a section entitled “Credo,” written in 1918 and wherein he stipulates how to write poetry. Available online at www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/ retrospect.htm. 2 This follows my preferred format started for ModeMuseum’s inaugural catalogue in 2001, Backstage, where I listed my curatorial considerations under the title “Statement VI .” This was continued in my “Doppie Pagine: On Not Spelling it Out” in Fashion Theory 10.1–2 (2006). 3 The press release of January 12, 1995 was entitled Florence Fashion Biennale. Fashion, Style and Evolution in Taste, and stated “The fundamental aim of the project is to document and study all aspects of international fashion, the influences upon it and its influences on other cultural forms . . . excluding its direct link with industry or commerce.” 4 In “A visual machine: art installation and its modern archetypes,” Celant argues, “the installation, crucial component of any exhibition, is in and of itself a form of modern work, whose articulation, both spatial and visual, is worthy of consideration.” 5 Matthew 16:17 reads, “17 Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon BarJonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.

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18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. 19 And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ ” 6 Attribute in the making. 7 The third encounter is in the Triumph of Apotheosis of Aeneas: xiv. 515–550, And last: in Pomona and Vertemnus; xiv. XXX . 8 Author’s translation. The original reads as follows: “Par attribut, on intend un accessoire qui characterise et aide à identifier la figure principale: la masse d’Hercule, l’aigle de Jupiter, le carquois de Cupidon.” 9 The original reads as follows: “Le symbole est la représentation d’une chose par un autre, le plus souvent d’une entite; immaterielle par une figure empruntée au mode physique: la Fidelité par un chien, la Justice par une femme tenant un glaive et une balance. Quand l’idée trouve son expression dans une composition groupant divers personnages, nous l’appelons allégorie.”

References Celant, G. (ed.) (1996a) Il Tempo e la Moda—Biennale di Firenze, Milan: Skira Editore. Celant, G. (ed.) (1996b) Visitors: Biennale di Firenze ’96, Milan: Skira Editore. Celant, G. (1996c) “A Visual Machine: Art Installation and its Modern Archetypes,” in R. Greenberg, B.W. Ferguson, and S. Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions, London and New York: Routledge. Clark, J. (2006a) “Doppie Pagine: On Not Spelling it Out,” Fashion Theory 10(1–2): 259–77. Clark, J. (ed.) (2006b) Anna Piaggi: Fashion-ology, Guide for an exhibition of the same name held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, February 2 to April 23, 2006. Clark, J. (2011) The Judgement of Paris, Guide for an exhibition of same name held at Fashion Space Gallery, London, February 16 to April 2, 2011. Clark, J. (ed.) (2015) La Galerie Louis Vuitton, Catalogue to accompany the inaugural exhibition of La Galerie Louis Vuitton, Asnières-sur-Seine, July 2015. Damisch, H. (1996) The Judgment of Paris, John Goodman (trans.), Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. de Tervarent, G. (1958) Attributs et symboles dans l’art profane: Dictionnaire d’un langage perdu (1450–1600), Geneva: Librairie Droz. Didi-Huberman, G. (1989) “The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer—the Detail and the Patch,” History of the Human Sciences 2:135–69. Fisher, P. (1997) Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Gombrich, E.H. (1971) “Personification,” in R.R. Bolgar (ed.), Classical Influences in European Culture AD 500–1500, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 247–57. Gombrich, E.H. (1972) Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London: Phaidon Press. Haughton, H. (2012) “Fashioning Names: Chloé and the Game of the Name,” in J. Clark (ed.), Chloé Attitudes, Paris: Chloé International SAS , 41–53. Menkes, S. (2015) “Louis Vuitton: Restless heritage on the move,” Vogue, August 10, available online: http://en.vogue.fr/suzy-menkes/suzy-menkes-column/articles/suzy-menkes-visits-thelouis-vuitton-exhibition-in-paris/27360 (accessed September 6, 2016). Ovid ([9 CE ] 1986) Metamorphoses, A.D. Melville (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Panofsky, E. (1972) Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York: Harper & Row. Pound, E. (1968) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions. Spindler, A. (1996) “Fashion as Art. Or Maybe Not,” New York Times, September 15, available online: www.nytimes.com/1996/09/15/arts/fashion-as-art-or-maybe-not.html (accessed September 6, 2016).

6 STAGING FASHION IN SOMERSET HOUSE, LONDON Alistair O’Neill Introduction This chapter charts the role of the fashion exhibition in the development of the contemporary design exhibitions program at Somerset House, London, where I have worked as a consultant and curator since the inception of the program in 2008. It compliments my work as a fashion historian, employed as an academic member of staff in the fashion program at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts, London). It takes as its emblem an image of a pair of walking legs—mannequin feet to be precise—wearing a pair of Charles Jourdan shoes in a London street (see Plate 16). It was taken by French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin in 1979 for the purpose of an advertising campaign, but it was exhibited as part of a suite of images for the first time at Somerset House as part of the exhibition Guy Bourdin: Image Maker (November 27, 2014– March 15, 2015) which I curated with Shelley Verthime, curator of the Guy Bourdin Estate. (A full list of curatorial credits for all exhibitions raised is cited at the end of the chapter.) The image presents a stand-in for a person, defined by the lower extremities of the body. It illustrates the literary figure of the flâneuse (or the flâneur) who walks the city in order to experience it. The photograph is therefore also about urbanism, how it depicts a London of the late 1970s now long gone, a world away from the contemporary. The image’s reappearance, translated as an exhibit in a curated exhibition, thus bears the capacity to reflect on “the mutations of changing cities” (Obrist 2015: 121). It also marks the centrality of fashion as a form of material culture well suited to this form of historical and spatial exploration, especially in being addressed to the particularities of this metropolitan city. As a figure of the imagination, this heeled woman (or a man, who knows?) walks a different route through London, perhaps even from those we know. In doing so, “she” embodies that spirit of exhibition-making defined by Hans Urich Obrist (2014: 121) in Ways of Curating: “You might describe it as the attempted pollination of culture, or a form of map-making that opens new routes through a city, a people, or a world” (Obrist 2015: 1). These feet thus define the means of being led on, so characteristic of an exhibition’s 105

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pathway, into a detour not of your own making, but one with the potential to educate and even entertain. Exhibitions are also quantified by the walking legs we see in the photograph, as they are measured by “footfall,” the reductive metric for measuring an exhibition’s success by its visitor figures. Exhibitions, therefore, are revealing of the cities they are staged in and the people who visit them.

London as a global fashion city In 2015 London was ranked second in global importance in the AT Kearney Global Cities Index (AT Kearney 2015). The index has five indicators: business activity, human capital, information exchange, political engagement and cultural experience. And it is in the last category, cultural experience, that London excels as the global leader; known for its museums and galleries, historic buildings and visitor attractions. London remains one of the four major fashion capitals, first recognized by the international attention paid to the “swinging” city in the mid 1960s, and reprised by the era of Cool Britannia in the mid 1990s when fashion was identified as a key player in the UK creative industries (Leonard 1997) and British fashion designers were hired by Paris couture houses (Evans 2010). Since that time British fashion has grown considerably, contributing £26 billion to the UK economy in 2014, and a major employer. The British Fashion Council’s report, The Value of the UK Fashion Industry (The Value of UK Fashion (2010, updated 2014) British Fashion Council report) confirms British fashion’s wider contribution to the UK ’s international profile, its brand equity and cultural tourism. London remains the locus for the industry in terms of retail, media, education, designer fashion and associated creative industries. In 2015, the Business of Fashion’s Global Fashion Education Rankings (www. businessoffashion.com/education/rankings/2015) identified London as home to the no. 1 BA course (Central Saint Martins) and no. 1 MA course (Royal College of Art) and having the highest concentration of leading fashion courses globally. They attract a diverse and international student body; their graduates go on to establish businesses that thrive in London Fashion Week, supported by talent and development schemes such as New Gen and Fashion East. Yet London has benefited from its new position as “the New York of Europe” (Menkes 2009) as fashion designer Hussein Chalayan put it; a financial safe haven and a city positioned in the nexus of global market territories. The success of its fashion culture is also due to an enduring spirit of experimentation, rebellion and irreverence that has traditionally paid small dividends but is now monetized and branded as a point of distinction. The success of own label fashion design companies such as Mary Katranzou, Roksanda Ilincic, Christopher Kane and JW Anderson (and in some cases the involvement of luxury conglomerates such as LVMH and Kering in their business models) is proof of this shift; and regarded in relation to established fashion brands such as Burberry, Paul Smith, Margaret Howell and Vivienne Westwood, it has done much to alter the international perception of London fashion as only producing experimental and unwearable fashion by graduate talent unexposed to commercial imperatives.

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London is also emerging as a center for temporary fashion exhibitions in museums, galleries, and commercial spaces. For example, in 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum staged Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the Saatchi Gallery held Mademoiselle Privé for Chanel, and a former office building at 180 Strand was the location for Louis Vuitton Series 3. This concentration of fashion exhibitions in the capital is not an overnight effect; writing over ten years ago in Museum’s Journal, the trade journal for the UK museums and galleries sector, Nicky Ryan (2005) noted: A subject that is increasingly coming up for museums is intellectual engagement with fashion curation. The cultural currency of fashion has risen dramatically in the past ten years as more international museums and art galleries have begun hosting exhibitions on the subject. Simultaneously, academics have begun to treat it as a significant cultural force, allowing a “new” history of fashion to evolve. The cover article responded to two initiatives from London College of Fashion: firstly, the Curator in Residence scheme with the V&A which produced the fashion exhibitions Men in Skirts (2002), curated by Andrew Bolton and Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back (2005), curated by Judith Clark; and secondly, the establishing of a Masters Course in Fashion Curation, which I founded with my colleagues Amy de la Haye and Judith Clark. As part of the cultural turn from dress history to fashion studies, fashion curation has offered the specialism a practice-based dimension and a forum for engaging with a wider public beyond the traditional scope of an academic audience. University of the Arts London continues to value this area of enquiry, launching in 2014 the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, and the research group for Fashion History, Theory and Curation at Central Saint Martins. One of the reasons for London’s success as a fashion capital in developing fashion exhibitions as part of its offer it due to its unique approach: triangulating expertise from the museums and galleries sector, fashion education, and the fashion industries. This model extends Christopher Breward’s (2008) identification of the relationship “Between the Museum and the Academy” as an interdisciplinary approach for fashion research engaging British higher education with the museum and galleries sector, arguing that a more open dialogue now exists with industry that has moved on from an entrenched position which regarded the representation of the fashion industry in a museum exhibition as a form of window display (Silverman 1986; Spindler 2000; Sudjic 2000). Fashion exhibitions represent a popular engagement with the themes of fashion, distanced from the elitism and privileged access that marks many of the industry’s engagement activities, be they marketing, press or promotion. Contrary to other kinds of exhibitions, fashion is a subject that requires little cultural competency to engage with it meaningfully. As a form of material culture we wear closely to our bodies on a daily basis means that we all have an understanding and view of how textiles clothe the body, and how our bodies are in turn fashioned by them. Fashion exhibitions also have the capacity to offer a self-reflexive understanding of dress, with the potential to probe and test the normative boundaries of this embodied set of concerns (see Figs 6.1 and 6.2).

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Figure 6.1 Valentino: Master of Couture, 2012, Somerset House, installation view. Photo: Alistair O’Neill. © Valentino—Valentino is a registered trademark of The Valentino Fashion Group.

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Figure 6.2 Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!, 2013, Somerset House, installation view. Photo: Somerset House Trust.

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The cultural format of the temporary exhibition addresses a sense of the contemporary, also marked by fashion. The transience of the temporary and the provisional is congruent to both; the fashion exhibition is therefore a useful presentation in describing modernity, and also experiencing it, in terms of conveying the feeling of what it is to be modern in an urban context. It captures the tenor of urban life and offers a reflection of the function of fashion in the metropolis, which can attest to the popularity of exhibitions addressing the themes of fashion and style in recent years. In 2015, the three top London exhibitions were: Alexander McQueen at the V&A, Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy, and Audrey Hepburn at the National Portrait Gallery. An article published in the Times newspaper, reported on the released figures of the Association of Leading Visitors Attractions for 2015, defined by footfall. It reported an overall annual increase of 1.16 percent, but it argued that “the real lesson to be learnt is how even our greatest galleries depend on well-publicized blockbuster shows to boost their figures.” The association’s press release confirmed that “Temporary exhibitions played a crucial part in this year’s visitor figures throughout the UK ” (Morrison 2016).

Somerset House The AVLA report also recorded that the largest increase in visitor numbers, with an increase of 31 percent is Somerset House. In ranking as the eighth busiest attraction, with over three million visitors, it is comparable to visitor figures for the Science Museum and the V&A. What is surprising is the relative infancy of Somerset House as an arts and cultural center; it has only had a temporary exhibitions program since 2008. By contrast, the museums of South Kensington have noble histories that can be traced back to the mid nineteenth century. Further, Somerset House is unlike many of the museums in London as it has no permanent collection. So why the sudden footfall to Somerset House, and why the appetite to visit? Somerset House is an arts and cultural center that covers 6.5 acres between the Strand and the Embankment in Central London in a building formerly occupied by the Inland Revenue, the UK tax office. It has two notable tenants: the Courtauld Institute of Art and King’s College who contribute to the cultural life of the complex, including their own temporary exhibitions program. In 1997, Somerset House Trust was established, established from a £20.75 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, to develop a space that could house one of the most important gifts to the nation, a £100 million collection of gold, silver and mosaic collected by Sir Arthur Gilbert. Architecture and design critic, Deyan Sudjic noted at the opening of the Gilbert Collection that, “it is not the Gilbert Collection that is Somerset House’s biggest draw. It is the sudden revelation of one of London’s most magnificent and unknown urban spaces” (Sudjic 2000b). The Gilbert collection attracted 200,000 visitors in the first year, and then attendance figures flatlined. A small temporary exhibition of objects once owned by Catherine the Great, as part of a short-lived initiative to create satellite spaces for the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, was the only respite from an otherwise empty set of galleries (Riding 2000).

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In 2006, Gwyn Miles was appointed as Director, establishing rented offices on the upper and lower floors of the building to companies connected to the arts. They include the Royal Society of Literature, Dance Umbrella, Music for Youth and the British Fashion Council. In 2008, it was decided that the permanent galleries devoted to the Gilbert Collection would close, with the collection transferred to the V&A. The failure of the project was replaced by a new contemporary design exhibitions program, led by curator Claire Catterall, offering a mixture of free and ticketed exhibitions. This was complimented by a series of activities set in the courtyard that included an ice rink in winter and film and music festivals in the summer. And from 2008 to 2014, it was home to London Fashion Week, now replaced by the London Design Festival in September and the British Council’s International Fashion Showcase in February. This mixed-use activity saw annual footfall rise from 1 million to 2.5 million in the space of five years (Somerset House Annual Report 2014–2015). In an article to mark the departure of Miles as Director, Wallpaper magazine described Somerset House as “a thriving commercial and creative hub,” illustrated with a new staircase designed by architect Eva Jiricna, set against the architecturally noteworthy Stamp stair, a feat of Georgian engineering. The current Director, Jonathan Reekie, is the former director of the Aldburugh music festival, first established by British composer Benjamin Britten. The contemporary design program addresses fashion, photography, architecture and design. With funding for exhibitions reliant on sponsorship, or the income generated by ticket sales, retail, events and hire. At its inception, the programming was described by Miles as “fleet of foot” (Quick 2014), and fashion exhibitions thrived due to their proximity to London Fashion Week. This model of commercial and cultural programming for fashion was indebted to the work of Maria Luisa Frisa, who staged in the 2000s a run of inventive and directional fashion exhibitions in Florence that were staged alongside the Pitti fashion trade fairs, which became a significant meeting place for business and a think-tank for visiting industry. The intention for the exhibitions program at Somerset House was to mount intelligent design exhibitions, which were visually led and garnered mass appeal within a program that drew connections between design, society and culture. What follows is a set of short exhibition case studies which help illustrate how we found our feet (and those of our visitors) in developing the program and the function of the fashion exhibition within this.

Exhibitions at Somerset House: From Skin and Bones to Guy Bourdin: Image Maker The opening exhibition, Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices between Fashion and Architecture (2008) was bought in from Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Curated by Brooke Hodge, the exhibition considered the shared language and concerns of the two forms of creative practice. As with any touring exhibition, the task of reconfiguring the display for the demands and limitations of a new space offers a small creative dimension. We felt strongly that London was an interesting focus for this kind of crossover in the 1980s and used it as an opening display and a way in to the existing exhibits. We were also able to add in further objects that enhanced London as a focus in historical terms (early architectural models by

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Zaha Hadid) and in the contemporary (a dress by Hussein Chalayan that projected lasers). To supplement the accompanying publication we produced a free exhibition guide that offered a commentary to visitors that they could carry round, as the original exhibition included few text panels; this included commissioning new exhibition graphics. The inclusion of Martin Margiela 20 (2010) into the program, curated by Kaat Debo, Director of the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum was born from a desire to link to a specialist fashion museum of renown, known for the quality of its collection as much as its curated exhibitions, but also to Margiela as a fashion house. The close proximity between the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fire Arts in Antwerp (where Margiela trained) and the museum (they occupy the same building) articulated a close alliance, further triangulated by the brand’s involvement in the staging of the exhibition, particularly the set design directed by Margiela scenographer Bob Verhelst. This gave the opportunity to make an explicit link to a cultural institution and a commercial fashion company by bringing their joint enterprise to London. In this, MOMU excels in the close and ongoing relationships it has been able to broker with contemporary Belgian designers, not only in how it collects their work (as surviving dress and paper-based materials) but also how it has been able to bring them into meaningful dialogue regarding the shaping of their representation in their temporary exhibitions. The first authored fashion exhibition at Somerset House, SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution (2009) was a survey of the first ten years of SHOW studio, the fashion imaging website established by British fashion photographer Nick Knight (and originally graphic designer Peter Saville). The project was novel as it was a survey of recent fashion history, charting one of the earliest digital fashion projects and prior to the publication of academic work on the subject. The project was co curated by Penny Martin, who had until that point been editor-in-chief of the website, Claire Catterall from Somerset House, and myself. This initiated a way of working in a collaborative curatorial team that has continued; in this our aim is not only in pooling expertise, promoting dialogue and enriching perspectives, it is also born out of a desire to replicate the triangulation of expertise—between the museums and galleries sector, higher education and industry—we see as unique to the London-based model for staging fashion exhibitions. In the open sharing of skill sets and in the distribution of contribution, this collective model of working stresses collaboration over the sense of authorship that can cling to other forms of curatorial practice. As such, the position is aligned with Jens Hoffmann’s position on the curator in exhibition-making as a decentered subject and a collaborator, “only a part of a larger structure, a subject position, and not the core” (Hoffmann 2007: 139). SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution was ambitious in many ways. Its three themes of process, participation and play directly addressed the exhibition audience in an innovative manner by employing some of the tactics the website had adopted for securing interest on the web. This meant that digital techniques were translated into analogue environments, and in turning from the virtual to the physical, brought unexpected avenues of enquiry. In one room a one-way mirror was installed offering visitors a privileged view of a photographic studio, where they could witness a live fashion shoot for i-D or British Vogue, whilst it also relayed as a timed release of images on the SHOW studio site. A live male model, installed on a chair on a plinth on the gallery, was dressed every morning in a different outfit by stylist Simon Foxton. Visitors could speak to the model, but

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only by dialling into the website and then speaking to the model via a telephone in the gallery. This kind of strategy brought digital communication technologies to bear on the time-based performance in the exhibition, not just as a relay to another remote audience, but as an interface to sit between a visible and physical encounter. Within the span of the exhibition SHOW studio also hosted the live streaming of Alexander McQueen’s “Plato’s Atlantis” collection (S/S 2010), now regarded as a first for the industry, particularly in how the numbers logging on crashed the website. Image making for fashion has been a continuing vein of enquiry for the program. Tim Walker: Story Teller (2012) was the first exhibition to have a full sponsor, British leather goods brand Mulberry. This was due to Walker having worked with the brand on its advertising campaigns for a number of seasons prior to the exhibition. It was unusual in that the photographer led the curatorial concept and the installation. As well as featuring exhibition prints it included many of the fantastical props Walker has employed in his editorials, made by prop makers and set designers such as Shona Heath and Rhea Thierstein. It offered an object-oriented account of the photographer’s work and the physical impact of the scale of many of the props brought into sharp focus to the visitor a sense of how they might inhabit such images. The examination of pictorial invention for the purposes of fashion continued with Guy Bourdin: Image Maker (2014), which expanded the definition of the French fashion photographer’s practice, by showcasing a range of archival materials recently released by the Guy Bourdin Estate. This offered the opportunity to unpack the photographer’s route into making images in an analogue age of photography. Even though the majority of exhibition prints featured were the work of digital restoration by Pascal Dangin, recovering the original color balance of the Kodachrome color transparency film Bourdin used, the exhibition focused in on analogue materials to put these new works into historical context. Surviving notebooks, test Polaroids, technical drawings, paintings, Super 8 films and magazine page layouts, delineated the degree of planning and control that Bourdin exerted over his image-making—from conception to print. This led to the formalization of the walking legs series of images Bourdin took as a commercial assignment for Charles Jourdan in 1979, the fashion company he had a longstanding relationship with producing regular campaigns for their shoe range over the late sixties and seventies. These were shown as a set of exhibition prints, complimented by surviving Polaroids, a Super 8 film and a catalogue that explained the road trip holiday he took with his family and assistant in his black Cadillac, across the UK in the late 1970s in order to shoot the body of work. In response to the exhibition Tate Modern decided to purchase a set of vintage prints by Bourdin from the Estate for their permanent collection, installed on display in 2015. It is a good example of how a curatorial project such as this can contribute to a greater understanding of the citation of fashion imagery in broader accounts of visual culture. Part of the reason for wanting to stage the exhibition was to qualify why Bourdin’s work continues to resonate in a digital age, demonstrating that what still captures our interest has little to do with speed and spontaneity, and much more to do with rehearsal, planning and a controlled way of working. Valentino: Master of Couture (2012), celebrating the career of the Roman couturier captured the imagination of over 100,000 visitors and very much put the exhibitions

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program on the map for many who had not visited the complex before (see Figure 6.1). Contrary to expectation, the exhibition received no funding from the brand, with costs recouped on ticket sales, retail and hire. It was curated by exhibition and set designer Patrick Kinmoth, interior designer and filmmaker Antonio Monfreda, and myself. The exhibition led on from exhibitions in Rome and Paris marking the couturier’s retirement. Aware of this fact, the decision was made to place emphasis on the couture skills of the Roman atelier and how the working practices differ from the French model. This was to unpack the hand techniques of many of the decorative effects found in the finished couture dress designs, and a final room in the exhibition revealed these techniques through films of the techniques being made shown alongside the resulting physical textile samples. The associated publication, made a virtue of the research process for the exhibition that made particular use of a private collection of photographs held by Mr Valentino in his chateau outside of Paris, held separately from the couture archive at the Valentino headquarters at the base of the Spanish Steps in Rome. It offered a route into appreciating the world of couture as being as much about social ritual and client liaison as about the design and production of hand-made clothing. The final example of an exhibition I would like to raise, Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013), is perhaps most representative of the approach we have been able to establish at Somerset House, brokered by the adjacencies to London’s fashion research communities and art colleges, its creative practitioners and varied fashion industries, and the fashionrelated collections and expertise of it many museums and galleries. The project was intended to raise the visibility of the Isabella Blow Foundation, a mental health awareness charity for the creative sector, established by Rt Hon Daphne Guinness. The foundation started by offering scholarships on the MA Fashion course at Central Saint Martins, to honour the memory of Alexander McQueen (who studied on the course) and Isabella Blow (who saw his graduation collection and purchased it, starting his professional career). The exhibition was the first project to promote the work of the Foundation to the general public, and made the life story of the fashion editor and stylist the subject, making use of Blow’s surviving wardrobe, purchased by her friend Guinness to stop it being dispersed at auction after her untimely death. The project offered an unusual and intriguing entry into understanding a subject through extant dress, as so many of the clothes were worn extensively by the wearer (see Fig 6.2). On inspecting the hawthorn print frock coat from McQueen’s 1992 MA collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims, a cigarette burn was discovered in its side. To fashion museums invested in the principles of “exhibitionability,” such a mark would be removed in the textile restoration an exhibit would undergo before being put on display. For us, the cigarette burn mark was a portal into exploring how Blow wore her remarkable wardrobe with such apparent disregard, gaining a closer understanding of the subject through the vagaries of wear and tear. This led to thinking that informed the display cabinets based on the unbalanced gait of Blow, or mannequins that developed out of the tailoring stand of the fashion college studio, to the figure of Blow with a face sculpted to replicate her; paralleling the development of her personal style drawn from the graduating collection of fashion students leading to their professional entry into Paris fashion, with Blow as the archetypal

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model of their collections. The display items were developed by set designer Shona Heath, complemented by an architectural structure devised by Carmody Groake. The places and spaces Blow inhabited in her life also became embedded in the exhibition, so a large yew hedge at the back of the Hilles, the marital home she shared with her husband Detmar Blow, became a backdrop for a display that showcased outfits that concentrated on her appreciation of silhouette in how she dressed. An Italianate fountain at the end of the hedge, was in fact a fairground illumination sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster that Blow hung in the front room of the workers cottage in Central London she lived in during the 1990s. The imaginative response to Blow’s wardrobe was only possible due to it being a private collection. It allowed us to photograph and film the garments on live models for the accompanying publication and promotional press campaign. It permitted us to mount some items in ways that wouldn’t be possible under conventional museum standards. But this was noticed by a large number of visitors. As Jess Cartner-Morley reviewing the exhibition in the Guardian noted: “Clothes that someone has worn are much more fun than an archive.”

Conclusion: towards curatorial investigation of fashion In the exhibition examples I have raised, I hope to have illustrated that my work as an academic and as a curator evidences how London benefits from a unique approach that triangulates expertise from the museums and galleries sector, fashion education, and the fashion industries. It is a blend of expertise that produces a particular kind of exhibition, characteristic of the city and how these three groups are mapped through its geography. I have argued in my book London—After a Fashion (2007), that fashion was central to the impact of modernity in urban cities, producing new ways of seeing facilitated by the invention and intensity of modern city life. In the book I also noted that we navigate through a city such as London by engaging with its hard attributes (its buildings, its maps) as much as with its soft attributes (its fashion, its restaurants, its cinemas, its exhibitions). And fashion can also guide us through urban life, as it is often though noticing or adopting fashion, that city life becomes legible, as “the adept city-dweller is engaged in the constant manipulation of these stylistic qualities” (O’Neill 2007: 13). Therefore the temporary fashion exhibition, in a manner not dissimilar to our adoption of fashion in urban life, is a contemporary cultural format that satisfies our desire to participate in the experience of modernity. And fashion on display, more than many other forms of material culture, is able to mark this transience; in how, for example, fashions of the past mark historical time more precisely than other things produced in a specific age. In its absolute state fashion marks “nowness,” yet as fashion theorist Heike Jenss has identified, its “survival in objects and images has the potential to transmit something about their time to future generations” (Jenss 2015:18). Fashion is thus a marker for the attitudes and sensibilities of a given moment in time. In their moment, there are often things which are at their most transparent or elusive and sometimes it is only with the passage of time

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that attributes surface. The reconsideration of fashion through the physical and spatial dynamic of the exhibition is therefore a worthy endeavor for thinking fashion history in the round. I hope to have illustrated an approach towards the curatorial investigation of fashion that addresses how it “works, how it is arrived at and how it is disseminated.” These are the words of Karsten Schubert (Schubert 2000: 169), who remains dismissive of the popularity of fashion exhibitions, as “the ultimate in consumer disengagement,” a type of exhibition which “suspends curatorial judgement and offers in its place something approximating to the spectacle and immediacy of an actual fashion moment” (Schubert 2000: 169). In this Schubert is mistaken, as he does not appreciate the dialectical nature of the fashion exhibition; in that it is not the mere substitution of judgement for immediacy; at its best the fashion exhibition is able to raise the contemporary as a phenomenon underscored and informed by history. It accords with Walter Benjamin’s identification of fashion in his essay “On the Concept of History” as having “a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago” (Lowy 2005: 86). It is this duality, so characteristic of fashion that drew Charles Baudelaire to write about it in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” the essay that changed the course of modern art, and also introduced us to the figure of the flâneur, the cultural nomad who wanders the city in order to experience its offers and to participate in the present moment. (Just like those mannequin feet in the Bourdin photograph.) The task of the temporary fashion exhibition, whether staged in museums, galleries, or commercial spaces, is to raise the feeling of nowness so sought by the flâneur—as an experience of what can constitute up-to-the-minute in the world today. Thus the temporary fashion exhibition is not a static display, but a reflection of the mutations and changes that affect us all and the cities we live in. In his great study of urban change and modernity, Marshall Berman described Baudelaire’s 1863 essay as the portrayal of modern life appearing “as a great fashion show, a system of dazzling appearances, brilliant facades, glittering triumphs of decoration and design” (Berman 1982: 136). How odd it is that this description of the Parisian modern life in the latter part of the nineteenth-century so closely resembles the urban modernity of the temporary fashion exhibition in the twenty-first century.

Curatorial credits for Somerset House exhibitions cited Guy Bourdin: Image Maker (2014) Curated by Alistair O’Neill with Shelley Verthime (Curator, Guy Bourdin Estate). Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013) Curated by Alistair O’Neill with Shonagh Marshall (Assistant Curator, Somerset House). Martin Margiela “20” The Exhibition (June 3–September 5, 2010) Initiated by the Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp and Maison Martin Margiela. Curated by Kaat Debo, curator at MoMu and scenographer Bob Verhelst, with Somerset House curator, Claire Catteral.

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SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution (September 17–December 23, 2009). Co-curated by Claire Catterall (Somerset House), Professor Penny Martin (London College of Fashion) and Alistair O’Neill (Central Saint Martins). Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices between Fashion and Architecture (2008) (April 24–August 10, 2008) organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Curator: Brooke Hodge. Somerset House Curator: Claire Catterall Curatorial consultant (fashion): Alistair O’Neill. Tim Walker: Story Teller (2012) Curator: Tim Walker. Valentino: Master of Couture (2012) Co-curated by Patrick Kinmoth, Antonio Monfreda and Alistair O’Neill. Other London fashion exhibitions cited: Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, Victoria and Albert Museum (March 14–August 2, 2015). Louis Vuitton Series 3, 180 Strand (September 12–October 18, 2015). Mademoiselle Privé: Chanel, Saatchi Gallery (October 13–November 1, 2015)

References Baudelaire, C. (1995) The Painter of Modern Life, London: Phaidon Press. Berman. M. (1982) All That is Solid Melts into Air, London: Verso. Breward, C. (2008) “Between the Museum and the Academy: Fashion Research and its Constituencies,” Fashion Theory, 12(1): 83–93. Evans, C. (2000) “British Fashion: Just What is it that Makes British Fashion so Different, so Appealing?,” The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, J. (2007) “A Certain Tendency of Curating,” in P. O’Neill, H. U. Obrist et al. (eds), Curating Subjects, London: Open Editions. Jenss, H. (2015) Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Lowy, M. (2005) Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, London: Verso. Menkes, S. (2009) “A Story Told through Folds, Tucks and Trims,” New York Times, April 27. Morrison, R. (2016) “To Keep Luring the Public, Museums Need Constant Reinvention,” The Times, March 11. Obrist, H.O. (2014) Ways of Curating, London: Penguin. O’Neill, A. (2007) London: After a Fashion, London: Reaktion Books. Quick, H. (2014) “Next Level” Wallpaper, February: 128–9. Riding, A. (2000) “Arts Abroad: A Foothold in London for Imperial Treasures,” New York Times, December 28. Ryan, N. (2005) “Fashion’s Fortune,” Museum’s Journal, July. Silverman, S. (1986) Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America, New York: Pantheon. Spindler, A. (2000) Viktor and Rolf, Haute Couture Book, The Netherlands: Groninger Museum. Sudjic, D. (2000) “First You Don’t See It Now You Do; The Gilbert Collection is worth millions. The Previously Hidden Courtyard It Uncovers Is Priceless,” Observer Review, June 4. Sudjic, D. (2001) “Is the Future of Art in Their Hands?,” The Observer, October 14.

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Reports Somerset House Annual Report 2014–15, www.somersethouse.org.uk/documents/20151061244 SHT %20Annual%20Report%202014–15.pdf (accessed 25 May 2017). Global Cities Index 2015, www.atkearney.co.uk/research-studies/global-cities-index/2015 The Value of UK Fashion (2010, updated 2014) British Fashion Council report, www. britishfashioncouncil.com/uploads/media/62/16356.pdf (accessed 25 May 2017). Mark Leonard (1997) “Britain: Renewing Our Identity,” Demos report, www.demos.co.uk/files/ britaintm.pdf (accessed 25 May 2017). Global Fashion School Rakings 2015, The Business of Fashion, www.businessoffashion.com/ education/rankings/2015 (accessed 25 May 2017). “London Visitors Attractions see 1.61% Increase in Visitor Numbers in 2105,” ALVA press release, www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=453&codeid=778 (accessed 25 May 2017).

7 BOUTIQUE—WHERE ART AND FASHION MEET: CURATING AS COLLABORATION AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE Annamari Vänskä

This chapter takes as its subject an exhibition project Boutique—Where Art and Fashion Meet (2012) and its transformations into three edited versions in 2013, 2014 and 2016. The initial exhibition was a wide-ranging interdisciplinary show, reminiscent of the Wagnerian “total work of art” which fused art, fashion, music and dance by bringing together artists and designers to collaborate on a mutual project. The original version of Boutique was displayed at the Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland in 2012 in the wider frame of the World Design Capital Helsinki project. Afterwards, the exhibition became a body of works that was then edited into new exhibitions in collaboration with other curators and institutions in Washington and New York (2013), Tokyo (2014), and Berlin (2016). This chapter discusses Boutique and its subsequent editions as an example of the various meanings and forms of curating as collaboration and cultural critique. It discusses what interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and designers meant in this exhibition, how collaboration should be seen as the standard curatorial method, and how curating can function as cultural critique. The chapter not only shifts focus from the curator as the star of the show to the relationships between curators, artists and designers but also between institutions, works, spaces and locations which also essentially shape works, exhibitions and the meaning of both. This viewpoint contextualizes Boutique and its editions in the ongoing discussion about new ways of displaying fashion beyond garments and how fashion exhibitions in art contexts tend to surpass the tradition of the objectbased model of displaying dress (e.g. Anderson 2000: 371–389; Taylor 1998: 337–358; Taylor 2004; Clark this volume; Debo this volume; Pecorari this volume). The idea of curating as collaboration also takes a stand on the ongoing discussion about the “curator’s power” (Brenson 1998; O’Neill 2007; Vidokle 2010). This theme has identified a shift of 119

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focus from works and artists to the makers of exhibitions since the 1990s. It has recognized the curator’s growing role as the mediator and manager of exhibitions, their experience and understanding. Boutique and its editions challenge this myth of the curator as the non-relational, non-interactive and non-participatory genius whose “art work” the exhibition is, and show instead that exhibition making is always teamwork. Doing so, the chapter situates this particular project within the so-called “collaborative turn” (Lind 2007) that has defined recent curatorial practices within contemporary art and debunked the idea of the curator as the central agent reminiscent of the modernist, heroic and nonrelational, non-interactive and non-participatory artistic genius. The chapter is divided into four parts. First, it focuses on how the exhibition Boutique was initiated and how and why collaboration was chosen as its focus. Secondly, the chapter discusses the exhibition as a body of works that opened up possibilities for curating new exhibitions in new venues, new geographical locations and in collaboration with other curators and artists. Thirdly, collaboration is discussed as a curatorial method and curating as a form of cultural critique.

Where art and fashion meet: collaboration as curatorial theme When the exhibition Boutique was initiated, the city of Helsinki was announced as the next World Design Capital in 2012. “World Design Capital” is an international program that selects one or more cities annually to be a “design capital,” and to showcase to “the rest of the world” the chosen city’s accomplishments in design in improving its citizens’ quality of life (www.icsid.org/about/history/). Within this wider framing, it seemed fitting to curate an exhibition that brought fashion center-stage. Another framing for the exhibition came from a still largely existing value hierarchy between art, fashion and design in Finland. Although the idea of fashion as the representation of “all things bad” from moral decay and women’s oppression to being a too frivolous field of intellectual inquiry within academia (see e.g. Wilson 1985; Davis 1992; Lipovetsky 1994; Kawamura 2005; Barnard 2007) has largely subsided, Finland has not valued fashion as highly as other fields of design. Unlike the other Scandinavian countries, Finland has never identified itself as a “fashion-nation.” While Sweden, Denmark and Norway have explicitly constructed themselves as “fashion-nations” since the early2000s (Melchior 2011: 177–200), Finland has begun to identify fashion as an important part of design only after the “Design Capital” project (see e.g. Pöppönen 2012; Väkevä 2015; Mankkinen 2016). This may seem odd since Finland has a strong internationally recognized identity as a “design-nation” and it has even included design in the national innovation system and by establishing a state-led official “Finnish design” policy scheme in the early 2000s (e.g. Valtonen 2005). In this policy scheme, however, fashion has not been recognized in the same way as other fields of design.1 One of the aims of curating Boutique was therefore to show, through the fruitful collaboration of artists and designers, that neither the ancient cultural hierarchy, nor the design-hierarchy applies. The aim was to make a statement that art and fashion interconnect, that Finland is a budding “fashion-nation” and that fashion is not only about consuming but also about posing critical questions about culture.

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These ideas led to the invention of the curatorial concept of the exhibition: collaboration, cooperation and community between art and design. The title of the exhibition, Boutique was initially a working title for the exhibition but it stuck because the etymology of the word seemed suitable for the whole project. In Greek etymology boutique refers to “storage,” and in English it used to mean “apothecary” while in French it first meant a “shop” before developing into its current form “boutique,” meaning specifically a “clothes’ shop.” These multi-layered meanings seemed to bring fashion and curating aptly together by referring to an exhibition as a “storage of ideas,” to fashion through the metaphor of the “clothes shop,” and to curating as “curing” the dated understanding of fashion as opposite to art and design. The exhibition’s subtitle, where art and fashion meet was simultaneously an ironic reference to marketing speak—especially to the memorable Finnish marketing slogan Nokia—Connecting people—as well as to the idea of museum as a place for meeting, cooperating and staging ideas. These meanings were also mediated in the press and taken up by the public reception of the show. In terms of curating, collaboration meant inviting “pairs” and “teams” instead of individuals and asking them to collaborate on a project that neither would realize on their own. Most teams consisted of an artist and a designer but there was also a dance company. This kind of working method presupposes a strong vision about the end result, but, even more importantly, it calls for trust between the artists, the venue, and the curator. The process started from a simple question to the teams: how would they like to contribute, and what was their yet-unrealized dream. This kind of working method, which uses an idea as a platform or a springboard for initiating projects allows for uncertainty and surprise. It accepts that it is impossible to know what exactly—if anything!—will emerge. It identifies each participant as an expert who contributes to the project with their special knowledge. It also makes the curatorial process more open and transforms the curator into a project manager. In the first stage of the process it was therefore important to curate individuals who were willing to collaborate. This method makes the relationship between the curator and the participating artists and designers more equal. While the curator is in charge of managing the project and maintaining its progress in a way that reduces the risk of failure, the participating artists and designers are responsible for producing the end result, their own project. Collaboration and division of labor produces the final exhibition. But who were the teams and what did they come up with?

Beyond garments: fashion as installation Collaboration had interesting results: all finished works were installations and with the exception of one piece, none of the exhibited works consisted of clothing. Instead, all works were installations and included still or moving images as if to highlight fashion as a conceptual practice beyond garments. Another reason for the format of the works might be due to the method of interdisciplinary collaboration for which art provides more flexibility than fashion design. Secondly, the nature of the finished works might also have to do with the display context which was an art museum. An exhibition is a special type of discourse, mediation and a form of communication (O’Neill 2007: 14). It also has a canonical model

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Figure 7.1 Paola Suhonen and Mikko Ijäs, from the installation “The Land of Seven Fairy Tales,” room no. 2, “Route 66.” Installation view, Helsinki, 2012. Photo: Kari Siltala. © Amos Anderson Art Museum.

of presentation which in the context of contemporary art and design often means spacespecific installation. Related to this was the way in which the project was carried out. After the selection of artists and designers, the senior curator Kaj Martin from the Amos Anderson Museum and I allocated a space of for each team in which to realize their project. The installation “The Land of the Seven Fairy Tales” by the designer Paola Suhonen and visual artist Mikko Ijäs consisted of seven succeeding “mood-rooms” that were constructed around seven short films reminiscent of fashion’s “mood-videos” (see Figure 7.1). Each film conveyed an atmospheric short story based on a specific location and fashion collection, and the atmosphere of each room reflected this mood. The central claim of the work was the importance of imagining that connects art and fashion—and how important a role visual imagery has come to play in narrating fashion (see e.g. Uhlirova 2013: 118–132; Reinach 2013: 144–154; Shinkle 2013: 175–192). Instead of being a visual display of clothes, the main focus of the installation was on the films and their narrative. In the films, the main characters—the models—wore costumes that were dresses from the collections. Later on, when this piece was displayed in Berlin, and the cost for constructing rooms was too expensive, the installation was displayed relief-like on the wall: representing films on tablet computers in combination with actual garments connecting to the films. This decision to exhibit two different types of fashion objects— films and garments—side by side complemented each other and gave both contexts that would otherwise not have been there.

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Figure 7.2 Tero Puha and Teemu Muurimäki, “Body Beautiful (Remix).” Installation view, Helsinki, 2012. Photo: Kari Siltala. © Amos Anderson Art Museum.

Another installation focusing on the power of visual representation was “Body Beautiful (Remix)” by the artist Tero Puha and the designer Teemu Muurimäki (see Figure 7.2). It was an investigation about the central role of the image in branding and constructing product identity. The duo created a product, a “scentless fragrance,” marketing imagery surrounding it, and a slogan Body Beautiful remix—Become Who You Are reminiscent of many perfume adverts. In many ways the installation was a deconstruction of the 1990s trend in advertising which created product and brand identity through the use of memorable images—such is the case in Calvin Klein’s Be and One, for example. The centerpiece of the tongue-in-cheek installation was a commercial where languid androgynous models first walk aimlessly on a beach, and ultimately end up holding the perfume bottle reverberating the empty slogans used by many actual brands, “become who you are,” spoken in a soft and alluring male voice. The giant advertising posters surrounding the commercial and the product represented the models, all of them with the same head but different bodies. The model had an Afro hairstyle, signifying “Africanness,” facial features referring to “Asianness” and body types representing a thin, muscular, fat, and hairy body. The racial stereotyping in the installation commented on how fashion advertising has taken part in the blending of global and local cultures and their meanings like in the case of Benetton. It was a tongue-in-cheek commentary about the ways in which global fashion brands tend to fuse local characteristics such as race, ethnicity or nationality into easily digestible symbols through the color of skin, for example. In fashion

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advertising, race, ethnicity and nationality are not shown as biological or unchangeable categories, let alone facts. Rather they are tools with which advertising aims at addressing the viewer personally. In this sense, the installation was a critique of the persuasive power of marketing images. Simultaneously it was an astute analysis about the ways in which fashion advertising contributes to the “reality” into which contemporary consumers are socialized. The role of images that connect brands with consumers was also at the core of shoe designer Minna Parikka and artist Jani Leinonen’s installation “Shoe Liberation Army” (see Plate 17). At the center were cartoon figures from global brands such as Hello Kitty, Kellogg’s Leo the Lion, and M&Ms. The installation merged the cartoon characters together to form a pattern that was printed on the shoes and made into wallpaper. The wallpaper was used for covering a distorted installation space, which also became a stage for showing the shoes. The work aimed to comment upon authenticity, copying and plagiarism—all themes that bind art and fashion together. “Shoe Liberation Army” also became an interesting study about the power of brands to affect what can be shown in an exhibition. In Helsinki, prior to the exhibition, the team had to make sure with a lawyer that the installation was not an infringement of copyrights. Later on, when the installation was reproduced in Tokyo, the Hello Kitty character had to be removed from the installation in order to avoid a possible infringement lawsuit. The installation made palpable the power of brands in setting the rules of display and discourse. Simultaneously, the shoes also became objects of desire as many of the visitors wanted to buy a pair—especially after one pair was given to Lady Gaga when she visited the exhibition in conjunction with her concert in Helsinki, and ended by wearing the pair in a photograph displayed on the photographer Terry Richardson’s website. Celebrities are essential to contemporary fashion industry (Church Gibson 2012)— an aspect which also bound “Shoe Liberation Army” to the installation Cinderella by the artist Erina Matusui and shoe designer Noritaka Tatehana in the Tokyo edition. Tatehena is known for designing shoes for Lady Gaga among others. In Berlin, “Shoe Liberation Army” transformed into a completely different kind of ensemble: a pink wall—a reference to the Berlin Wall—on which the shoes were scattered forming a shoe relief. Some of the projects also brought live bodies in the exhibition—as if making a commentary about the absence of bodies in fashion exhibitions. These pieces concentrated on the problematic relation with the body, as in the dance piece “un-fit” by Anna Mustonen & Co., fashion’s role in constructing classed identities in “Cultural Dresscode” by artists Heidi Lunabba and Tärähtäneet Ämmät (Nutty Tarts), the unsustainability of the fashion industry in the installation “15 %” by Timo Rissanen and Salla Salin and the loss of history and eradication of values of the clothing industry in the installation “Girl Evacuees” consisting of an “army of girls,” i.e. of ten life-size mannequin dolls by Katja Tukiainen and Samu-Jussi Koski. “un-fit” investigated the boundaries between the body and fashion. It was a critical intervention to the ways in which the fashion industry uses the body as malleable material to connote “fashionability,” while simultaneously producing personal feelings of inadequacy in people. The core of the installation was a dance piece, which brought live bodies into the exhibition—reflecting on ideas about museum display of garments as static or even a graveyard of dead clothes (Steele 1998: 334). The dancers connected the museum display to everyday fashion

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Figure 7.3 Timo Wright, still-image from the video accompanying the dance piece “un-fit,” 2012. © Timo Wright.

practices, bringing the body back to the fashion exhibition, as it were. The work also consisted of a video work by Timo Wright. The video represented a female body caught in a pose which gradually disappears from the screen as the image begins to scratch— only to re-appear in the same pose over and over, in a loop. The installation also included “talking fashion photographs” of nude and partly veiled women by Federico Cabrera. The photographs were accompanied by loudspeakers, and every time a viewer passed by the images, a female voice asked, for example, “why do you look at me?” (see Figure 7.3). The installation “Cultural Dresscode” also investigated ways in which people differentiate themselves from others and construct their identities through clothing. Originally, this piece was based on ethnographic interviews in six socio-economically different locations in Helsinki. The artists set up an interview booth in a public space, and invited passers-by to fill in a questionnaire about their relationship to clothing and what they wanted to communicate through it. They also photographed each interviewee and eventually created “an ideal outfit” that represented the typology of each socio-economic group in each location. The results of the interviews, photographs of interviewees and the ideal outfits of each location were installed in a fitting room in the exhibition. Later on, when “Cultural Dresscode” was displayed in New York, Tokyo and Berlin, it was modified in many ways to fit in each specific location. First, the name was shortened to “Dresscode” which already includes the idea that conventions and norms regarding dress and dressing up are always culturally constructed, not natural facts. In New York the project was realized in the same spirit as in Helsinki, but in three different locations area: the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn. The results from each location were represented in fitting rooms under the title of each borough. However, when the exhibition travelled to Tokyo, there was no funding to realize the research project. An alternative way of representing the piece had to be

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Figure 7.4. Heidi Lunabba and Tärähtäneet Ämmät, “Dresscode.” Installation view, Tokyo, 2014. Photo: Akihide Mishima, Courtesy of SPIRAL /Wacoal Art Center.

imagined. In collaboration with the artists we decided to exhibit the previous cities as results of visual research on screens installed in fitting rooms with the name of the respective city “Helsinki” and “New York.” What is more, the current exhibiting location, “Tokyo,” became a platform of an ongoing research process. This was realized by setting up a photo studio in the exhibition space and asking visitors to take a photograph of themselves which were streamed to a screen in the “Tokyo” fitting room (see Figure 7.4). The same method was utilized in Berlin—this time the ongoing process was realized by asking visitors to take a selfie and to send it online to a certain address where the images were collected to be shown on-screen in a fitting room entitled “Berlin.” Currently the installation consists of hundreds of photographs of street styles in Helsinki, New York, Tokyo and Berlin. It has become a valuable form of documentation and a large corpus of visual material for future research of fashion. It exemplifies how fashion curating need not only be about displaying haute couture, but also about everyday fashions. It is also an example of how interdisciplinary collaboration and socially engaging projects can produce results that are widely accessible and underline the democratic appeal of fashion. The installation “15 %” commented on the darker side of the garment and fashion industry. Central to the piece was a quasi “assembly line” in a “sweat-shop.” In Helsinki, the installation was constructed in a windowless white room with fluorescent lights and tables around which a tailor, performer Janelle Abbott individually cut, sewed and ironed ordinary white cotton t-shirts. Central to the piece was the surplus fabric: every t-shirt that is currently produced in the well-oiled machinery of the fast-fashion system sends an average 15% of produced and treated fabric to waste. This is part of the production

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Figure 7.5 Timo Rissanen and Salla Salin, “15 %.” Installation view with performer Janelle Abbott, New York, 2013. Photo: Timo Rissanen.

process that the consumer usually never sees but in “15 %” the surplus fabric was transformed into the central piece of the whole installation. After finishing a t-shirt, Abbott numbered it and put it in a paper bag reminiscent of brand-logo high-fashion shopping bags. What is more, she wrapped the waste fabric in silk paper and packaged it with the t-shirt in the same bag. In Helsinki, all the shirts were sold at a prize of 4.99€ which is the average price of a fast-fashion t-shirt. This time around, however, the customer also had to take the waste with them and decide what they do with it. All the money raised by selling the t-shirts was given to charity. When “15 %” was realized in New York, the sweatshop was installed in the Aronson Gallery, Parsons School of Design, which has a large shop-like window facing Fifth Avenue. Here Janelle Abbott sat at the window, and produced t-shirts every day throughout the whole exhibition (see Figure 7.5). In this context the installation became an exclamation point about the industry’s dark undercurrent and displayed to passers-by how the fashion industry exploits natural resources and labor. Abbott worked long hours, every day from the opening of the exhibition until its closing, which made visible the repetitious—and boring—work of dressmakers in the garment industry. In this case, exhibition visitors lightened the tediousness of sewing as many talked with her about the work. The installation thus also focused on the “behind-the-scenes” labor as it placed Abbott who represented the worker, as the central figure of the work. The exploitation of garment workers in the fast-fashion industry became even more highlighted when Abbott went on strike, underlining the fact how little workers are paid for their hard work. In fact, hiring Abbott for the Tokyo and Berlin editions was too expensive. Therefore “15 %” was displayed as documentation in these locations, consisting of video screens showing

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footage from the previous exhibitions, as well as an installation with sewing machines and paper bags, remeniscent of the work done in previous exhibitions. If “15 %” had to do with the various unsustainable practices and aspects of fashion, how the industry treats matter as disposable, and exploits workers, the idea behind “Girl Evacuees” was the opposite. This installation, consisting of ten life-size fiberglass dolls with ten gowns designed for them drew from the history of Finnish refugees during the First and Second World Wars. During both wars, the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Finland known as Karelia, forcing Karelians to flee their homes and taking only their most valuable belongings with them. In many cases, the most valuable things that women could take along were their full dresses. The installation thus made the violent history of war visible through clothing. Simultaneously, the installation also drew attention to the fact that while fashion is fundamentally a material practice and we live in a thoroughly materialist culture, the current fast-fashion system treats matter as mute and disposable (e.g. Scaturro 2008). In contemporary culture, clothing hardly counts as most valuable belongings—rather, it is easy to discard and leave behind. Later on, when the exhibition traveled, the number of mannequin dolls was reduced due to travel costs. In Tokyo, the installation consisted of six dolls and in Berlin, three. While in Helsinki and in Tokyo the dolls were represented in the same space as if an army of girls, in Berlin the dolls were scattered around the exhibition space, which was a three-storey open space with the dolls binding the space and the exhibition together. The history of collaboration between artists or artists and designers shows that the collaborative method used in Boutique and its editions is by no means new. On the contrary, it is long and multifaceted and extends from sixteenth-century artists’ studio work to twentieth-century collaborations in Andy Warhol’s pseudo-industrial Factory (Lind 2007: 16– 17). Collaboration between artists and fashion designers also has its own history, ranging from Futurist manifestos on “utopian anti-fashion” and Constructivist (and Communist) fantasies about the fashioned future-citizen, to collaborations between surrealist artists and fashion designers such as Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1930s (Stern 2004; English 2007). More recently, it has materialized in Yves Saint Laurent’s interpretation of Piet Mondrian’s painting in his “Mondrian Dress” design from 1965 (Mackrell 2005; Geczy and Karaminas 2012) and in collaborations between contemporary artists and global brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dior (Bengtsen this volume; Bai this volume). Art-fashion collaborations have recently become an important tool in associating the fashion brand with cultural capital, in attracting new consumers—and in increasing the brand’s economic value. The multifaceted history of collaborations and overlaps between art and fashion exemplifies how independent curators often tend to work when they commission works. They go from concepts and ideas and do not necessarily assume the conventional role of the dress historian whose principal task has long been to research the history of a particular designer’s oeuvre or a fashion moment, and to select key examples from it for display along the conventions of dress historical presentation (see e.g. Taylor 1998, 2002). The contemporary fashion curator is more like a project-researcher (see e.g. Steele 1998: 327–335; Breward 2008: 83–94) whom the museum—or a gallery—hires for the duration of the curatorial project. But what happens once the exhibition is over? What happened to Boutique?

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New editions: New York–Tokyo–Berlin Usually, exhibitions are solitary events—most commonly due to lack of funding for taking the exhibition elsewhere, and due to the nature of the exhibition as a site-specific event. Boutique was undoubtedly a site-specific exhibition. It comprised installations each of which was constructed on the spot to a specific space. This also meant that the works were flexible: it was possible to realize modifications or editions from the original pieces according to each new space. In this sense Boutique was essentially a body of concepts and ideas that could take new material forms. The malleability of the works made it much easier to bring the exhibition elsewhere and to realize every new edition in collaboration with people from each exhibition location in order to contextualize the show in that particular place. The first edition of Boutique was co-curated with Hazel Clark for the Aronson Gallery at Parsons School of Design in 2013. The collaboration began when Clark visited Helsinki to see the original exhibition since the other artist behind the installation “15 %,” Timo Rissanen, also worked at Parsons in New York. After seeing the exhibition, Clark selected three pieces from it on the basis of their critical stance against the unsustainable fashion industry and the size of the possible exhibition space: “15 %,” “Dresscode” and “un-fit.” In the frame of New York which is the global fashion city (e.g. Rantisi 2006: 109–122) and a gallery within the design school with a shop-window facing the Fifth Avenue, the major thoroughfare, the exhibition had to be a critical intervention and to mediate an alternative view of fashion to students and to other visitors. The critical potential of fashion was also highlighted through changing the name of the exhibition, from Boutique to Fashion Interactions. The new name also underlined the potential of art and fashion in creating critical discourse as well as the possibility of fashion curators to use fashion as a reflective practice. Organizing an international symposium on fashion curating—Fashion Curating Now—further emphasized this by focusing on possibilities and challenges of contemporary fashion curating on a global scale. The symposium hosted many of the authors included in this book: Judith Clark, Kaat Debo, Nathalie Khan, and Alexandra Palmer. The second edition of Boutique went to Japan and was exhibited in one of the most prominent design exhibition spaces in Tokyo, the Spiral Art Center, and co-curated with Spiral’s curator Ikuko Kato. The name of the exhibition was altered slightly: Boutique! Thinking about Fashion, Through Art and co-produced with Spiral, the Finnish Institute in Japan and the Finnish Embassy in Tokyo (2014). This time around, all installations were displayed as more or less modified versions to fit the exhibition space and the production budget. In fact, most of the works were produced on site which was a more affordable solution than transporting the works from Finland. In Tokyo the idea of collaboration was also extended to cooperation between two nations: Japan and Finland. This means that the original exhibition was enlarged with Japanese artists and designers whose works conversed with the themes of the Finnish works, modifying and adding new meanings to all. Inspired by the story of Katja Tukiainen and Samu-Jussi Koski’s “Girl Evacuees”, the installation “Fukiyose” by matohu and Kenmei Nagaoka reflected on the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, and what people took with them when fleeing their homes (see Figure 7.6). In the context of Tokyo, the story behind the dresses by Koski became an important mediator

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Figure 7.6 Installation view with matohu and Kenmei Nagaoka, “Fukiyose” (foreground) and Katja Tukiainen and Samu-Jussi Koski, “Girl Evacuees” (background). Tokyo, 2014. Photo: Akihide Mishima, Courtesy of SPIRAL /Wacoal Art Center.

between the two nations and the way in which a disaster, be it war or a nuclear catastrophe, affects individuals. Simultaneously, the designer matohu and artist Kenmei Nagaoka’s installation also connected to “15 %”: it included a jacket assembled from matohu’s previous designs and discarded fabric, as a reminder that unsustainability is a dilemma that binds the Japanese, Finnish and global fashion industries and consumers together. The unwanted byproduct of economic activity in fashion is the negative impact on the environment and humans—both on those who work in production and on those who over-consume fashion. The third edition of Boutique was exhibited in Berlin (2016) under its original title and produced by the Embassy of Finland. The frame for this edition was the local Berlin Fashion Week and the exhibition space, Felleshus, which is the home of the Nordic embassies in Berlin. Felleshus is an outspokenly political stage: the exhibiting times are divided between each Scandinavian country so that each has annually a three-month time slot to display the crème-de-la-crème of the respective country to German audiences. Berlin Fashion Week, on the other hand, is known for its unconventionality among the fashion week concept (www.fashion-week-berlin.com/en/about-us.html). A major part was dedicated to panel discussions and projects on sustainable fashion. In this double frame—the context of the fashion week and the context of a national showcase—the exhibition was, on the one hand, a socio-political intervention critiquing the fashion industry and, on the other, a staging of the innovative collaboration of young Finnish artists and designers. In Berlin, the exhibition was again accompanied by a one-day international symposium, Curating: Fashion in Context which I co-organized with Hazel Clark,

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addressing how to teach critical fashion curating and what the aims and practices of fashion curating could be in museums, galleries and commercial spaces in the future. Most of the works installed in Berlin were only slight modifications of the original exhibition. “The Land of The Seven Fairy Tales,” for example, became an installation consisting of seven short films paired with garments from the collections shown on the films. The dance piece “un-fit,” on the other hand, was transformed into a dialogue between two works: a video by Timo Wright from the dance piece and an installation called “Hate Couture” by Tärähtäneet Ämmät. While the video exhibits the disintegration of the body, “Hate Couture” consists of nude colored garments featuring undesirable bodily features such as veins, saggy breasts, fat and body hair—a work reminiscent of Rei Kawakubo’s/ Comme des Garçon’s spring/summer 1997 collection “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body.” A new work was also included in the Berlin exhibition: a hat performance by the performance artist and milliner Mimosa Pale. On the opening night, three performers wore Pale’s large sculptural hats with designs drawing from art history, e.g. from the Japanese Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” (1829–1832). The performance made references to the history of collaborations between avant-garde artists and designers as noted above, while also making visible the dying profession of millinery in contemporary fashion.

Fashion curating: a form of cultural analysis “An exhibition is not an illustration,” Hans Ulrich Obrist states in the concluding chapter of Ways of Curating (2014: 167). What he means is that exhibitions are not merely illustrations or representations about something—they produce reality itself. This was certainly the case with Boutique and its editions. It was not a traditional illustration of dress or fashions of a certain moment—rather, it was a materialization of interdisciplinary collaboration. But more than that, it was also what Mieke Bal (2004: 9) calls “cultural analysis” as it focused on issues of fashion that have cultural and societal relevance, and aimed to contribute in topical debates through the exhibited works. Although I, the curator, played an important role in setting the exhibition project in motion, it was neither me nor the artists and designers alone who gave the project and its works meaning. It was the collaboration between artists, designers, institutions, geographical locations and their audiences that ultimately produced the meanings of the exhibition and its works. The whole project goes to show that curatorial work is not about the curator as an individual and that the exhibition is not the materialization of her/his intentions contrary to what for example Diana Vreeland suggested through her exhibitions. The curator is often seminal in setting a project in motion but, once the show is on, it is open to multiple interpretations in the same way as artworks. After opening, the curator steps aside and the public takes over. It produces meanings in dialogue with the exhibition and makes its own interpretations. This makes the curator first and foremost an enabler: someone who works to create space for establishing, experiencing and understanding, also in ways that s/he did not intend. Like the artist and the designer, the curator is therefore only partially involved in the production of meaning. The reception of Boutique indicates this: most of the audience read the exhibition and its editions as a form of cultural critique and as critical analysis of fashion. This also made

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the exhibition quite popular among the audiences in the different locations—it felt as if this kind of approach had been long anticipated. The popularity of the exhibition was immediately evident on the opening night with a queue of over 500 people outside the museum throughout the opening. Over the three-month exhibiting period, it attracted over 20,000 people which was remarkable for a museum with approximately 50,000 annual visitors (Boutique statistics Helsinki 2012). In comparison, the Berlin edition attracted over 17,000 visitors during its three-month exhibition time (Boutique statistics Berlin 2016) and Tokyo over 11,000 visitors over its two-week exhibition time (Boutique statistics Tokyo 2015). Furthermore, the Helsinki exhibition was mentioned about sixty times in the media and in blogs—and met with enthusiasm and praise (Boutique in the media 2012) and the Tokyo edition over eighty times (Boutique statistics Tokyo 2015). The same enthusiasm was present in the Berlin edition where the guest book had sixty-three pages with entries from the visitors, stating for example: “As researcher of cultural studies, first time in Berlin, absolutely fabulous!” “Exceptional, and much awaited! Exciting, typically Nordic—well presented in this beautiful and light space.” “Unorthodox, innovative, unconventional.” “A wonderful statement.” “An interesting and stimulating exhibition. I would have wanted to see more.” “Timely, fantastic, avant-gardist, a beautiful mixture of architecture and spatial installation.” “An inspiring exhibition which criticizes the whitewashed and blind contemporary fashion industry.” BOUTIQUE STATISTICS BERLIN 2016, translated from German by the author Boutique and its edited versions clearly filled a gap in the ongoing discussion regarding the art–fashion conundrum and the challenges and problems of the fashion industry, and how fashion can also function as a critical discourse. In retrospect, it seems that the exhibition may have seemed more critical to the audience because it intertwined fashion with art—and because it did not display clothing. The framing of the exhibition within an art institution may thus have lent meanings to the exhibition that might not have materialized had it been exhibited in another kind of location. The various editions thus produced “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988: 575–599) about art, fashion and their relevance to cultural debate—exemplifying how knowledge about fashion is made and disseminated, and how this knowledge is always framed, affecting the meanings and their very formation. The series of edited exhibitions also made me as a curator and as a researcher of fashion ever more aware of the specificity of knowledge and meaning of production and especially, how the meanings of fashion change depending on framing and the context of display. The feedback of the exhibition exemplifies how Boutique and its editions succeeded in creating self-reflexive and critical discourse about fashion and art. It also assured me that

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fashion curating is a viable format of critical discourse and cultural analysis. It particularly enabled me to understand fashion as a local phenomenon. Although fashion is globally distributed, the meanings that we read from it and that make it intelligible, are often locally specific. Fashion must always become local in order for it to affect. In this exhibition, this need was materialized in the edited versions of the original exhibition through the inclusion of local artists and designers. The editions therefore suggest that fashion curating is always particular and embodied. It is a culturally specific activity, and a platform for interpersonal and intercultural negotiation despite the fact that new visualization methods and media technologies persuade us to believe that fashion transcends all cultural boundaries. Boutique and its editions showed that fashion is site-specific. Travel and change of location alter and add meaning. Fashion curating changes places but each place always changes the exhibition and the works included in it.

Note 1 This has changed gradually, especially since fashion design students have started to be recognized at the annual Hyéres Festival in France which promotes young fashion designers (see e.g. Frilander 2015; Heikkilä 2016).

References “About Us,” Berlin Fashion Week, available online: www.fashion-week-berlin.com/en/about-us. html (accessed September 3, 2016). Anderson, F. (2000) “Museums as Fashion Media,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church-Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, New York: Routledge, 371–389. Bai, Y. (2018) “Artification and Authenticity: Museum Exhibitions of Luxury Fashion Brands in China,” in A. Vänskä and H. Clark (eds), Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury, 213–229. Bal, M. (2004) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Balzer, D. (2015) Curationism. How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else, London: Pluto Press. Bengtsen, P. (2018) “Fashion Curates Art: Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton,” in A. Vänskä and H. Clark (eds), Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury, 199–212. Brenson, M. (1998) “The Curator’s Moment—Trends in the Field of International Contemporary Art Exhibitions,” Art Journal, 57(4): 16–28. Breward, C. (2008) “Between the Museum and the Academy: Fashion Research and its Constituencies,” Fashion Theory, 12(1): 83–94. Clark, J. (2018) “Props and Other Attributes: Fashion and Exhibition-making,” in A. Vänskä and H. Clark (eds), Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury, 91–104. Davis, F. (1992) Fashion, Culture and Identity, Chicago, IL : Chicago University Press. Debo, K. (2018) “Fashion Curation at MoMu: Digital Challenges,” in A. Vänskä and H. Clark (eds), Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury, 73–86.

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Doubtfire, J. and Ranchetti, G. (2015) “Curator as Artist as Curator,” Curating the Contemporary (CtC), April 30, available online: https://curatingthecontemporary.org/2015/04/30/curator-asartist-as-curator/ (accessed September 1, 2016). English, B. (2007) A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century. From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk, Oxford and New York: Berg. Frilander, A. (2015) “Näin Aalto-yliopisto ponnahti muodin huipulle—arvokilpailun finaalissa neljä suomalaista,” Helsingin Sanomat, April 16, available online: www.hs.fi/ilta/art-2000002816861. html (accessed January 24, 2017). Geczy, A. and Karaminas, V. (eds) (2013) Fashion and Art, Oxford: Berg. Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–99. Heikkilä, A. (2016) “Hyères-suunnittelukilpailu avaa ovia isoihin muotitaloihin,” YLE Uutiset, April 24, available online: http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8832936 (accessed January 24, 2017). International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (2016) “History,” available online: www.icsid. org/about/history/ (accessed September 1, 2016). Kawamura, Y. (2005) Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, Oxford: Berg. Lind, M. (2007) “The Collaborative Turn,” in J. Billing, M. Lind, and L. Nilsson (eds), Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, London: Black Dog Publishing, 15–31. Mackrell, A. (2005) Art and Fashion: The Impact of Art on Fashion and Fashion, London: Batsford. Mankkinen, J. (2016) “Suomi-muoti kohahduttaa maailmalla—arvostetun Hyères-muotifestivaalin finaalissa jälleen suom_kohahduttaa_maailmalla__arvostetun_hyeres-muotifestivaalin_finaalissa_ jalleen_suomalaisia/8639151 (accessed September 1, 2016). Melchior, M.R. (2011) “From Design Nations to Fashion Nations? Unpacking Contemporary Scandinavian Fashion Dreams,” Fashion Theory, 15(2): 177–200. Obrist, H.U. (2014) Ways of Curating, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. O’Neill, P. (2007) “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” In J. Rugg and M. Sedgwick (eds), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Chicago, IL : Intellect, 13–28. Pecorari M. (2018) “Beyond Garments: Reorienting the Practice and Discourse of Fashion Curating,” in A. Vänskä and H. Clark (eds), Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury, 183–197. Pöppönen, H. (2012) “Suomi-muoti haluaa murtautua esiin,” Helsingin Sanomat, May 24, available online: www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/a1337739460575 (accessed September 1, 2016). Rantisi, N. (2006) “How New York Stole Modern Fashion,” in C. Breward and D. Gilbert (eds), Fashion’s World Cities, Oxford and New York: Berg, 109–22. Reinach, S.S. (2013) “Fashion Films, Blogs and E-commerce: The Puzzle of Fashion Distinction in China,” in D. Bartlett, S. Cole and A. Rocamora (eds), Fashion Media. Past and Present, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 144–54. Scaturro, S. (2008) “Eco-Tech Fashion: Rationalizing Technology in Sustainable Fashion,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 12(4): 469–88. Shinkle, E. (2013) “Fashion’s Digital Body: Seeing and Feeling in Fashion Interactives,” in D. Bartlett, S. Cole, and A. Rocamora (eds), Fashion Media. Past and Present, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 175–83. Steele, V. (1998) “A Museum of Fashion is More than a Clothes-Bag,” Fashion Theory 2(4): 327–35. Stern, R. (2004) Against Fashion. Clothing as Art, 1850–1930, Cambridge, MA , London, England: The MIT Press. Taylor, L. (1998) “Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History,” Fashion Theory, 2(4): 337–58. Taylor, L. (2002) The Study of Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, L. (2004) Establishing Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Uhlirova, M. (2013) “The Fashion Film Effect,” in D. Bartlett, S. Cole, and A. Rocamora (eds), Fashion Media. Past and Present, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 118–32. Väkevä, V. (2015) “Ilmiö: Suomi-muoti on niin kovassa nosteessa, että maineikkaan Hyerésin kilpailun finaalissa on kolme suomalaista,” NYT-liite, February 23, available online: nyt.fi/ a1305930043261 (accessed September 1, 2016). Valtonen, A. (2005) “Getting Attention, Resources and Money for Design—Linking Design to the National Research Policy,” Proceedings of the “International Design Congress—IASDR 2005” 1–4.11.2005, Douliou, Taiwan, available online: www.researchgate.net/publication/228366217_ Getting_Attention_Resources_and_Money_for_Design-Linking_Design_to_the_National_ Research_Policy (accessed September 1, 2016). Vidokle, A. (2010) “Art Without Artists?” e-flux, available online: www.e-flux.com/journal/artwithout-artists/ (accessed September 1, 2016). Wilson, E. (1985) Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago.

Unpublished documents Boutique in the media 2012. In the possession of the author. Boutique press release 2012. In the possession of the author. Boutique! statistics Tokyo 2015. In the possession of the author. Boutique statistics Berlin 2016. In the possession of the author.

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8 FROM LESBIAN AND GAY TO QUEER: CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY IN COLLECTING AND EXHIBITING LGBT FASHION AND DRESS Shaun Cole

In 1994 the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, staged its ground-breaking “Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk 1940 to Tomorrow” exhibition, which not only investigated subcultural styles and their influence on high fashion, but also included a section that dealt with lesbian and gay dress and fashion. My involvement in the Streetstyle exhibition was twofold: firstly to look for possible supporting visual material from the Prints, Drawings and Paintings (PDP ) collections for consideration in the exhibition; and secondly to write research reports on skinheads and lesbian and gay style. At the associated symposium I presented a paper entitled “What a Queer Collection” that addressed the gay and lesbian materials displayed in the exhibition in the context of wider concerns around collecting materials relating to lesbian and gay and lives and materials both in the V&A and in other museums and galleries. Almost twenty years later the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (MFIT ) in New York held the first major exhibition to deal exclusively with fashion and dress of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT ) people—“A Queer History of Fashion: From the closet to the catwalk.” This chapter is a somewhat personal reflection on the issues and concerns I raised in my symposium paper and compares these to the representation of LGBT dress and fashion in the FIT exhibition. It will also consider the period between “Streetstyle” and “A Queer History of Fashion” to consider approaches to collecting and displaying LGBT dress and fashion in museum collections. This is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of all exhibitions or museums that have included LGBT fashion and style, but a small selection that have relation to the “Streetstyle” exhibition through venue, themes and curators. While there is an increasing amount of writing on LGBT fashion and dress 137

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(Cole 2000; Cole and Lewis 2015; Geczy and Karaminas 2013; Steele 2013), there is very little written on its presence in museums and archive collections and so this chapter will consider this in light of debates raised around the collection and display of LGBT materials in museums, galleries and archives.

Lesbian and gay styles in the “Streetstyle” exhibition One of the first discussions that arose from the proposal to have a lesbian and gay section in the exhibition was whether lesbian and gay men’s was dress subcultural and if so did it to fit within the framework and definitions being used for the “Streetstyle” exhibition? The underlying decision for the inclusion of a subculture or “tribe”—a term preferred by cocurator Ted Polhemus (1994)—within the exhibition was whether that group had an identifiable doctrine, belief or ideology that was represented or recognizable through their dress choice, even if the subtleties are not recognizable by outsiders. It has been argued that lesbians and gay men are by their very self-identification subcultural. Writings on lesbian and gay history had demonstrated that the legal, social and moral impositions upon lesbian and gay people meant that they could be considered subcultural (see for example Bray 1982; Davis and Kennedy 1993; Duberman, Vicinus and Chauncey 1989; Norton 1992; Weeks 1991). Dress has unavoidably been an important part of the formation and self-identification of lesbian and gay subcultures. Interviewed for the gay style magazine Attitude “Streetstyle” co-curator, Amy de la Haye, stated that “gay and lesbian style is crucial to the study of subculture” (cited in Collard 1994: 14). However, to date at that time most studies of subcultural styles had ignored homosexuality. Michael Brake’s point that “[y]oung gay people are swamped by the heterosexist emphasis they find in peer groups and subcultures” (1985: 181) was highlighted for me by the apparent contradiction between Polhemus’s comment in Attitude in which he confirmed that “it is perfectly obvious that the gay community has been very influential” (cited in Collard 1994: 14) and that he did not include any mention of this influence in his 1994 book, written to accompany the exhibition. Whilst not wanting to be overly critical of Polhemus, as his work has been important in this field and he has subsequently addressed LGBTQ styles, I did have to question why at this point he did not address the subject (see Plate 19). The lesbian and gay style section of the exhibition consisted of six mannequins: John Hardy’s 1954 outfit from Vince’s Man’s shop; Elizabeth Wilson’s Biba dress worn to the first Gay Liberation Front disco in 1971; Justin Stubbing’s clone look; Inge Blackman’s combination of tailored jacket and trousers and African headwrap that reflected her black heritage and lesbian identity; DJ Slamma’s tank girl inspired clubbing outfit; and Cornelius Brady’s Leigh Bowery jacket and purple lycra body suit made by Richmond/Cornejo’s pattern cutter (see Plate 19). Two of these outfits proved fortuitous in their inclusion as they gave the exhibition team a way of including two influential, though difficult to place designers—Biba and Leigh Bowery. My research report, which was commissioned by the exhibition curators to summarize the main components of this particular subcultural dress style and inform the content of the

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Figure 8.1 Installation shot of Lesbian and Gay Style section in Streetstyle exhibition. With permission of Amy de la Haye.

exhibition, had not only identified significant lesbian and gay dress styles as subcultures in themselves (and influenced the outfits in the exhibition) but also addressed subcultural styles appropriated by and subcultures contributed to by lesbians or gay men, such as Punk, New Romantic and New Edwardian. The presence of outfits lent or donated by gay men in other sections of the exhibition reflected these findings but also added to the LGBT presence within the exhibition and, whilst not explicitly stated in the labels, made a point about LGBT presence within and contribution to subcultures and subcultural style.1 The supermarket of style section that closed the exhibition and reflected on the breakdown of traditional subcultural styles that was replaced by a more eclectic postmodern mixing and matching (Polhemus 1994) also contained outfits from Hamish Morrow and Ray Weller; the latter included in the lesbian and gay style section in de la Haye and Dingwall’s 1996 book of the exhibition. What proved somewhat difficult in acquiring material for the show was gaining access to older lesbians and gay men who had retained clothing that they were willing to lend to the exhibition. Society’s and the law’s attitudes to homosexuality had instilled a reluctance in many to be involved in such a public declaration of their sexuality and this was commonly reflected in the way in which lesbians and gay men chose to dress. Indications of their sexual orientation were subtle—suede shoes, a ring on the little finger (Cole 2000). There were of course exceptions; one only has to think of Quentin Crisp to have an image of an “outrageous queen” or Beryl Reid’s character in the film The Killing of Sister George to see a butch lesbian. The question in relation to the exhibition was how were we to acquire the clothes (we never found a tailored suit worn by a lesbian “butch” from the 1940s or 1950s)

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and represent the subtleties of a pinkie ring or other signifier? This is a problem that is not exclusive to “Streetstyle” but relates to broader debates around the display of dress and the present/absent body in exhibitions and how garments relate to the specifics of the original owner/wearer (Wilson 1985; Taylor 2002; Clark and de la Haye 2014; Hjemdahl 2014). Photographs could have been used for the lesbian and gay section but one of the major selling points of the exhibition, and what made “Streetstyle” different from past exhibitions about subcultures, was its use of real people and the display of clothes worn or compiled by people who had been involved in the particular tribes (de la Haye and Dingwall 1996: 8). The final placing of the lesbian and gay style section was at first a disappointment. The principle of locating a subculture within the exhibition was that it would be placed at the point when the “tribe” first appeared and would include all later incarnations as well as the high fashion spin-off, hence Teddy Boys were in the 1950s, Hippies in the 1960s and so on. There had been a great deal of discussion about where to place the lesbian and gay section. Not having a separate section but having a panel at the beginning of the exhibition and including lesbian and gay styles where they were appropriate to other sections was discussed, but my research had shown this was not a popular option amongst potential donors or visitors. Placing the section early in the exhibition was not possible unless a lesbian or gay man’s outfit from the 1940s could be found. As Elizabeth Wilson had promised her Biba dress, situating the section in the early 1970s was another option that would reflect greater visibility following the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which decriminalized sexual acts between men over the age of twenty-one in private in Britain and the beginnings of gay liberation, following the 1969 New York Stonewall riots. However, this looked as though gay men and lesbians appeared out of nowhere in the 1970s. At the point when we were despairing of finding any clothes that dated from any earlier than 1971, John Hardy contacted de la Haye, in response to an article in the Independent. Hardy had worked as a sales assistant and model for the men’s boutique, Vince Man’s Shop, in the early 1950s, which, as I have argued elsewhere, had had a notably gay clientele and played a major role in the development of Carnaby Street (Cole 1997, 2000). Hardy still had the clothes he had modeled in the 1954 Vince catalogue, a copy of that catalogue, and photographs of himself wearing those clothes. Better yet he was willing to donate the clothes to the museum and allow the use of the photographs. The lesbian and gay section now had a very firm start date of 1954. However, when the exhibition opened the section was located in the 1960s: the only section not to be located in the decade of its earliest outfit. Unfortunately, it was never made clear to me why this decision was made. On closer inspection the sections’ positioning in the 1960s did have one consolation, the section was immediately opposite the skinheads section. This initially seemed to be an unlikely coupling but with hindsight it proved to be of benefit to the study of gay men’s dress as a subcultural style as research published since the “Streetstyle” exhibition has identified that many gay men were actively involved in the Skinhead subculture, not only as an appropriation in the post-punk era but also during its first heyday in the early 1970s (Healy 1996; Cole 2000). The exhibition reflected that involvement as two of the outfits in the section were worn and given by gay men, John G. Byrne (see Plate 17) and me.

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Tokenistic representation? In researching the lesbian and gay section I felt it was important to ensure that the section represented what lesbians and gay men wanted to see in such an exhibition. Whilst conducting interviews for the research I always asked the following three questions: ●

Is there a place for lesbian and gay style in the exhibition?

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Would you rather see a separate section on lesbian and gay styles, or see them incorporated within other relevant sections?

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If, after visiting the exhibition, you felt that the section was tokenistic would you rather it was left out altogether?

The answer to the first question was a unanimous yes. On the whole the view with regard to the second was that there should be a section dedicated to lesbian and gay styles, although many felt they would like there to be a mention where there was a definite gay influence or adoption of style. With regard to being tokenistic the general feeling was that it was more important to see a major museum include lesbian and gay material in one of its major exhibitions and subsequently its permanent collections than being left out for fear of being criticized for getting it wrong or being tokenistic. In the introduction to his unpublished MA Museum Studies dissertation, Vu Tuan Nguyen, raises the issue of tokenism, stating “While everyday life is saturated with heterosexual affect . . . most museums have mirrored the prejudices of society or, at the very least, have failed, through tokenistic inclusion or silence, to challenge them” (2013:1). Whilst she wasn’t explicitly interested in whether the collecting of lesbian and gay material was tokenistic in her 1994 Museum Studies dissertation, Gabrielle Bourn was interested in what was held by social history museums. For topicality she contacted me and included that the V&A was collecting as part of the “Streetstyle” exhibition. Six years after Bourn’s dissertation, Angela Vanegas (2002) followed up on Bourn’s research and found that very little had changed in terms of active collection of LGBT materials. Like Bourn, Vanegas was offered a variety of reasons for lack of collecting. In the case of material, such as AIDS ephemera or body-piercing jewellery, that could be interpreted at LGBT, Vanegas noted that the “underlying message seemed to be that, because lesbians and gay men are defined by their sexuality, they can only be represented by objects relating to sex, an approach that denies other aspects of gay and lesbian culture” (2002: 99). In relation to tokenism and underrepresentation Bourn (1994) drew parallels between the inclusion of lesbian and gay issues in museums and black history. She used a case study of the transatlantic slavery gallery in Merseyside museums to illustrate how the story has had to be told with the little surviving material available. She argued that a lesbian or gay history is there to be told, in the same way that black histories have been told, even if only one article is available. She quoted a gay male history curator who pointed out the possibility of being told “ ‘It’s your axe to grind,’ which they would not dare to say about

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the issues of black history or disability” (Bourn 2004).2 Reflecting on this I argued at the “Streetstyle” symposium that a parallel could be drawn between one of the black style sections in the exhibition and lesbian and gay styles. The Caribbean Style section looked at the clothes of West Indian immigrants to Britain in the 1940s. These clothes were not considered subcultural in the West Indies but translated to drab post war Britain and compared to the clothes being worn by the majority of British men and women, which were still under the auspices of rationing; they were remarkably different (Tulloch 2005). So, I pose the question is a lesbian wearing a tailored suit with a shirt and tie or a gay man in flamboyant casual wear at a time when clothing followed very strict rules and regulations any less subcultural because their clothing choices were defined by their sexual orientation rather than by their racial origins (see Figure  8.1). Surely both were challenging the hegemony of dress in a not dissimilar way. Whilst the focus of the V&A’s 2004 “Black British Style” exhibition that I co-curated with Carol Tulloch was on the dress styles of the black British population since the 1940s, it was pointed out that there was no explicit representation of Black LGBT communities. We responded to this omission by altering the label for a 1980s photograph by Monica René of a young man wearing a leather skirt to explicitly mentioned black LGBT dress experience and including a paper on Black LGBT style by filmmaker Inge Blackman and theater director Rikki Beadle Blair at the exhibition conference. Retrospectively, Black LGBT could have been explicitly represented by including Inge Blackman’s “Streetstyle” exhibition outfit in the “New Order” section of the exhibition which addressed new ways of dressing as a contemporary black Britain, prompting discussion on how sexual orientation intersected with other subject positions of class, gender, age, race and ethnicity which were addressed in the exhibition. MFIT ’s “A Queer History of Fashion” set itself a monumental task in charting a queer history of fashion (as opposed to a history of queer fashion) from the eighteenth century to 2013 and moving beyond “simply recognizing that some individual fashion designers happened to be gay” to “explore the complex historical links between sexuality, society, and culture” and demonstrate how LGBTQ “culture has been central to the creation of modern fashion” (Steele and Dennis, 2013) (see Plate 18). While in many regards it was successful, reviews identified concerns that seemed to nod towards tokenism. Annamari Vänskä argued that “concentration on identity” within the exhibition meant that it was in danger of reinforcing a history based only on the most visible aspects of fashion’s queer history “(openly) gay designers and cross-dressers” (2014: 457), reflecting my concerns about initially being asked to research masculine clones and drag queens for “Streetstyle” research report. Similarly a review noted the lack of representation of designers of color, stating that this “speaks to the historic lack of representation and rights for people of color” (Fashionista 2013). The exhibition included garments designed by Willie Smith, Narciso Rodriquez, Patrick Kelly, Stephen Burrows and Andre Walker, which the reviewer believes could have been supplemented by including “icons of queer fashion,” performers Josephine Baker and Sylvester (Fashionista 2013). Availability and hard curatorial decisions based on available space often dictate the objects that are included and represented in temporary exhibitions, but this can often seem to endorse exclusions or tokenism (see Plate 18).

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Sexuality and sexual orientation in museums Mark Liddiard (1996) has pointed out the general exclusion of sexuality from museum displays and highlighted the reasons he found, including lack of material. Liddiard contextualizes the discussions of sexuality through museum exhibitions and collections by noting the popularity for television coverage on the topic. He also points out that “there is good evidence to suggest that many museums actively seek to censor any explicit allusion to” sexuality (Liddiard 1996: 164). In reflecting on his experiences curating an exhibition on male same-sex lovers in the visual arts, Michael Petry (2007) highlights how heterosexual sexuality and relationships are discussed in museum and exhibition contexts seemingly without any consideration or attempt at rationalizing, what he terms a form of heterosexual “outing,” whilst same-sex relations have been deemed more problematic and are likely to be hidden and distorted by a heterosexual filter. He also points out that the interference in the drafting of labels for his exhibition by local authority officials amounted to the ways in which “homophobia works institutionally in the cultural sector quite as effectively as in interpersonal exchanges” (Petry 2007: 127). Conlan and Levin returned to a similar discussion in 2010, observing that there is “little or no attention to issues of sexual and gender identities” and “communities built on shared sexuality or gender identification” are often not considered in museum studies texts (2010: 308). In my symposium paper I was keen to contextualize the “Streetstyle” contents within concerns facing a curator collecting lesbian and gay material. I noted how the Museums Association’s 1994 “Equal Opportunities” briefing stated that it “values the contributions of all, whatever their nationality, place of birth or race, their age, their sexual orientation . . .” (Museums Association 1993:n.p.). Despite the view that “all people are to become an integral part of museums” (ibid) the subject of lesbian and gay material in museums was not addressed directly at the 1993 Museums Association Conference on Equal Opportunities. At the 1994 Museums Association Conference on Diversity any workshop on lesbian and gay issues was conspicuous by its absence. While Bourn’s study had concentrated mainly on, and put forward a sound case for, collecting lesbian and gay material in social history museums, the question remained for me in 1995 of whether a museum of fine and decorative arts like the V&A should be actively collecting such material. A key concern for me was how important is the sexual orientation of the artist, designer, maker (or in the case of dress, the wearer) of the object. I noted how I believed that parallels could be drawn with the rise of the importance of interest in the gender and/or racial background of artists and designers in understanding the creative process and the messages portrayed in their work in the seventies and eighties. The use of the term “Queer” in the title of my “Streetstyle” symposium paper was intentionally ambiguous; it referred to the word’s meaning of “odd” or “strange,” the abusive term for homosexual and its late twentieth century reclamation, as well as being a nod to the academic move from Lesbian and Gay studies to Queer Studies and the new Queer Theory. One of the projects of Queer Theory has been to undo identity categories to challenge the idea of the heteronormative and traditional sexual and gender roles. In this sense Queer operates as an adjective, a noun and a verb; as descriptor, identifier and action. In relation to collections and archives Judith [Jack] Halberstam has identified the

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queer archive as “a theory of cultural relevance, as construction of collective memory and complex record of queer activity” (2003:326). I had also considered the way in which lesbian and gay related material was accessible to visitors. There were no entries for “Sex” or “Gender” in the V&A’s 1969 printed “Subject Index for the Visual Arts” but this was developed over time with headings, including “homosexuality” being added to reflect changes in society and collecting activities. At the time of the “Streetstyle” exhibition there were very few entries, relating to fine artists, printmakers and photographers, and inclusion was predicated on subject matter of the image rather than the artist or designer’s sexual orientation. There was no question at this time of the term “Queer” being included within the subject indexing categories but this has subsequently changed. The introduction of digitized cataloguing systems and a publicly accessible “Search the Collections” on the Museum’s website have made it easier to be able to categorize items in the collections in much more multidimensional ways and to allow the visitor to search using terms “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “Bisexual,” “Homosexual,” “Queer,” “Homosexuality,” “Andogyny,” “LGBTQ ” and “Gender and Sexuality”—all of which produce various results and a variety of object types and materials, including posters, prints, photographs, sketchbooks, sculptures and clothing (which includes theatrical and performance costumes). Many of these terms were included in the “Search the Collections” as a result of the work of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ ) Network (which I was personally involved in setting up before leaving the V&A) in order to ensure that LGBTQ -related materials were more easily identifiable. At the time of writing there were 850 objects tagged in some way under the category umbrella of “Gender and Sexuality” (Clayton to Cole 2016).

Collecting policies for LGBTQ materials in museums The year following Bourn’s thesis saw an increase in discursive texts on the subject of LGBT collections, perhaps reflecting changes in legal and social positions and opinions around sexuality/sexual orientation (Rifkin and Camille 2001; Petry 2007; Steorn 2010; Vanegas 2002). In 2007, Darryl McIntyre noted that museums were less likely and inclined to collect LGBT-related materials because “collections of personal papers, media cuttings, oral histories and the like seem to naturally gravitate to libraries and archives” (2007: 49). Writing in 2012 V&A curator Oliver Winchester noted that recent exhibitions had sought to redress the previous exclusion of same-sex desire and histories from their collections and displays by telling of “hidden histories” and showing “discovered” identities through “bright and optimistic narratives that are built upon a retrospective (and ethically questionable) outing of notable men and women of the past whose sexual desires could be described as non-normative” (2012: 142). The V&A currently does not have a collecting policy regarding LGBTQ , however there are particular parts of the V&A’s Collections Development Policy that could be interpreted as covering this material: “we seek to acquire work which reflects contemporary culture, including material which addresses political, cultural and social issues such as climate change, health and identity” (Victoria and Albert Museum 2015). The LGBTQ Network is

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discussing with Museum staff a greater engagement to highlight and make accessible to visitors existing LGBTQ related materials (Clayton to Cole 2016). Fashion acquisition has traditionally focused on “the most luxurious, haute couture and exclusive levels of readyto-wear clothing” (de la Haye and Dingwall 1996: 6), but is supplemented to reflect “advances in technology in relation to textile and fashion design and the widening international fashion industry” with a focus on Africa, Russia and Brazil (V&A 2105: 23). The Collection Development Policy of the Museum of Applied Arts and Science (MAAS ) in Sydney, Australia likewise does not explicitly mention LGBTQ but does state that collections should “reflect the cultural diversity of all Australia . . . determined by attitudes of communities, responding to new sensitivities and cultural diversity” (Cox to Cole 2016). This, curator Peter Cox notes, provided ample justification for collecting LGBTQ materials, including posters, tickets and fliers for Mardi Gras, the Sleaze Ball, Mardi Gras costumes designed by artists Peter Tully and Brenton Heath-Kerr and AIDS -related materials including AIDS Memorial Quilt, posters, badges and ephemera (Cox to Cole 2016). These have been displayed in the 1996 “Absolutely Mardi Gras” exhibition and “The 80s are Back” exhibition held at MAAS December 2009 to March 2011. MFIT ’s collecting policy is comparable to the V&A.3 According to Director Valerie Steele “Our collecting policy is to look for objects with artistic and/or historical significance, especially objects that move fashion forward.” There is no LGBT specific mention in the collecting policy although as Steele notes “we are interested in subcultural styles and, of course, there are many gay fashion designers” (Steele to Cole 2016). MFIT has of course specifically addressed the subject of LGBTQ fashion, dress and identity in its groundbreaking exhibition “A Queer History of Fashion.” Similarly Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, in the United Kingdom currently has no written policy to collect fashion or dress from the local LGBTQ communities but has items on display in the “Renegades” gallery, a collection of streetwear that was curated by de la Haye. These include a queer fetish outfit from the 1990s and a gay skinhead outfit donated by Brighton resident and contributor to the Streetstyle exhibition, John G. Byrne. Curator of fashion and textiles at Brighton, Martin Pel notes that the reason that Brighton did not more systematically collect LGBT materials until very recently was due to an agreement with a local charity, Brighton Ourstory, who planned to open a gay museum in Brighton (Pel to Cole 2016). The closure and dispersal of Ourstory’s collection and materials in 2013 and materials motivated Brighton Museum & Art Gallery to “build a significant and distinctive collection which reflects local and national histories of LGBTQ communities” (Pel to Cole 2016). 2017 will see Brighton Museum & Art Gallery stage two exhibitions to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act; one curated by Pel and de la Haye of the clothing that artist Gluck left to the museum in 1978 and one on fifty years of LGBTQ history in the city. The Museum of London, which had been specifically highlighted by Vanegas (2006), McIntyre (2007) and Nguyen (2013) for its 1999 Pride and Prejudice exhibition that exhibited relevant materials in the collection (including dress and fashion objects), specifically engaged with collecting LGBT materials in the “sexuality” sections of its 2005 “Reassessing what we collect phase II ” document authored by Raminder Kaur. Significantly it also points out that, like the V&A, materials collected earlier in the museum’s history were not identified in their catalogues as “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual” or “transgendered.” In 2016 the Museum produced

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an object-based guide entitled “Under the radar: A snapshot of lesbian and gay lives in London, 1700–today” that, as well as highlighting certain objects, guided the visitor back to the “Collections Online.” Similar to V&A’s “Search the Collections,” search terms such as “gay,” “lesbian” and “queer” bring up a variety of object types relating to LGBTQ communities, including, seventy-nine garments that were donated by Peter Viti in 1985 (see Lomas 2007). This significant collection of a gay man’s wardrobe has recently been mirrored by the acquisition of 100 individual items of clothing and accessories worn by British civil servant and architecture expert, Francis Golding between 1965 and his death in 2013.4 ‘A small selection of this material, curated by Museum of London’s Timothy Long was displayed in the Museum’s “Show Space,” a quick turn-around display for new acquisitions, 31 March – 25 May 2017’. When considering the Museum of London’s online guide it is worth highlighting that both the V&A and Brighton Museum & Art Gallery also have guides to LGBTQ -related objects that are on display in their galleries in the form of trails. The V&A’s “Out on Display” downloadable PDF highlights twenty objects, ranging in date and material and offering possibilities of considering LGBTQ narratives. The fashion or clothing-related objects in the guide are two of Leigh Bowery’s costumes designed for Michael Clark’s 1987 ballet Because We Must and a Charles James silk dress, made from a Jean Cocteau designed printed fabric featuring stylized representations of his own and lover Jean Marais’s faces. Brighton Museum & Art Gallery’s 2013 LGBTQ Museum Trail has ten objects (that like the V&A’s trail vary in date and material form) and includes a T-shirt from the Brighton Pride in 1987 and a silk dress designed by Alexander McQueen in 2001. The text for this latter object notes McQueen’s sexual orientation.

Exhibiting LGBT fashion Highlighting McQueen’s sexual orientation in this trail brings me back to consider both the questioning of whether and how this should be highlighted in museums cataloguing as discussed above and the way in which MFIT divided its objects in “A Queer History of Fashion.” Whilst the exhibition followed a somewhat conventional chronological arrangement, the 100 ensembles were divided between two differently colored plinths. Those that represented the contribution of LGBTQ designers were placed upon raised white plinths to represent the fashion catwalk, and included garments by designers, who both publicly declared their sexual orientation and those who did not, including Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Perry Ellis, Jean Paul Gaultier, Rudi Gernreich, Alexander McQueen, Jil Sander, Gianni Versace, and Madelene Vionnet. Those styles that were directly associated with queer subcultures were placed upon a lower lavender (a color associated with queer or deviant sexualities) plinth (see Figure 8.1). It wasn’t until the architect Joel Sanders pointed out this division at the “Queer History of Fashion” Symposium that I noticed this, at which point it reminded me of the way in which the V&A’s “Streetstyle” exhibition had the subcultural clothes at visitors’ eye level with the high fashion designer interpretations raised above visitors head level, reflecting the ideas of “trickle down” and “bubble up” that have been associated with fashion’s influences.

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One section of “A Queer History of Fashion” that was particularly praised and that broke up the high fashion and “subcultural” chronology was the wall of twenty-three AIDS activist slogan T-shirts (see Fig 8.2). This section not only showed the ways in which LGBTQ communities responded to the AIDS pandemic but also commemorated the losses by the LGBT communities and the fashion industry. The situating of this element of dress reinforced the “queer” element of the exhibition representing a point in time when the term “queer” was actively reclaimed in identity politics and protests and became a point of discussion in academia, with the development of queer theory. In 2002 Vanegas had noted how lesbian and gay material had been represented in exhibitions through material relating to AIDS , including my own 1996 “Graphic Responses to AIDS ” held at the V&A that included two T-shirts from activist groups as evidence of how AIDS graphics were used and disseminated. This political significance of AIDS in LGBT history and its representation in fashion exhibitions has been mirrored by the inclusion of garments worn at same-sex marriage and civil partner ceremonies. “A Queer History of Fashion” closes with the ensembles of three couples and the V&A’s 2014 exhibition “Wedding Dresses 1775–2014” broadened its definition of “wedding dresses” by including the suits worn by fashion historian Christopher Breward and his partner James Brook to their civil partnership ceremony. This inclusion is not without its issues. The V&A’s choice of same-sex partners was male and did not explicitly include wedding dresses worn by female same-sex couples. This point was raised in relation to “A Queer History of Fashion” where the female couples wore more masculine styles, rather than more traditional dresses (Vänskä 2014). The subtitles of both “Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk 1940 to Tomorrow” and “A Queer History of Fashion: From the closet to the catwalk” were mirrored in the titles of “Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s” held at V&A in 2013–2014 and “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” which both displayed LGBT content.5 “Club to Catwalk” highlighted the creativity of fashion in London in the 1980s and referenced LGBT lives and included clothes worn and designed by LGBT people, particularly in the section “High Camp.” Gaultier’s gender-blurring expressions and experimentations with fashion were specifically contextualized against London’s backdrop at London’s Barbican Art Gallery in 2014. At the National Gallery of Victoria showing Gaultier’s discussions of his own sexuality and his forthright deconstruction of gender and sexuality were highlighted (Di Trocchio to Cole 2016). Where gay male designers’ work, such as Gianni Versace, Charles James and Yves Saint Laurent, is included in galleries of fashion or thematic exhibitions of fashion this reading is frequently left to information contained in online catalogues or LGBT themed tours and guides. This is not necessarily an attempt to “hide” this aspect of a designer’s life or design practice or the “retention of a heterosexual filter” (Petry 2007: 122) but perhaps a decision around the main focus and context of that particular display instance.

Conclusion While the V&A was not the first museum to show LGBT material, the Streetstyle exhibition was ground-breaking in that it consciously acknowledged that lesbians and gay men

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Figure 8.2 AIDS T-shirt display in A Queer History of Fashion at Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. With permission of Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.

had distinct ways of dressing that marked them out from the hegemonic and quotidian. The six outfits, while by no means representative of all styles of dress worn by lesbians and gay men in the post-war period in Britain did offer an insight into the relationship between sexual orientation and fashion/dress. Twenty years later MFIT expanded on this and demonstrated not just the subcultural choices of LBGT people but also the contribution of gay designers to the field of fashion. Even if the exhibition did not offer everything everyone wanted in terms of the subject—but then what exhibition does—Steele and Dennis are to be congratulated for staging this exhibition and bringing the research into LGBT dress off the page and into the museum. As this chapter has tried to demonstrate MFIT ’s effort has been mirrored by other museums who are beginning to value their LGBT collections, including those of dress, and find ways of highlighting these to their audiences both to demonstrate to LGBT people that their presence and histories are valued and to nonLGBT visitors that these histories and objects, whilst sometimes ambiguous can tell many stories including one about LGBT fashion and dress choices. As Vänskä concluded in her review of “A Queer History of Fashion” and I would like to reiterate “Since homosexuality— or non-heterosexuality more generally—is such a big part of fashion and its creative energy, it is important not to participate in the (re)production of the closet. This theme should permeate all fashion exhibitions in one way or another since fashion is so much about the body, gender, and sexuality” (2014: 454). It seems from the examples discussed here that curators are beginning to take this on board and consider this element in their fashion and dress exhibitions and associated catalogues and guides.

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Notes 1 The sections/tribes that contained gay men’s clothing were: Skinhead (outfits from John G. Byrne and me), Punk (outfit from Philip Salon), New Romantic (two outfits from Philip Salon and one from David Barber), Goth (outfit from Martin Meister) and Minimalist (outfit from Tony Glenville). 2 In 1995 Gabrielle Bourn gave me access to a copy of her unpublished MA Dissertation when I was preparing my lecture for the “Streetstyle” symposium. I did not make a note of page numbers for the direct quotes and have not been able to access a copy of the dissertation subsequently to include these page references in this chapter. 3 The collecting policy at National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne Australia, is similar to that of the V&A, in that they collect fashion and the sexuality of the designer is secondary (Di Trocchio to Cole 2016). 4 The Archives at London College of Fashion also acquired 115 of Golding’s garments and accessories to create a fascinating collective insight into one gay man’s wardrobe. 5 The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk originated at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and was shown at the Brooklyn Museum at the same time as A Queer History of Fashion. It was adapted and staged in Dallas, San Francisco, Madrid, Rotterdam, Stockholm, London, Melbourne, Paris, Munich and Seoul as well Montreal and New York.

References Bourn, G. (1994) “Invisibility: A Study of the Representation of Lesbian and Gay History and Culture in Social History Museums,” unpublished MA dissertation, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Brake, Michael (1985) Comparative Youth Culture, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bray, A. (1982) Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London: Gay Men’s Press. Clark, J and de la Haye, A. (2014) Fashion Exhibitions: Before and After 1972, London: Yale University Press. Clayton, Z. (2016) “V&A Camp Exhibition Proposal,” email to Shaun Cole, April 6. Cole, S. (1997) “Corsair Slack and Bondi Bathers: Vince Man’s Shop and the Carnaby Street Phenomenon,” Things, 6: 26–39. Cole, S. (2000) Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Berg. Collard, James (1994) “No Style on Queer Street,” Attitude, 6(October): 14. Conlan, A. and Levin, A.K. (2010) “Museum Studies Texts and Museum Subtexts,” in A. Levin (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader, London: Routledge. Cox, P. (2016) “MAAS Collecting Policy LGBTQ ,” email to Shaun Cole, May 23. Davis, M.D. and Kennedy, E.L. (1993) Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, New York and London: Routledge. de la Haye, A. and Dingwall, C. (1996) Surfers, Soulies, Skinheads & Skaters: Subcultural Style From the Forties to the Nineties, London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Di Trocchio, P. (2016) “NGV and LGBTQ Collecting Policy,” email to Shaun Cole, May 19. Duberman, M.B., Vicinus, M., and Chauncey Jr. (eds) (1989) Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, London: Penguin. Fashionista (2013) “It’s Time to Rewrite a Queer History of Fashion,” available online: http:// fashionista.com/2013/09/its-time-to-rewrite-a-queer-history-of-fashion (accessed April 5, 2016).

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Geczy, A. and Karaminas, V. (2013) Queer Style, London: Bloomsbury. Halberstam, J. (2003) “What’s that Smell?” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(3): 313–33. Healy, M. (1996) Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation, London: Cassell. Hjemdahl, A. (2014) “Exhibiting the Body, Dress and Time in Museums: A Historical Perspective,” in M.R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums: Theory and Parctice, London: Bloomsbury, 117–32. Kaur, R. (2005) “Unearthing Our Past: Engaging with Diversity at the Museum of London, available online: http://archive.museumoflondon.org.uk/NR /rdonlyres/A138DFA 6-9B14-4E8C-9F53D47DA 649415D/0/Raminder.rtf (accessed April 5, 2016). Liddiard, M. (1996) “Making Histories of Sexuality,” in G. Kavanagh (ed.), Making Histories in Museums, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 163–175. Lomas, C. (2007) “ ‘Men Don’t Wear Velvet You Know!’ Fashionable Gay Masculinity and the Shopping Experience, London, 1950–Early 1970s,” Oral History 35(1): 82–90. McIntyre, D. (2007) “What to Collect? Museums and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Collecting,” International Journal of Art & Design Education, 26(1): 48–53. Museum of London (2016) “Under the Radar: A Snapshot of Lesbian and Gay Lives in London, 1700–today,” available online: www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/9314/5580/7711/ under-the-radar-lesbian-and-gay-lives-1700-today.pdf (accessed April 5, 2016). The Museums Association (1994) “Equal Opportunities,” Museums Briefing, 4(March). Nguyen, V.T. (2013) “Towards a Queer Intersectional Museology,” Unpublished MA Thesis, Sydney: University of Sydney. Norton, R. (1992) Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830, London: Chalford Press. Petry, M. (2007) “Hidden Histories: Experiences of Curating, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 26(1): 119–28. Polhemus, T. (1994) Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk, London: Thames and Hudson. Rifkin, A. and Camille, M. (eds) (2001) Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly, Oxford: Blackwell. Steele, V. (ed.) (2013) A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Fashion Institute of Technology New York. Steele, V. (2016) “Number of Outfits/Mannequins in Queer History of Fashion,” email to Shaun Cole, April 18. Steele, V. and Dennis, F. (2013) “A Queer History of Fashion,” available online: http://exhibitions. fitnyc.edu (accessed April 5, 2016). Steorn, P. (2010) “Queer in the Museum: Methodological Reflections on Doing Queer in Museum Collections,” Lambda Nordica, 15(3–4): 119–43. Taylor, L. (2002) The Study of Dress History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tulloch, C. (2005) Black Style, London: V&A Publications. Vanegas, A. (2002) “Representing Lesbians and Gay Men in British Social History Museums,” in Richard Sandell (ed.), Museums, Society, Inequality, London and New York: Routledge, 98–109. Vänskä, A. (2014) “From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?”, Fashion Theory, 18(4): 447–64. Victoria and Albert Museum (2015) V&A Collections Development Policy, available online: www. vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/v-and-a-collections-policies (accessed April 5, 2016). Weeks, J. (1991) Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity, London: Rivers Oram. Wilson, E. (1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago.

9 INTERVENING FASHION: A CASE FOR FEMINIST APPROACHES TO FASHION CURATION Nathalie Khan Fashion is traditionally seen as gendered and has been presented as such in museums and galleries (de la Haye and Wilson 1999; Palmer 2008). It has also been argued that fashion in the museum relies on the interest of a female audience and knowledge of fashion as practice and norm (Petrov 2014). Petrov argues that it is vital to “create social histories” and narratives in order to engage with both the sociological as well as the material aspects of fashion (Petrov 2014: 82). On this basis, fashion exhibitions that relate to an understanding of gender critique and its relationship with class, ethnicity and sexuality to highlight power relations produce knowledge and engage with academic debate further and go beyond fashion as simply a feminine subject. Fashion in the museum has become increasingly popular (Steele 2008). Approaches to fashion can differ in the context of “fine or applied art” (Anderson 2000: 375). However, in a postmodern context the hierarchies between art and fashion are increasingly dissolving (Wilson 1990). This in turn demands a more critical view of the way that fashion histories or contemporary examples are presented. As Griselda Pollock has noted: A feminist museum is not a depository of knowledgeable items exhibiting something “feminist”: an attitude, position or essence characteristic of the illusionary unity: woman. It is not a collecting point for things “women.” It is working practice, a critical and theoretical laboratory, intervening in and negotiating the conditions of the production and of course the failure of sexual difference as a crucial axis of meaning, power, subjectivity and change. POLLOCK 2007: 14–15

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Drawing on this quotation, this chapter will question how the idea of fashion curation as working practice, can engage in a critical manner with economic and political structures that generate social inequality. In the context of feminist critique of fashion, we must remember that feminism does not generate a unified aesthetic. Fashion, as part of an image-driven culture, is a potent symbol of oppression, as well as liberation and pleasure (Entwistle 2014, Negrin 2010, Evans and Thornton 1998). It thrives on both communal as well as individual expression (Wilson 1987). This chapter considers fashion and the study of dress, as a way to engage with aspects of social history in a feminist context. While fashion relies on continuous change, dress history as a discipline within art history, plays a significant role within the framework of museology. Curatorial approaches to fashion differ, but a feminist engagement with dress may be informed by “first “ or “second wave feminism,” ideas on “anti fashion,” as a tool for gender construction, and third wave feminism or queer theory, “post feminism” or postcolonial critique of fashion. Fashion and the body, has been described as a critical concept within academic discourse (Entwistle 2014; Entwistle and Wilson 2001) and is part of in the construction of gendered identity. Yet whilst curatorial practice of fashion and dress is rarely viewed in the context of feminist critique, fashion as a field within the discipline of cultural studies has been defined as an important part of the way we understand gender construction and fashion within a feminist context (Wilson 2006 1987; Evans and Thornton 1998). Within this framework it is striking that such debates are rarely reflected in fashion exhibitions. Broader narratives and critical engagement with fashion as a product of capitalist or even patriarchal culture is at times “met with suspicion by museums and more traditional museum curators” (Teunissen 2014: 40). However, as Teunissen (2014) has argued, fashion studies has had a significant impact on fashion exhibitions, especially on the design of exhibitions, as well as the presentation of contemporary fashion.1 This then leads to the question as to what the role of feminist critique in fashion curation should be. If as Wilson (2006: 410) has argued, fashion sits in the context of feminist politics, how can curatorial practice engage effectively with debates on second as well as, third wave feminist understanding of fashion? Academic debate on the role of curation as a way of engaging with critical discourse has become increasingly relevant not just in the context of dress history but also within fashion and contemporary art (Teunissen 2014). Contemporary fashion in the museum remains popular, but acts to divide traditions of dress history and academic debate (Anderson 2000; Steele 2008; Palmer 2008; McNeil 2008; Pecorari 2014).2 One can begin to locate the theoretical and methodological divide in curation, by first placing fashion curation as a facet of curatorial practice within the context of feminist history and contemporary art. Drawing upon critical debate and cultural theory, the focus will further be placed on specific aspects of third wave feminism, to assess how contemporary art and critical engagement with femininity are impacted by curatorial practice. This will be done by examining two distinct case studies: firstly a 2009 exhibition based at The Women’s Library in East London, titled The Politics of Appearance; the second a live event called Untitled Runway Show, by K8 Hardy, which was staged as part of the Whitney Biannual in New York in 2012.

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Critical curatorial practice Fashion exhibitions, which are informed by an underlying narrative, are able to make critical statements on fashion. Yet, there is a stark difference between exhibitions, which deem themselves to be feminist and those that are curated from a feminist perspective. The question “what is feminist fashion curation?” remains at the forefront when considering fashion exhibitions that engage with fashion as gendered, but continue to make essentialist statements about women’s interest in fashion. On the other hand exhibitions that engage with the notion that women’s interest in fashion is based on a gendered construct, may more comfortably be said to represent a feminist approach to curating. Cultural critics, art historians as well as curators, have reflected on the divide between critical engagement between theory and curatorial practice.3 The art historian Griselda Pollock’s (2007) in Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum and the cultural critic and curator Amelia Jones (2016) in Feminist Subjects vs Feminist Effects, are useful sources when looking for ways to define feminist curation as critical practice. Jones’ (2016) focus is on her own practice as curator of feminist art when she discusses exhibitions such as Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974 to 1979, 2002).4 As an icon of feminist art the work sought to write forgotten women back into history, responding to a “narrative that for millennia had excluded” or that which “at times removed women as historical subjects” (Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for feminist art, 2002). Chicago’s Dinner Party and the exhibition is of importance as it demonstrates how the curatorial approach as well as the work itself can serve as critique. In this case the exhibition showcased feminist work and in doing so aiming to provide critical context, whilst at the same time furthering feminist debate. The independent art curator Maria Lind (2011) speaks about the idea of the curatorial in an expanded field. She draws on the notion of interconnections, linking “objects, images, processes, people and locations, histories and discourses” (Lind 2011: 63). An approach, which one can argue is suited to fashion as much as it is to contemporary art. The curatorial, Lind refers to, becomes a means of “doing theory,” which offers a model for cultural exchange, debate and in some cases, critique. Keeping in mind the popularity and interest in fashion exhibitions (Steele 2008; Palmer 2008), one may argue that fashion curation is indeed an integral part of the cultural production of fashion. Lind’s model of the curatorial is equally concerned with the social process underpinning each project as it is with the final display. What remains to be seen is how curatorial practice in fashion curation responds to changes within feminist discourse. This involves a renewed sensibility to cultural context, critical and collective engagement with process and close involvement with the role of the institution and the community it serves. Although Lind’s (2011) approach is concerned with contemporary art it is also relevant when addressing changes in feminist engagement with fashion, gender constructions and representational meanings of dress. The need for critical practice in fashion curation becomes more pressing when looking at the increasing emphasis on visual spectacle and the ways in which “contemporary fashion” is shown within the museum as entertainment (Teunissen 2014). Both Foster (2015) and Latour (2004) refer to the events of 9/11 as a turning point in the demise of cultural critique. Latour (2004) points to a mistrust in academic perspectives, whereas

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Foster (2015) takes a more optimistic view when he appeals for a continuous need for critical engagement with culture. His views on art criticism and curatorial practice are relevant here as he argues that “many curators no longer promote critical debate” through their practice (Foster 2015: 115). He goes further when he states that critical thinking has given way to an art world driven by market value. He points to, what he calls a “consumerist relation to identity” where every critical position is caught up in neoliberal capitalism (Foster 2015: 117). One may ask if this is also the case in fashion curation, where we see the continuous rise of the blockbuster exhibition, promoting celebrity status of both designers and brands. Here museum quality dress is equally caught up in market value, consumer culture and the kind of curatorial practice, which mirrors the glitz of just another shop window. Fashion exhibitions as spectacle are in themselves not new phenomena (Koda and Glasscock 2014; Clark and de La Haye 2014), as it dates back to Diana Vreeland’s view that fashion as spectacle should entertain and “drown in beauty” (Steele 2008). But this rather commercially motivated approach leaves little room for feminist practice or the kind of examples discussed in this chapter.

Feminist fashion curation Theoretical explorations and critical curatorial practice are relevant in both contemporary art and fashion curation. There are varying types of exhibitions that can be seen as engaging with feminist ideas and issues from a cultural and historical perspective. Some connect with debates or aspects of gender construction or offer interpretations of the body, ethnicity and/or sexuality. More recent examples include Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity (Musee d’Orsay 2012), A Queer History of Fashion (Fashion Institute of Technology, New York 2013), Faith Fashion Fusion: Muslim Women’s Style in Australia (Immigration Museum: Melbourne 2014) or Up Cloche: Fashion, Feminism, Modernity (Michigan State University Museum 2016). What these exhibitions have in common is that they express ideas relevant to an engagement with gender construction and female identity through fashion. While working with archives and constructing histories, concepts and narratives drive critical practice. Take for example debates on craft and ornament. In this setting women’s work, labor and the relationship with fashion is linked to debates on craft and modernity. Negrin (2006) has commented on the devaluation of the ornament as a feminine domain and the dismissal of craft as inferior: During the period of modernism, ornament was much maligned as inessential, superficial, deceptive and irrational. Coupled with the denigration of ornament was its association with the feminine domain. NEGRIN 2006: 220 During the late 1960s and 70s exhibitions, which engaged with aspects of “textile art” or “fiber art” became prominent in both feminist art practice and fashion exhibitions (Jeffries, Wood Conroy and Clark 2015: 4). This practice, which questioned and challenged the

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notion of craft as a feminine domain engaged with the discourse of women as active producers. A more recent example, which reflected on this debate, was Viva La Craft (2009), which blurred both artistic boundaries between art, performance, craft and gender construction. The exhibition was curated and performed by feminist art collective Chicks on Speed, in Melbourne and Berlin in 2009. The project took an interactive approach and dealt with the relationship between feminine practice, consumerism and craftsmanship from a feminist perspective. Utilizing what has been described as a “punk and DIY ” approach. The interactive performance Viva la Craft connected with ideas on craft as an intrinsically feminine and patriarchal concept. Craft itself can be seen as subversive as has been argued by historians such as Parker (2012: 215) who comments on ways in which women managed to “make meanings of their own” through a medium which was meant to limit and marginalize women. This has been further discussed by Golda (2015) who argues that fragmented as well as ritualistic elements of craft have informed feminist practice. This was mirrored in the interactive format of Viva la Craft, which allowed artists as well as the audience to engage with the process of making, while relating to the debate that women were denied a place within art history but instead were reduced to practicing “art with the needle and thread” (Parker 2012: 215) through slogans embroidered on garments. As Wilson (1986, 2001, 2006) has argued fashion is part of social and cultural life, but any engagement with narratives around craft and critical practice progresses the debate and as such always sits within the context of feminist politics. Consequently, curatorial approaches, such as this have the potential to offer a way to build awareness, deconstructing historical narratives and questioning mechanisms of domination.

A feminist intervention: The Politics of Appearance As has been discussed previously, fashion exhibitions highlight aspects of gendered identity (Petrov 2014), but rarely do we find fashion exhibitions that engage with fashion or consumer culture in a critical way. In addition, few exhibitions have engaged directly with aspects of the women’s liberation movement, legacies of second wave feminism or the political context of the 1970s. One such example is the exhibition The Politics of Appearance (2009), which formed part of a larger display, titled MS Understood at The Women’s Library in London. The display, The Politics of Appearance (2009) was dedicated to the role of fashion in the context of the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM ) of the 1970s. The display was the result of an oral history project facilitated by the historian Clare Rose.5 Since 2013 The Women’s Library has been housed at the London School of Economics, whilst at the time of the exhibition the space was located in East London. As an archive, the library manages the museum collection of over 5,000 artifacts. It is dedicated to the personal, political and economic struggles that have symbolized women’s battle for equality over the past 500 years. The library houses a broad range of materials, from pamphlets, to newspapers, rare books, textiles, posters and ceramics. It also stages

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annual exhibitions on the history of the women’s movement. On display were photographs, craft and embroidered garments, which gave an insight into the lives of a group of writers and political activists known through their engagement with the Women’s Library, such as Elizabeth Wilson, Sue O’Sullivan, Raphael Samuel, Sally Alexander, Mary Chamberlain, Amanda Sebestyen, Anna Davin and Michelene Wandor. Objects such as handcrafted dresses or painted t-shirts, such as the crocheted tank top worn Elizabeth Wilson to the Gay Liberation Front Ball at Kensington Town Hall in 1971 (now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum archive), have helped to question perceptions of the past as well as the present. Rose chose each of the objects on display, together with the participants and the Women’s Library. Within the exhibition Rose engaged with notions of cultural ambivalence about fashion and perceived stereotypes of feminist style. She drew on visual material such as newspaper clippings from publications including the feminist magazines Spare Rib (March 1973) and Shrew (September 1970, October 1972). The latter describes the fashion industry as exploitative of workers and comments on fashion media as undermining women’s self image. Spare Rib (1973), however, identified clothes as a source of pleasure and as a way of reclaiming creativity through craft. In displaying both these positions through visual material the project offered a critical view of fashion, as being neither serious nor frivolous. Taking an investigative approach Rose also drew on personal accounts, such as photographs and garments. She presented the idea that fashion is seen as being “oppression, as well as self-expression and pleasure” (Rose 2009). The appearance of members of the WLM has been characterized by outsiders as based on a rejection of fashion and of conventional femininity: shock-haired, jeanswearing, and bra-less. Some participants have linked this to a wider rejection of conventional aesthetics: Amanda Sebestyen has said of the early days of the WLM that “It wasn’t a very visual time.” Yet out of this period came some important new directions in both the practice and theorizing of gender and dress, notably the work of Elizabeth Wilson and Juliet Ash. ROSE 2009 What we find here is what can be described as a curatorial form of feminist intervention, where fashion is seen in terms of representation as well as actual experience. The exhibition differs from a less critical engagement with fashion as it challenges norms and stereotypes associated with feminist style. It referred to mainstream media, which caricatured feminists as anti fashion while at the same time aiming to challenge this notion.6 The garments and embroidered textiles invoked the personal and the political by drawing on the role of craft and DIY approach to fashion. Many of the garments on display were sewn or embroidered by the participants, such as Anna Davin’s mini dress (see Figure 9.1). The garments on display engaged with the apparent contradictory nature of fashion, which is directly informed by political debate as well as by actual style. By linking objects to biographies and experience the viewer had access to both historical context as well as feminist rhetoric, which goes beyond the dismissal of fashion as restrictive or even irrelevant. A photograph of Anna Davin wearing a mini dress whilst protesting against the

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Figure 9.1 Anna Davin’s Mini Dress. With permission of Clare Rose and Anna Davin.

notorious right-wing politician Enoch Powell further illustrated this, as he gave a speech in Oxford in 1968 (see Figure 9.2). Encounters with textiles, garments, oral accounts or personal photographs exceed the presentation of chronologically ordered fashion trends of the early 1970s, showing instead, materials that are shaped by memory, experience and culture. By using clothing which was actually made and worn The Politics of Appearance reflected current academic debate such Parker’s argument (2012) on craft as a gendered activity. While being limited to the feminine, the garments represented creative and subversive qualities, while at the same time informed by current fashion trends. Parker comments on this process in the following way: Limited to practicing art with the needle and thread, women have nevertheless sewn a subversive stitch—managed to make meanings of their own in the very medium intended to inculcate self-effacement. PARKER 2012: 215

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Figure 9.2 Photograph of Anna Davin at a political protest. Permission: Anna Davin.

Here, a sense prevails that feminism is not simply rooted in the time this exhibition documents, although the objects and artifacts certainly are, but is part of an ongoing feminist dimension in which these ideas should be seen. By displaying garments, which were owned by authors who feature in interviews, The Politics of Appearance draws on the personal and the political, a prominent approach within feminist discourse. Oral history accounts, including interviews and conversations between the curator and the women who donated garments, manifest personal narrative, experience and feminine subjectivity. This also presents a more democratic approach, as the project is not merely informed by the vision of one curator, but is the result of collaborative work and collective engagement with the topic. The Women’s Library, itself a feminist organization offers what one may term its own ethical code, serving its community through debate, education and events. In this sense The Politics of Appearance, can be viewed as having adopted a feminist approach as well as a methodology. The process of collaboration is informed by feminist positioning and places the curatorial approach within academic debate and context. Through the display of everyday objects, such as home-made garments, printed t-shirts and crocheted tops, the audience was able to engage with the material quality of the object. In this way not only the role fashion played at the beginning of the 1970s became apparent, but also the women who own, made or personalized these garments were recognized as authors in their own right. This is made apparent through Michelene Vandor’s children’s jumper for example (see Figure 9.3).

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Figure 9.3 Detail of display of Michelene Vandor’s knitted children’s jumper. Permission: Anna Davin.

Each object became a representation of an experience, as well as what Griselda Pollock (2007) describes as “inscriptions in, of and from the feminine,” which is mirrored in the use of DIY approach to fashion and the use of craft (Pollock 2007: 107). The relationship between material and social status of objects, which are linked with the participants’ biographies present interconnected feminist forms of historical and feminist practice. Richter, Krasny and Perry (2016) are also relevant here as they examine how an exhibition can articulate feminist practice when both curator and participants are authors, as traditionally curation is informed by “structures of domination” (Richter, Krasny and Perry 2016: 5). In addition the political practice of the institution, in this case The Women’s Library and its archive, drives what is made visible and how we see it. Ideas on the role and function of the archive as a space and concept have undergone numerous debates in recent years. Both Jacque Derrida (1995, 2006) and Michel Foucault (1969, 2006) have commented on the changing role of the museum archive. The archive itself is no longer seen as a repository of the past, but instead a place for the curator to reconstruct the history through fragments, never complete or absolute and open to selection and interpretation. Remnants of the past only offer a glimpse into “never wholly achieved” (Foucault 1996, 2006: 30) partial and vast areas of social life. Even if subjects or participants actively shape the parts of the archive, gaps remain between individual discourses and narratives. This view of the archive as highly personal but also fragmented

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is of course relevant in the light of women’s experience featured in The Politics of Appearance.7 Griselda Pollock (2007) goes on to point out the need for self-understanding in relation to memory and memorial activities, when it comes to constructing a history of feminist art in the museum context. However, rather than remaining within the confines of the museum or gallery space Pollock proposes a virtual museum, which facilitates a rewriting of a feminist history of women in art: “Feminist” becomes a term of provocation and inspiration to such readings. It does not offer an alternative interpretation of the archive. Rather it functions as a kind of movement within it, tracking across a series of images a sense of something deeper and recurrent, important for human existence yet marked by difference and division. POLLOCK 2007: 21 The Politics of Appearance aimed to challenge stereotypes of 1970s fashion, feminist style and second wave feminism, as well as popular notions of femininity and in doing so destabilized existing knowledge as well as widespread opinion of feminist writers or activists rejecting fashion as oppressive or limiting. Pollock (2007) can be applied here as she suggests that feminist work explores difference; this involves the making and unmaking of relational as well as unstable meanings. The Women’s Library, as a cultural organization, offers the kind of space in which such interaction can be formed. Curatorial engagement with the archive has to take its own limitations into account. What is selected shapes our understanding as well as critical engagement with patterns of social structure. As has been mentioned previously, many of the objects on display were not taken directly from the museum archive, but belonged to the women whose personal memories were shared. This plays an important role, where personal narrative adds to the fragmented versions of the past and addresses the limitations of the archive. The curator and art scholar Amelia Jones (2016) argues that most effective curatorial work needs to remain “open to unexpected cultural productions that might promote feminist interests while not being so obviously part of feminist histories and institutions” (Jones 2016: 43). This has been achieved to some extent, as Clair Rose’s decision to focus on the personal, offered both aspects of self-definition, challenging popular opinion and a wider view on feminine subjectivity. Other participants, who contributed to the display, by donating garments and sharing personal narratives, supported both the institution as well as the community through actively shaping collective memory and debate.

Critical fashion and feminist practice The female body is one of the building blocks of consumer culture (Stratton: 2001). Traditionally seen as a “popular subject matter within the arts” (Cottell 1995: 88), fashion has played only a small part in feminist art practice. But progressively fashion as a subject has become a medium to comment and engage with gender representation as well as consumer culture. Third wave feminist artists have used fashion to present capitalism as a way to comment on notions of femininity and “emptiness of materialism” (Meckseper in

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Gillick 2008) within their practice. Fashion as a concept has informed feminist critique. Artists such as K8 Hardy, Josephine Meckseper or Andrea Zittel for example, have focused on fashion and its role in the construction of capitalist culture, femininity and fashion. Fashion as a trope is used as part of performances, video, sculpture of photography to highlight ways in which identity is no longer seen as fixed or stable. Fashion as trope within feminist art practice and fashion curation are of course very different. However, feminist engagement with the role of fashion within and as part of contemporary culture, informs our understanding of fashion in the context of feminist art practice. Feminist thinking on fashion goes beyond a mere historical engagement with the topic, relying instead on a critical understanding of fashion as part of capitalist and patriarchal culture. Critical practice however can be found in the work of fashion designers who use their work to engage critically within the confines of the industry or social issues, one example being the American designer and artist collective Bernadette Corporation who produced several fashion collections between 1994 and 2001.8 Female artists who address embodied subjectivity, gender construction and consumer culture bring new and critical approaches to the way we encounter fashion in a museum context. A further example is Zittel’s Uniform Project (1994–2011). The work featured home-made garments, consisting of a small selection of dresses each of which were meant to be worn for an entire season. The work was a comment on the endless variety and choice in fashion and the role of functionality in design. This approach differs from the more commercial confines of the fashion industry and responds or challenges the confines of the art market. This can also be applied to Zittel’s project Smockshop (2006), which invited a group of artists to design and make garments as a way of questioning authorship. However, the question remains as to how fashion curators can respond to the eroding boundaries between fashion and cultural critique, whilst simultaneously existing as forms of contemporary art that engages critically with fashion.

K8 Hardy: Untitled Runway Show The American curator Elisabeth Sussman, known for her monographic exhibitions of artists such as Nan Goldin I’ll be your Mirror (1997) or Gordon Matta Clark’s You are the Measure (2007) curated the 2012 Whitney Biennial together with Jay Sanders. Part of the New York exhibition was K8 Hardy’s display Untitled Runway Show, which was specifically commissioned for the Biennial. Born in 1977 the New York based artist K8 Hardy is a founding member of the queer feminist journal and artistic collective LTTR . Hardy’s work challenges ingrained perspectives of both fashion and femininity. In this way she offers models and approaches through which curators can establish relationships between the material and social context of dress. At the time of Hardy’s participation in the Whitney Biannual, she was known for publishing four issues of her zine, titled FashionFashion between 2004 and 2008. She also showed continued engagement with both fashion and textiles, through designing her first fashion collection in collaboration with JF and Sons in 2010 (Granata 2010). The performance invited the audience to take on the traditional role of the catwalk

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audience, watching models present the “looks” put together by the team and utilizing found material. Each creation took on the form of a self-conscious anti aesthetic, emulating yet also challenging conventional runway shows. This was achieved through the use of professional models as both performer and subject. Fashion conventions were challenged further, by letting the models walk in slow motion sideways, backwards, and in their own freestyle (see Plate 20). Shown on the third floor of the former Whitney Breuer building, the project was a collaboration between different artists and practitioners: the set was designed by artist Oscar Tuazon, the elaborate hair was created by New York stylist Duffy and the make-up artist was James Kaliardos. K8 Hardy designed the garments using a DIY approach. Prominent examples included a dress made out of assembled bras. Not unlike fashion designers before her, such as Martin Margiela, Helen Storey, Ann Sofie Back or Xuly Bët, Hardy challenged the runway show as a ritual through the use of cheap material as well as the freedom given to her models. She also participated towards the end by taking on the role of the designer, mimicking the tradition of stepping onto the catwalk and greeting the applauding audience after the finale. Hardy’s appearance provoked this reaction and the applause implied that the public interacts with both the work and the ritual, as it takes on the role usually reserved for fashion buyers and the media. K8 Hardy commented on her project challenging perspectives of commercial aspects of fashion: I wanted to do a fashion show so that we can look at fashion in a different context outside of commercialism and outside of the marketing that’s usually associated with a fashion show. HARDY in STERN 2012 The live moment of the catwalk show is rarely recreated within the museum or gallery context, despite the fact that it plays such an intrinsic part in the creation of fashion codes. An exception is Fashion in Motion9 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (curated by Judith Wilcox), which showcases young and emerging designers or innovative approaches to fashion design. The sociologist Joanne Finkelstein (1997) has commented on the way fashion exhibitions produce knowledge, but at times fail to relate to practices and methods of the fashion industry itself. By using the form and tradition of the catwalk show, Hardy engages with aspects of the industry through mimicking fashion. The media’s fascination with catwalk shows as a live event and its continuous significance, has been observed by Finkelstein: Mass media demonstrates a persistent interest in the world of fashion. So much so that the coverage of haute couture verges on surveillance. FINKELSTEIN 1997: 159 Hardy’s staging of a catwalk show dealt with the intertextualization and aesthetic politics of fashion. She engaged critically with fashion for its commercialism and elitism whilst at the same time trying to reinvent and develop her own take on fashion using what can be described as a DIY approach. The Untitled Runway Show was a performance, which is

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informed by the tradition of feminist performance art as critical practice, while at the same time mimicking commercial practice. Hardy chose to cast professional models for her show rather than relying on street casting. In doing so, she continued to rely on gender distinctions and conventional notions of beauty ideals. The Untitled Runway Show presents an embodiment of what has been described as gendered subjectivity (Dimitrakaki and Perry 2013) by adopting feminist strategies as it investigates alternative ways of looking at fashion as performance. When compared to Clare Rose’s The Politics of Appearance (2009) staged just three years prior to Untitled Runway Show witnessed very different engagement with fashion, with a focus on the garment’s agency and fashion as critical practice. Rose aimed to present the idea that fashion has the ability to “intercede between individuals and the material world” (Finkelstein 1997: 160). The home-made garments and embroidered textiles on display reflect political views, and appropriated aesthetic or symbolic resistance. Both Rose’s exhibition and Hardy’s performance engage with a DIY approach to fashion, and its subversive qualities. In this sense the material aspect of the garments has become symbolic of an idea or attitude. Craft and DIY become part of gender performance. Both examples, although in different ways, make the viewer aware of what can be described as a “masquerade of femininity” in a postmodern context (Tseelon in Negrin 2010: 514).

The continued need for a critical engagement with fashion This chapter has argued that curating is a “form of knowledge production” (Richter 2016: 23). Furthermore, feminist curatorial practice engages with the “process of gendering, engendering and differentiation in relation to the way meaning is constructed” (Pollock 2007: 56). K8 Hardy’s Untitled Runway Show (2012) at the Whitney Biannual and Clare Rose’s The Politics of Appearance (2009) at the Women’ s Library offer different social constructions of fashion, dealing with discursive and cultural shifts in feminist thinking. Both represent ideas on fashion and dress, which move away from a moralistic rejection of fashion as restrictive or limiting. While the former offered a mimicry of fashion as ritual, as a way to interrupt fashion’s “largely unquestioned flow” (Hardy in Browne 2012), the latter investigated feminist engagement with fashion while looking at historically constructed meanings through personal narratives. Each project, whilst coming from entirely different contexts and approaches was informed by fashion’s reliance on gender distinctions. Both place emphasis on the idea that fashion can be seen as “naturalizing norm,” but at the same time offering a chance to be “socially eruptive” (Finkelstein 1997: 154). Curatorial practice in contemporary art as discussed by Jones (2016), Lind (2011) or Richter (2016) has shown that feminism directly and indirectly influences curators who establish critical engagement through objects and images, which draw on issues concerning sexual difference. This in turn is informed by critical practice. For Foster (2015) critical practice “engages the viewer to discover the signs of capital behind everyday objects” (Foster 2015: 118). This understanding of objects can be applied to fashion curation, as this chapter has argued. Fashion curation and feminist practice in a

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postmodern context imitates, as a way to denounce its own power to mimic itself. This approach has been applied in an art context, as has been the case with Hardy’s Untitled Runway. Fashion exhibitions increase the cultural evaluation of fashion and consequently further its mystification. The effect of fashion exhibitions as being culturally significant cannot be denied, but only a return to a critical understanding of its complex position and political power can further the potential of fashion curation in a museum context. If curatorial approaches to surviving dress no longer exploit what one might call a critical edge, fashion could hardly continue to serve as a vital topic. If simply reduced to spectacle, fashion no longer offers alternative modes of engagement or critical reflection.

Notes 1 Some examples of contemporary fashion exhibition, which showcase contemporary designers, are Viktor and Rolf at the Barbican (London) 2008, Bernard Willhelm at MoMu in Antwerp (200?) or Hussein Chalayan at Musees des Arts Decoratifs in Paris (2011). 2 Critical approaches to fashion history and curation have been addressed in the Special Edition of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 12, 2008. To read more about the disciplinary debate see Breward (2008) and McNeil (2008). 3 Curators, fashion and art historians have addressed the topic of curation as feminist or critical practice. For an insightful definition of feminist curatorial practice of feminist art see Amelia Jones (2016). For a discussion on fashion curation and gender see Petrov (2014). 4 The exhibition (1974–1979) by Judy Chicago is an icon of feminist art. It represents 1,038 women in history. This work of art was comprised of a triangular table divided by three wings, each 48 feet long 39 women were represented by place settings and another 999 names were inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table was placed. This artwork sought to write forgotten women back into history. Its principle aim was to reclaim women from history. 5 I would like to thank Clare Rose for generously sharing her research and visual material for this chapter. 6 Clare Rose referred to an article in British magazine The Spectator (1970), which illustrates popular stereotypes of feminist style. The article described the members of the first National Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College Oxford in 1970 as “a struggling crowd of long hair and maxi coats, beards and babies, the usual mud-colored student crowd, some men, a few old wierdos, a sprinkling of nostalgics, student anarchists, communist girls in clothes out of Dr Zhivago.” 7 Other authors have developed this debate further by mapping out queer archives. This includes Ann Cvetkovich in her An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures or on “transgender archives,” as Judith Halberstam does in the book In a Queer Time and Place. 8 For more details on the Bernadette Corporation see the company’s platform 2000 Wasted Years: http://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/bernadette-corporation. 9 Fashion in Motion is a series of events, which takes place regularly at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It takes on the form of a live event, such as a runway show or tableau and aims to showcase the work of international designers. Some designers who presented at Fashion in Motion include Gareth Pugh (2007) Giles Deacon (2009), Meadham Kirchhoff (2013), Sibling (2014) and Grace Wales Bonner (2015).

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References Anderson, Fiona (2000) “Museums as Fashion Media,” in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London: Routledge, 371–89. Breward, Christopher (2008) “Between the Museum and the Academy: Fashion Research and its Constituencies,” in Fashion Theory, Oxford: Berg, 83–96. Browne, Alix (2012) “High Performance: K8 Hardy’s ‘Untitled Runway Show’,” in New York Times Magazine, available at http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/high-performance-k8hardys-untitled-runway-show/?_r=0 (accessed May 25, 2017). Cumming, Valerie (2004) Understanding Fashion History, New York: Costume and Fashion Press. de la Haye, Amy (2003) “Where is the Dummy Now? Amy de la Haye on Art and Fashion,” in Tate, The Art Magazine, 3: 12–17. de la Haye, Amy and Wilson, Elisabeth (1999) Defining Dress, Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1995, 2006) “Archive Fever,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press. Dimitrakaki, Angela and Perry, Lara (2013) Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Entwistle, Joanne (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, London: Polity Press. Evans, Caroline and Thornton, Minna (1989) Women and Fashion: A New Look, London: Quartet Books. Finkelstein, J. (1997) “Chic Outrage and Body Politics,” in Kathy Davis (ed.), Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, London: Sage, 150–89. Foster, Hal (2015) Bad News Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, London: Verso. Foucault, Michel (1969, 2006) “The History of a priori and The Archive,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press. Gardner, Laura (2014) “The Art—Fashion Tangle,” in Vestoj: The Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion, available at: http://vestoj.com/the-art-fashion-tangle/ (accessed May 25, 2017). Gillick, Liam (2008) “Josephine Meckseper,” in Interview Magazine, available at: www. interviewmagazine.com/art/josephine-meckseper/# (accessed May 25, 2017). Golda, Agnnieszka (2015) “Feeling, Sensing the Affectivity of Emotional Politics through Textiles,” in Hazel Clark, Janis Jeffries, and Diana Wood Conroy (eds), Handbook of Textile Cultures, London: Bloomsbury. Granata, Francesca (2010) “K8 Hardy’s Fashion Week Performance at JF & Sons,” in Fashion Projects, available at: www.fashionprojects.org/blog/705 (accessed May 25, 2017). Jeffries, Janis, Wood Conroy, Diana and Clark, Hazel (2015) The Handbook of Textile Cultures, London: Bloomsbury. Jones, Amelia (2016) “Feminist Subjects vs Feminist Effects: The Curating of Feminist Art (or is it the Feminist Curating of Art),” in On Curating, 29(May): 5–20. Koda, Harold and Glasscock, Jessica (2014) “The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Evolving History,” in Fashion and Museums, London: Bloomsbury. Latour, Bruno (2004) “Why has Critique run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” in Critical Inquiry, 30(Winter): 225–48. Lind, Maria (2011) “The Curatorial,” in Selected Maria Lind Writing, Berlin: Sternberg Press. McNeil, Peter (2008) “We are not in the Fashion Business: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy,” in Fashion Theory, 12: 65–81. Negrin, Llewellyn (2010) “The Self as Image: A Critical Appraisal of Postmodern Theories of Fashion,” in G. Riello and P. McNeil, The Fashion History Reader, London: Routledge. O’Neill, Paul (2012) The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

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Palmer, Alexandra (2008) “Untouchable: Creating Desire and Knowledge in Costume and Textile Exhibitions,” in Valerie Steele and Alexandra Palmer (eds), Exhibitionism, Special Issue of Fashion Theory, 12(1): 31–63. Parker, Rozsika (2012) The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, New York: IB Tauris. Pecorari, Marco (2014) “Understanding Fashion through the Museum,” in Fashion and Museums, London: Bloomsbury. Petrov, Julia (2014) “Gender Considerations in Fashion History Exhibition,” in Fashion and Museums, London: Bloomsbury. Pollock, Griselda (2004) “Women Art and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians,” in Hilary Robinson (ed.), Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today, London: Camden Press. Pollock, Griselda (2007) Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, London: Routledge. Richter, Dorothee (2016) “Feminist Perspectives on Curating,” in On Curating, available at: http:// on-curating.org/index.php/issue-29-reader/feminist-perspectives-on-curating.html#.V30m-jfgfzI (accessed May 25, 2017). Rose, Clare (2009) “Opinion: The Liberation Look,” Times Higher Education. available at: www. timeshighereducation.com/news/opinion-the-liberation-look/409273.article (accessed May 25, 2017). Steele, Valerie (1998) “A Museum of Clothes is More Than Just a Clothes Bag,” in Fashion Theory, 2(4): 327–35. Steele, Valerie (2008) “Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,” in Fashion Theory, 12(1): 7–30. Stern, Claire (2012) “K8 Hardy Subverts Fashion with Runway Show at The Whitney,” in Elle.com, available at: www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a21667/k8-hardy-subverts-fashion-runwayshow-at-the-whitney-42800/ (Accessed May 25, 2017). Stratton, J. (2001) The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption, Chicago, IL : University of Illinois Press. Sussman, Elisabeth and Sanders, Jay (2012) Whitney Biennial 2012, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Teunissen, José (2014) “Understanding Fashion through the Museum,” in Fashion and Museums, London: Bloomsbury. Wilson, Elizabeth (1986) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago Press. Wilson, Elizabeth (1990) “These New Components of the Spectacle: Fashion and Postmodernism,” in R. Boyne and A. Rattansi (eds), Postmodernism and Society, London: Macmillan Education, 209–36. Wilson, Elizabeth (1992) “Fashion and the Postmodern Body,” in Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Chic Thrills, London: Pandora. Wilson, Elizabeth (2006) “Book Review: Understanding Fashion History by Valerie Cumming,” in: Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 10(3): 409–12.

SECTION THREE

BEYOND THE MUSEUM The combination of commerce and culture is tangible in fashion curating, as the contributions in this section indicate. All of the authors work outside of museums, as researchers within academia who analyze fashion curation at the intersection of art and commerce. One interesting example of merging art and fashion is the Louis Vuitton Foundation, designed by the wow-factor architect Frank Gehry in the Bois de Bologne in Paris, which opened in fall 2014. It doesn’t however display fashion garments but houses an extensive art collection with works by such modernist artists as Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Gilbert & George. It also exhibits contemporary site-specific installations commissioned from renowned contemporary artists such as Ellsworth Kelly or Olafur Eliasson. This view of curation demonstrates how the meanings of art and fashion curating have expanded. On the one hand, the authors ask, what is professional curating, how should it be developed, and what is the role of curation for research and fashion studies? On the other they ask, what purposes does curating serve for brands, and question why global fashion brands have found their way into museums. The first two chapters are by Simona Segre Reinach who works as the Professor of Fashion Studies at Bologna University in Italy and Marco Pecorari, who is the Program Director of MA Fashion Studies at the Parsons Paris School of Art and Design. They probe the question of the relationship between curating and research on fashion. Their contributions are framed by fashion theorists and historians such as Valerie Steele (1998), Lou Taylor (1998, 2002, 2004) and Christopher Breward (2008) who have pointed out the importance of curating for researching fashion. Curating fashion is a way to participate in cultural analysis, and a specialist way of producing knowledge about fashion and to disseminate this knowledge to various audiences outside of academia through the exhibition format. Simona Segre Reinach’s chapter, “Fashion Museums and Fashion Exhibitions in Italy. New Perspectives in Italian Fashion Studies” draws from her personal experience of curating two fashion exhibitions at Bologna University Rimini Campus (80s–90s Facing 167

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Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance). She explores the ways in which fashion curation can be a site of innovative scholarship and open up space for theoretical investigation of fashion. She investigates how Italy, commonly seen as the “fashion nation” has gained this status only recently and, perhaps surprisingly, mainly through international fashion exhibitions focusing on Italian fashions held outside Italy. Reinach also discusses the potential of fashion studies to curating, and how “didactic exhibitions,” as she calls them, can be a way to produce knowledge about fashion. Marco Pecorari’s “Beyond Garments: Reorienting the Practice of Fashion Curating” discusses the possibility of curating fashion beyond garments. Here the framing is as proposed by Valerie Steele (1998) that a fashion exhibition is not merely a “clothes-bag.” What Steele means with this argument is that garments are important objects of knowledge, which can provide valuable insights into the historic and aesthetic development of fashion. In his chapter, Pecorari stresses the importance of finding specific curatorial languages for fully understanding fashion as more than just a dress-centered phenomenon. In order to explain this idea, he analyzes four exhibitions: Dysfashional (2007) curated by Luca Marchetti and Emanuele Quinz as part of the Luxembourg European Culture Capital, the installation Fashion Archive 1995–2010 by duo graphic designers M/M Paris for the exhibition Not In Fashion (2010) at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt/ Main, and the performance Models at Work (2012) by Olivier Saillard at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. What unites these cases is their capacity to discuss fashion beyond garments by focusing on its immaterial aspects, and by interpreting fashion as a multi-sensory phenomenon. According to Pecorari, all these cases also employ experimental curatorial languages, which are used to create alternative and polysemic narratives about fashion. The final two chapters in this section, and in the book, are by Peter Bengtsen who is an art historian and a sociologist and works at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University in Sweden, and Yuli Bai who teaches at the Art Institute of Beijing Union University, China. Their chapters analyze fashion curation in the commercial field where curating has fast become hard currency and more visible, expanding to museums and to commercial boutiques and department stores. Many fashion brands deliberately bring art and fashion together and use curating as a tool for creating cultural capital and economic value for the brand and the designer. For example, in autumn 2012, the shop windows of the fashion department store Selfridges in London were transformed into displays where art and fashion merged. Life-sized and miniature mannequin dolls modeled after the world-famous Japanese artist Yaoi Kusama wearing a red gown patterned by her signature white polka dots, were surrounded by Louis Vuitton hand-bags in different sizes and colors, also printed with Kusama’s polka dots (see also Plate 3). Peter Bengtsen’s chapter “Fashion Curates Art: Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton” is an investigation of how one specific collaboration between a fashion conglomerate and a contemporary artist exemplifies a wider phenomenon of the ways in which brands curate artists to fit their own needs. Central to the chapter is the discussion about why and to what ends curation of art has become important for fashion brands in their branding efforts. The case in question is the collaboration between the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and the luxury brand Louis Vuitton through which Bengtsen explains how, on

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the one hand, Murakami has long sought to level the boundary between art and popular culture, and how, on the other hand, the Louis Vuitton products designed by Murakami are not considered separate from his other art production. The chapter shows how curating has been a significant way for Louis Vuitton to associate itself with the world of fine art and the art market. The last chapter in this section, and the concluding chapter of this book, “Artification and Authenticity: Museum Exhibitions of Luxury Fashion Brands in China” by Yuli Bai is an investigation of contemporary luxury brands, and how their aim to appear as “authentic” has proved vital in their pursuit of reinforcing their cultural status, charging premium prices and competing in the market. In Bai’s opinion, building bridges between fashion and art through curating is the key in constructing the brand as authentic. In tracing this strategy, Bai discusses the effectiveness of exhibitions that focus on the concept of authenticity, and in doing so considers the intimate relationship between luxury brands, art, and curatorial practices. Bai’s case studies are from recent curatorial projects by major global fashion brands in China: Louis Vuitton’s Art of Travel (2013) and Dior’s Esprit Dior (2013) and Hermes’ Leather Forever (2010) in Shanghai, Chanel’s Culture Chanel (2011) and The Tale of Silk (2008) in Beijing, China. Through these exhibitions Bai analyzes how and in what ways exhibitions serve as seductive smokescreens behind which luxury brands can obscure aggressive commercial intentions by projecting authenticity, whilst at the same time fulfilling Chinese consumer demand. The chapter also investigates the ways in which luxury brands construct the themes, content, design, and location of the exhibitions, and how they include the exhibitions in the rationale of the brand by creating multiple meanings, art world associations, and relationships with Chinese culture more broadly. In doing so it poses fascinating questions about the future of critical fashion curating, practically, intellectually and geographically.

References Breward, C. (2008) “Between the Museum and the Academy: Fashion Research and its Constituencies,” Fashion Theory, 12(1): 83–94. Steele, V. (1998) “A Museum of Fashion is More than a Clothes-Bag,” Fashion Theory 2(4): 327–35. Taylor, L. (1998) “Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History,” Fashion Theory, 2(4): 337–58. Taylor, L. (2002) The Study of Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, L. (2004) Establishing Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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10 FASHION MUSEUMS AND FASHION EXHIBITIONS IN ITALY: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN ITALIAN FASHION STUDIES Simona Segre Reinach Introduction Fashion studies in Italy are undergoing a major change, as fashion has officially entered the field of cultural studies, thanks to a process of integration between the economy of fashion and the representation of fashion in museums and exhibitions. As is well known, for historical and anthropological reasons the Italian fashion system has often been marked by strong regional and local connotations. The rivalry between the various “fashion capitals”—Turin, Florence, Rome and Milan—in the short history of Italy since Unification (1861) to the present, and the variety of the different areas of production scattered over the country, such as Como silks, Biella wools, Vigevano shoes, to mention but a few, make it difficult to provide a complete picture as compared to the French or the British fashion system, concentrated around Paris and London (Giusti, Mora, Segre Reinach 2015). As Frédéric Godart describes it, the Italian fashion industry is still shaped by “embedded flexible networks” (Godart 2012: 134) which are not completely integrated. The same applies to museums: Italy has more small museums than any other country in Europe and these are scattered all over the country (Trione 2016). It is therefore unlikely that a fashion-centered museum, such as the Galliera in Paris, the V&A in London, the Costume Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, or the Kyoto Costume Institute, could be established in Italy. In this chapter I will analyze the specific Italian scene in the context of the constant growth in interest in fashion museums and fashion exhibits in many parts of the world. I will outline display projects and didactic exhibitions at the University of Bologna as an example of the university curriculum in fashion studies, but also as part of a more general trend in fashion studies internationally. In promoting interdisciplinary practices, didactic exhibitions help to blur the differences between theory

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and practice, research and industry—contributing, as Christopher Breward maintains (2008), to demonstrating the industrial and commercial apparatus that support the spectacle of fashion exhibitions.

Fashion as historical-artistic heritage and the rise of fashion museums in Italy It is right to be here, I couldn’t believe that this was the first time a Cultural Minister had taken part in the Pitti opening. Fashion is an essential part of our cultural heritage and a mix of excellences: alongside shopping and wine and food, it represents the heart of our tourism supply, appreciated throughout the world. Fashion as a product of contemporary art has always been somewhat neglected by those with political responsibilities in the cultural sector because it is excessively absorbed in protecting the historical-artistic heritage. DARIO FRANCESCHINI (Ministro dei Beni Culturali) www.newsjs. com/url.php?p=http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/pitti-moda-uffizi-1.1645411 (accessed January 15, 2017) The official recognition of fashion as a cultural field, an economic system and an expression of national identity, was slow to reach Italy (Scarpellini 2015). Minister Dario Franceschini was speaking in Florence on the occasion of the eighty-ninth edition of Pitti Uomo (January 12–15, 2016), one of the most important international fashion fairs, from both the business and image viewpoint. Mr Franceschini was amazed that no politician before him had taken part in this fair to publicly communicate the economic and cultural value of fashion, as two related issues. He attributed the reasons to the opposition, still present in Italy, between ancient art and contemporary art. Since fashion, Mr Franceschini argues, is related to contemporary art, those responsible for Italian museums, committed above all to safeguarding historical heritage, have not sufficiently taken it into consideration. But it is time to recognize that fashion is an art of our times, Mr Franceschini continues, and even the Florence Uffizi, the most visited Italian museum (together with the Vatican Museums), will be opening up to new projects for fashion exhibitions. While in certain aspects Mr Franceschini’s speech may appear naïve, it is also true that in Italy the importance of art history in the construction of national identity, with the separation between minor and fine arts, is still strong. In a country with an artistic heritage heavily leaning towards the past, considered untouchable by modern cultural studies, the entry of fashion into museums and the erosion of the dividing line between fashion and art may create a sort of short circuit, as if a fashion museum couldn’t exist independently. It is as if what happened in other countries with regard to most museums’ policies towards fashion, especially in the US and in the UK with the cases of the Met Museum and V&A (Buckley and Clark 2016), and with the rise of new fashion museums, such as the MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum, the Fashion and Textile Museum London, the Santiago Fashion Museum, Lisbon Mude, to mention only the best known (Riegels Melchior and Svensson 2014), couldn’t happen in Italy.

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Actually, within the complex and composite panorama of Italian museums, it can be said that dedicated museums of fashion exist and do not exist at the same time. Fashion museums have not existed, up to now, if we think of them as places where the history of Italian fashion is illustrated in a systematic manner—that is related to a broader history of global fashion, highlighting the cultural background, the characteristics and the major turning points from the 1950s to the present. And yet they do exist. Even a simple Google search under “fashion museums” shows many museums listed under this heading. But are they real fashion museums? And why do most of them not have the world “fashion” in their title, still preferring to be named costume museums? Some of them have emerged with the explicit intention of displaying a local artisanal skill (e.g. the Museo del Merletto (lace museum) at Burano in Venice); others spring from the tradition of ethnographic and folklore museums in various Italian regions, to “document and understand the traditional forms of work of the working classes” of which dress is a consistent part (Dei and Meloni 2015:9), as with the Museum of Costume in Nuoro, Sardegna, previously called the Ethnographic Museum. This recently renovated museum has chosen the name Costume Museum, and not fashion museum, as Sardinia is mainly considered to be a place of traditions. Yet contemporary designer, Antonio Marras, who is still based in Sardinia, has always openly acknowledged the influences of Sardinian costumes and Sardinian culture in his work. In fact the transition from costume museum to fashion museum (Harden 2014) is not an easy one in Italy. It is easier to find a “fashion” museum as part of the category of so-called “micromuseums” (Trione 2016), such as the more recent company museums. They reflect the production specialization of the so-called industrial districts (Merlo 2003) and are often the historic headquarters of the companies founding them. Company museums are a constantly growing phenomenon, relating to a specific national association called Museimpresa. These include those of numerous fashion firms, the most successful is the Museo Ferragamo in Florence. The archives of company museums constitute a rich store of various artifacts, from drawings to garments and paper documents (Fontana 2010). The list of museums that deal in different ways with costume, fashion and garment production could be very long. I mention some, just to give an idea of their diversity. In Venice there is the Vicenza, the center of the gold and jewel industry, the Museo del Gioiello (Jewellery museum). In Gorizia (Veneto) there is a Museo di Moda e Arti applicate (museum of fashion and applied arts). Como has the Museo nazonale della seta (National silk museum) and the Fondazione Ratti. Santarcangelo di Romagna has the Museo dei bottoni (button museum); at Gignese, on the Maggiore Lake, there is the Museo dell’ombrello e del parasole (umbrella and parasol museum); at Vigevano there is the Museo delle calzature (shoe museum). Brescia has the Museo della moda e del costume Mazzucchelli (Mazzucchelli fashion and costume museum). The Museo dell’artigianato della seta del costume e della moda calabrese (silk, costume and fashion museum) is located in Reggio Calabria. A common feature of these numerous minor museums, is that they are located where there is, or was in the past, a specific production of textile, garment and accessories, usually in small towns or rural areas. That is, they reflect the background of Italian fashion which started as a high-quality producer of textiles, accessories, and fabrics for other sartorial systems, namely for the French fashion system, long before

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being recognized as an original fashion system (Steele 2003). On the other hand, museums in cities such as Florence, Venice, Rome and Milan, while in some cases also reflecting this particularity, are a consequence of the classic dynamic between urban culture and fashion—extensively studied since the seminal works of Georg Simmel (1895, 2001). Examples include Palazzo Fortuny, formerly the home of Spanish couturier and artist Mariano Fortuny and center of rich exchange with the international artistic milieu in the early 1900s, Centro Studi di storia del tessuto di Palazzo Mocenigo (study center for fabric history) in Venice, the Museo Boncompagni Lodovisi a museum of applied art with a section on Italian haute couture and Fondazione Micol Fontana in Rome center of the Dolce Vita of the 1950s. By comparison, the Palazzo Morando in Milan reflects the rich bourgeois costumes of Lombardia from the nineteenth century. In Florence the Pitti Costume museum is a special case. As we shall see, it is the perhaps the best suited to become the first real fashion museum in Italy (Chiarelli 2009). I should also mention the virtual museum of Valentino, an experiment to put together museum and archive (www. valentinogaravanimuseum.com). The heterogeneity of these museums, which in different ways could be described as “fashion museums,” although they are not always referred to as such, reflects both their composite origins—ethnographic, industrial, historical, private collections, company archives—and the transformation of the concept of fashion in Italy, as in other countries. Thus, the international process of fashion as a worthwhile field of study and research, from industrial, to culture and finally to art, calls for the inclusion of different types of museums that were once classified under the label of “material culture” museums—such as the Nuoro—or company museums, such as the Ferragamo Museum. As Efrat Tseelon (2012) explained, the blurring between art and fashion is part of a new reflectivity pervading fashion studies after the 1990s. In Italy it is particularly a revision of the relationship between fashion and fine arts that will make possible the existence, or perhaps more accurately the recognition, of a “fashion museum” (De Biasi 2015).

Fashion exhibitions Italian fashion achieved international fame in the 1980s, with the invention of Milanese prêt-à-porter (Merlo and Polese 2006, Segre Reinach 2013). The subject of Italian designers and the rise of prêt-à-porter has been dealt with by specific exhibitions/ retrospective shows, focusing on some of these protagonists, such as Enrico Coveri’s exhibit titled Coveri Story. Da Prato al Made in Italy, Gianfranco Ferré ‘s La Camicia Bianca Secondo Me (my idea of the white shirt), both hosted at the Museo del Tessuto in Prato (Florence)—Coveri’s in 2012 and Ferrè’s in 2013—and Missoni’s Missoni, l’arte, il colore (Missoni: art and color) hosted at the Museo di Gallarate (April 2015–January 2016), to mention only the most recent. While outside Italy we should recall, if only for their different trajectories, the Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace exhibitions. The itinerant Giorgio Armani exhibition, inaugurated by the New York Guggenheim Museum in 2000, which reached the Milan Triennale in 2007, after seven years of travelling to many international destinations, has received more criticism than consensus. Perhaps because it was

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financed by Giorgio Armani himself, and despite Germano Celant’s curatorship and Robert Wilson’s design, it stirred up old polemics on the pertinence of fashion in the museum (Silverman 1986; Stevenson 2008; Potvin 2009). The exhibition devoted to Gianni Versace at the London V&A in 2002 after the designer’s death in Miami in 1997, instead had the flavor of a “pure” retrospective. We must recall that Versace had already been very successfully shown at the V&A in 1985, in a pioneering exhibit in which the garments had been placed alongside celebrated Raphael cartoons (Wilcox and Mendes 2002), arousing no criticism but only acclaim, probably as a form of cross-cultural exoticization. But the reality in Italy, despite a consolidated tradition of historical exhibitions, such as those curated by fashion historians like Grazietta Butazzi (1980) and Enrica Morini (2000), shows that, until very recently, it has been hard to find a cultural systemization of fashion expressed in exhibitions. Exhibitions that really research the different stages in the history of Italian fashion, and its relation to culture and economy are not at all common. Up to the last decade, there has been no critical representation of Italian fashion, other than through scattered instances (Frisa 2015). If we add that until recently, with few exceptions, the exhibition catalogues did not include an English translation, we may understand Italy’s late entry to the international circuits of fashion studies and also fashion curation. This fragmented picture has enabled foreign curators to feel as if they were almost telling the story of Italian fashion for the first time. Thus, Sonnet Stanfill, the curator of 2014 The Glamour of Italian Fashion exhibition inaugurated at the London V&A, is quoted as follows: Italy has no national museum of design, and fashion history as a discipline is still in its infancy there, according to the V&A curator Sonnet Stanfill. This, she says, has given the V&A the freedom to tell the story of Italian fashion almost for the first time. CARTNER-MORLEY 2014. The Glamour of Italian Fashion. From 1945 to 2014 set out with the ambition, only partly achieved, to provide for the first time an inside perspective on the system. This was ten years after the Fashion. Italian Style exhibition (curated by Valerie Steele at FIT Museum New York 2003), which successfully staged the American view of Italian fashion. Highlighting the continuities over the more numerous discontinuities, however, The Glamour of Italian Fashion exoticized fashion in Italy rather than historicizing it (Wickson 2014). But the exhibition had the merit of narrating Italian fashion as a whole to the public—starting from the 1951 show in Sala Bianca (Palazzo Pitti Florence), considered the birth of Italian fashion, to present day globalized scenario.

A new wave: the project of a national museum of fashion Things are rapidly changing, however, as two recent exhibitions on the subject of Italian fashion clearly show: Bellissima. L’Italia dell’alta moda and Il nuovo vocabolario della moda italiana. Bellissima curated by Maria Luisa Frisa, Anna Mattirolo and Stefano Tonchi

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deals with the origins of Italian haute couture, still little known compared with French haute couture. Il nuovo vocabolario della moda italiana, curated by Paola Bertola and Vittorio Linfante, ventures into a description of the present (i.e. of the last twenty years of Italian fashion), the so-called post prêt-à-porter age, to also outline the future identity of Italian fashion. Both exhibitions were set up in new or non-traditional museums: Bellissima at the Maxxi in Rome, the museum for contemporary art designed by Zaha Hadid in 2010, Il nuovo vocabolario della moda italiana at the Milan Triennale Palazzo dell’Arte, the modernist building designed by architect Giovanni Muzio in 1933 and home of the Design Museum since 2007. The two exhibitions can be considered a response to a new need for visually historicized Italian fashion by an overall view from within, completely avoiding the exoticized gaze. One analyzing the past, the other analyzing the present and the possible futures, both exhibitions imply a strong relationship between academic research and specific curatorial approaches. This new wave is paired with what is happening in Florence, the city of Italian Renaissance. The recent declaration of intent by Eike Schmidt—director of Museo degli Uffizi—to eventually launch a proper fashion museum in Florence perfectly expresses the turning point in the field of fashion studies in Italy. In May 2016, Eike Schmidt announced that Palazzo Pitti Galleria del Costume would be transformed into Museo della moda Firenze (i.e. to transform a Costume Museum into a Fashion Museum) (Roddolo 2016), including other Florence venues to compose what can be termed a museo diffuso (diffused museum) of fashion. As in the project, the future museum will reflect the plurality of voices in Italian fashion culture. It will involve the three floors of Palazzo Pitti, enlarging the already existing Costume Museum— with a program of new acquisitions of modern and contemporary pieces by designers—the Giardini di Boboli and also part of the Galleria degli Uffizi. The future Museo della moda Firenze will also be in connection with other art institutions in the city and outside Florence. It will be a joint venture between Gallerie degli Uffizi, Pitti Immagine Discovery, and the Centro di Firenze per la moda italiana. This is very much in tune with the Italian museology background, noted above, which comprsies many decentralized museums, and with the very essence of the history of the fashion system in Italy, diffused in different regions, places and cities. As art is the main feature of the city of Florence, the fact of a fashion museum pervading the most iconic of art locations—the Galleria degli Uffizi—certifies that art itself is broadening to include the dimensions of an anthropology of culture (Marstine 2005; Garnier 2013: 27) and that fashion is a recognized expression national culture. It seems to confirm the obsolescence of the debate as to whether or not fashion is art (Settembrini 1996; Steele 2012; Miller 2007; Frisa 2015). As Efrat Tseelon (2012) maintains, art engages with fashion not simply as an aesthetic inspiration, but as a medium of critical reflection. The first step towards the Museo della moda Firenze is clearly expressed by the exhibition Tra Arte e Moda launched by the Ferragamo Museum and spread across many locations in Florence as the Ferragamo Museum, the Galleria degli Uffizi, the Pitti Costume Museum, the Marino Marini Museum, and the Prato Textile Museum. The exhibition aims at exploring in great detail the very many overlapping and mutual influences between art and fashion. The gigantic portrait of Karl Lagerfeld exposed between Raphael paintings in the Pitti Museum (Sala di Giove) in Visions of Fashion can perhaps be seen as a challenge to many, but it clearly represents the change in the strategy of Italian museums towards fashion.

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A process of cultural recognition of fashion by Italian politicians is occurring not just in Florence, but also in Milan. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi took part in the opening of the Milan Fashion Week 2016 at Palazzo Reale, and in his speech he underlined the relevance of fashion in Italian culture. Shortly afterwards (January 31, 2016), Dolce e Gabbana’s high fashion show at Teatro alla Scala of Milan, broke another taboo on the cultural value of fashion due to the prestige of the venue. The twenty-fourth ICOM meeting (International Council of Museums) held in Milan (July 2016) included, for the first time, a visit of the delegates to three fashion institutions—Armani Sylos, the new Fondazione Prada, both inaugurated in 2015, and the Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré founded in Milan in 2008. Giorgio Armani, Gianfranco Ferré and Miuccia Prada are among the most celebrated examples of Milanese fashion. Armani Sylos is a direct celebration of Giorgio Armani’s career. Founded and curated by the designer, the museum is a permanent exhibition of his collections from the 1980s to today. The Fondazione Prada, headed by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli sets out to deal with contemporary art in a broad sense, as its artistic director, Germano Celant, states. Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré was established with the aim of preserving, organizing and making available the patrimony of materials that document Gianfranco Ferré’s professional activity. Recent thematic exhibitions, such as Jungle. The Animal Imagery in Fashion (April–September 2017) at Venaria Reale in Turin, suggest a new trend to explore subjects beyond the celebration of single designers (Segre Reinach 2017). All these changes promote new possibilities in university curricula in fashion studies, as we shall see below.

Didactic exhibitions, display projects and research at the University of Bologna So-called didactic exhibitions—that is, those created by academia or with a contribution from academia—which were once denigrated as “the book on the wall,” actually proved to be able to mediate between the academy and the museum (Breward 2008: 90) and offer an original contribution to fashion studies. Experiments in fashion curation respond to a need among students and scholars to discuss research methods and practices and explore “the wide-ranging and multilayered forms, experiences, and meaning dimensions of fashion” (Jenss 2016 Kindle edition). Although didactic exhibitions are not another way of writing papers, concepts and ideas underlying a display are always clearly elaborated and visible, as they are in papers, shedding light and adding meaning to objects, collections, and everyday aesthetics; not just a celebration of the beauty of fashion, but the creation of a shared knowledge that stems from conceptualizing the study of the objects (Segre Reinach 2016). A didactic exhibit could in fact be considered as another way of advancing an argument, with a different set of rules, leading to the formation of a so-called “third stage” (Breward 2008) in which the selection of objects modifies and subtly alters the original thesis. Didactic exhibitions and display projects therefore fit perfectly in the broader vision of fashion, taking into account the different fields: the aesthetic, the economic, the socio-cultural (McNeil 2008). With this in mind, the University of Bologna has signed a partnership agreement with the Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini (January 2016), a private collection containing over 250,000

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garments and accessories, to consolidate consultation for didactic, exhibition and research purposes of the fashion degree courses of the University’s Rimini Campus, where most fashion classes are located. The Mazzini Archive, located near the city of Imola in Emilia Romagna includes items from the early twentieth century to the present, with a specialization in the 1980s–1990s. Constantly re-supplied with new acquisitions, it has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, regular consultation with designers and firms on which its main activity is based, and on the other its availability for academic research, finalized up to completion of display projects. Fashion scholars and fashion students encounter the history and ideas underlying the creation of the garments. An interchange of information for the products in the Mazzini collection is provided; not only the garment’s identity card, so to speak, but also the ways to retrieve it, when and how often it has been consulted by fashion designers to create new collections—that is, considering fashion as an expanded practice, including the biography and the cultural history of fashion items, garments and accessories. The work of garment cataloguing necessarily evolves from the indexicality of rigid categories, typical of museums—but not so much in tune with fashion necessities—to include the history and contexts of use, past and present. The Mazzini Archive, which can be considered as a living museum of fashion, encourages experiential learning through the staging of fashion exhibitions, installations and performances. The projects achieved have inaugurated a new cycle of didactic exhibitions and displays devoted to fashion in the museum. In 2013 the Rimini Municipality acquired a building adjacent to the original part of the museum, called “Ala Nuova” (New Wing), designed to host art, design and fashion exhibitions. The first was 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. It alluded to a comparison between the Italian and the Japanese fashion systems. The 1980s and 1990s underlined the hegemony of two fashion models, the Italian prêt-à-porter fashion and the Japanese radical fashion, opposites in dress culture and product features, but similar in the search for new aesthetics and innovative finishing of materials. The exhibition matched them, revealing similarities and differences, such as the deconstruction of the garments, the symbolic use of colors, the new forms and attitudes of women’s and men’s wear (see Figure 10.1, Plate 21, Plate 22). Other exhibitions followed, such as the retrospective of fashion designer Monica Bolzoni, one of the exponents of Milanese design-fashion, a conceptual wave within prêt-à-porter (1980–1990) (see Figures 10.2; 10.3) and an exhibition exploring the relation between fashion and food, as an extension of the Milano Expo 2015 program. These didactic exhibitions reinforce a sensitivity to fashion already present in the museum, which hosts antique garments, such as the funeral fittings of Sigismondo Malatesta Signore of Rimini (1417–1478) and several collections of the Fondo René Gruau (Tosi Brandi 2009), the celebrated fashion illustrator born in Rimini (1909–2004) whose innovative work has been the basis for many exhibitions, the most recent of which in 2014. In 2016 the Rimini campus installation Superworkers. Fashioning the Spirit of the Heroes—also presented at Bologna Design Week (October 2016)—displayed work uniforms belonging to the Mazzini’s 1960s–1980s collection, such as Pirelli, Api, Yamaha, Volkswagen, unveiling the metamorphosis of work uniforms typical of the first and second economic boom in Italy into their contemporary imagery as “Super Heroes” in vintage collections. The aim of the Bologna and Rimini didactic exhibitions and display projects is to link present-day

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Figure 10.1 “The Quiet Revolution: American Gigolos and Androgynous Dandies.” Garments from the exhibition 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Simona Segre Reinach). Garments: Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini.

Figure 10.2 “Cinderella,” white jute and cotton voile long dress, 1980s, 2000; cream velvet and satin multilayered collar, 2000; damask bandana. Monica Bolzoni Bianca e Blu. Storia e Narrazioni di una Moda Designer. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo). Photo: Michelangelo Battista, Vogue Italia, November 2006.

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Figure 10.3 Iconic extra-long dresses and objects installation reproducing the mood of Monica Bolzoni’s atelier Bianca e Blu, Via De Amicis 53, Milan (1981–2009). Monica Bolzoni Bianca e Blu. Storia e Narrazioni di una Moda Designer. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013. Photo: Michelangelo Battista, Vogue Italia, November 2006.

reflection on the relation between the fashion system and local and national identity with a globalized fashion culture, documenting all the dimensions of fashion and creating synergies with the industry. Research and display activities also include an inventory in the progress of establishments and artisan workshops in Emilia-Romagna, an area in which there are many small textile and garment production industries and major fashion brands (such as Alberta Ferretti and Max Mara). Many of these artisan establishments, voiceless in the last few decades as sub-contractors of big brands or overwhelmed by the extreme forms of fashion industrialization, are today finding new market opportunities (Colombo, Cavalli and Mora 2013). Their “rebirth” includes the narration and display of their history, objects, themes and narratives, as in the project called Efesti, Italian contemporary artisan and craft (www.Efesti. com) presented at Rimini Summer School 2016.

Conclusions In this chapter I have described the case of Italy as part of a globally increasing interest in fashion museums and fashion exhibitions, and the new perspectives of didactic exhibitions with specific reference to Bologna University. Fashion exhibitions and fashion museums are expanding their entertainment role, to contribute more effectively to the field of fashion studies, to communicate knowledge through the aesthetic form of fashion. I have outlined the process by which: (a) some of the museums of material culture, costume history and company museums are gradually transforming into fashion museums or openly including fashion; (b) fashion exhibitions are gaining a respectable role within mainstream celebrated art museums; and (c) didactic exhibitions and display projects are contributing to the institutionalization of Italian fashion studies. These three elements constitute a vicious circle: on the one hand there is growing attention to the relation between the communication of knowledge and the fashion system, a relation once exclusively connected to visual arts

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(Riegels Melchior 2014); on the other hand a more nuanced attitude towards the definition of creativity is gradually replacing the traditional opposition between art and fashion. Blurring boundaries between local/regional (costume, local productions) and national fashion (created in Italy), fashion exhibitions are increasingly being linked with sociocultural, historical and economic narratives. The Italian fashion system now includes fashion exhibitions and fashion museums as a relevant part of the representation of the fashion industry on a globalized stage.

References Breward, C. (2008) “ ‘Between Museum and the Academy,’ Fashion Research and Its Constituencies,” in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 12: 83–93. Breward, C. (2016) “Introduction. Locating Fashion Studies,” in H. Jenss and C. Breward, Fashion Studies: Research, Methods, Sites and Practices, New York: Bloomsbury. Buckley, C. and Clark, H. (2016) “In Search of the Everyday: Museums, Collections and Representations of Fashion in London and New York,” in H. Jenss (ed.), Fashion Studies. Research Methods, Sites and Practices, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Butazzi, G. (1980) 1922–1943. Vent’anni di moda italiana. Proposta per un museo della moda, Florence: Centro D. Cartner-Morley, J. (2014) “From Bomb Sites to Bulgari: V&A Falls under the Spell of Italian Glamour,” Guardian, April 1, 2014, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ 2014/apr/01/v-and-a-italian-glamour-exhibition-style (accessed May 25, 2017). Cavalli, A., Colombo, P., and Mora, E. (2013) Artefici di bellezza, Venice: Marsilio. Celant, G. (2008) Unveiling the Prada Foundation, Milan: Fondazione Prada. Chiarelli, C. (2009) Dietro le quinte di un museo di moda, Florence: Sillabe. De Biasi, V. (2015) “La memoria mancata della moda,” WE , dicembre 12: 99. de la Haye, A. and Clark, J. (2008). “One Object: Multiple Interpretations,” in Fashion Theory, 12(2): 137–69. Dei, F. and Melon, P. (2015) Antropologia della cultura materiale, Rome: Carocci. Fiorio, M.T. (2011) Il Museo nella storia, Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Fontana, G.L. (2010) “Archivi di prodotto e archivi per la moda,” in G. Muzzarelli, G. Riello and E. Tosi Brandi (eds), Moda. Storia e Storie, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 234–44. Frisa, M.L. (2008) “The Curator Risk,” in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 12(2): 171–80. Frisa, M.L. (2015) Le forme della moda, Bologna, Il Mulino. Giusti, N., Mora, E., and Segre Reinach, S. (n.d.) “Dall’alta moda agli street styles: casi e tendenze,” in Enciclopedia Treccani. Le Regioni, Vol. 2, Rome: Treccani, 561–81. Godart, F. (2012) Unveiling Fashion, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Grenier, C. (2013) La fin des musèes? Paris: Edition du Regard. Harden, R. (2014) “From Museum of Costume to Fashion Museum: The Case of the Fashion Museum in Bath,” in R.M. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museum, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Jenss, H. (2016) “Introduction,” in H. Jenss (ed.), Fashion Studies. Research Methods, Sites and Practices, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Light, A. and Smith, J.M. (2005) The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Marstine, J. (ed.) (2005) New Museum Theory and Practice, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell. McNeil, P. (2008) “We are not in the Fashion Business,” in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 12: 65–81.

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Melchior, R.M. and Svensson, B. (2014) Fashion and Museums, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Merlo, E. (2003) Moda italiana. Storia di un’industria dall’Ottocento a oggi, Venice: Marsilio. Merlo, E. and Polese, F. (2006) “Turning Fashion into Business: The Emergence of Milan as an International Hub,” Business History Review, 80(Autumn): 415–47. Miller, S. (2007) “Fashion as Art: Is Fashion Art?” Fashion Theory, 11(1): 25–40. Morini, E. (2000) Storia della moda, Milan: Skirà. Potvin, J. (2009) (ed.) The Places and Spaces of Fashion, New York: Routledge. Riello, G. (2011) “The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approach to the Study of Fashion,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 3(1): 1–9. Rinaldi, M. (2006) “Il museo dell’azienda. Identità a confronto,” in Pezzini e Cervelli Scene del consumo. Dallo shopping al museo, Rome: Meltemi, 125–46. Roddolo, E. (2016) “Schmidt: Ecco come sarà il nuovo museo della moda di Firenze,” Il Corriere della Sera, May 13. Scarpellini, E. (2015) “La moda nella storia,” in Fashion Studies, Memoria e Progetto, n. 50. Segre Reinach, S. (2013) “Italian Fashion. Metamorphosis of a Cultural Industry,” in G.L. Maffei (ed.), Rethinking Italian Design, Oxford: Berg-Bloomsbury. Segre Reinach, S. (2016) “On Fashion Curation as Educational Project—Simona Segre Reinach in Conversation with Josè Teunissen,” in L. Marchetti (ed.), Fashion Curating: Understanding Fashion through the Exhibition, Geneva: HEAD . Segre Reinach, S. (2017) JUNGLE. L’immaginario animale nella moda, Drago, Roma. Settembrini, L. (1996) Biennale di Firenze. Il tempo e la moda. Catalogo, Milano: Skirà. Silverman, D. (1986) Selling Culture, New York: Pantheon Books. Simmel, G. (1895 [2001]) La moda, Milan: Mondadori. Stanfill, S. (2014) The Glamour of Italian Fashion, London: V&A Publisher. Steele, V. (2003) Fashion. Italian Style, Yale and New York: Yale University Press. Steele, V. (2008) “Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,” in Fashion Theory, 12: 7–30. Steele, V. (2012) “Is Fashion Art?” in A. Geczy and V. Karaminas (eds), Fashion and Art, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Stevenson, N.J. (2008) “The Fashion Retrospective,” in Fashion Theory, 12: 219–35. Tosi Brandi, E. (2009) Gruau e la moda. Illustrare il Novecento, Milan: Silvana. Trione, V. (2016) “Micromusei: la rete virtuosa è un’altra Italia,” in Corriere della Sera, March 6, Supplemento “La Lettura.” Tseelon, E. (2012) “Outlining a Fashion Studies Project,” Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 1: 3–53. Wickson, P. (2014) “Works of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945–2014 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London,” in Italian Studies, 3: 434–46. Wilcox, C. and Mendes, V. (2002) The Art and Craft of Gianni Versace, London: V&A Publishing.

11 BEYOND GARMENTS: REORIENTING THE PRACTICE AND DISCOURSE OF FASHION CURATING Marco Pecorari

Exhibitions of fashion have historically and conventionally been defined by the presence of garments (or other wearable objects), as well as through their visual or pictorial representations.1 This tendency originated in the interpretation of the garment as a material manifestation of fashion, instigating and provoking the expansion of discourses about the production or consumption of fashion, and the construction of gender, identity or the body (Breward 1998: 302). While this tendency has proven crucial in furthering our understanding of fashion as a valuable phenomenon of study, the supremacy of dress in fashion museums or fashion exhibitions has also partially limited the understanding of fashion from a curatorial perspective, as something other than merely an assemblage of mannequins. In fact, the restrictions of handling and interacting with garments in museums and the problem of recreating the absent body in exhibitions have been recurrent issues in fashion curating, partially limiting both visitors’ experience of the sensorial potential of garments and further understanding of fashion materiality beyond mere wearable objects. At the same time, fashion exhibitions without garments have frequently fallen into the deceit of paralleling fashion with other artistic disciplines, elevating other means of representing fashion—such as fashion photography—to a state of high art, rather than seeking to find a specific curatorial language to explore exhibiting fashion beyond garments. This chapter moves beyond such a scenario and discusses the importance of alternative curatorial languages to overcome these difficulties and restrictions dictated by the exhibition of garments in museums. By exploring past or contemporary exhibitions and performances curated by independent curators in private galleries or held in public museums, I aim to investigate the different territories where the practices and discourses of fashion curating can be expanded beyond the use of garments as unique and constitutive artifacts of fashion exhibitions. Although the chosen exhibitions and performances were staged in 183

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varying curatorial environments and under different circumstances, what unites them is the fact that, while their focus is on fashion, they employ non-wearable objects in novel ways. In doing so, they enhance alternative narratives about fashion, its practices and actors, acting as representative, but not unique, cases of a tendency to challenge canonical fashion curatorial paradigms and exhibition designs (e.g. display, use of cabinets or mannequins). Thus, I will here regroup and categorize these cases into three main conceptual themes—Fashion Materialities, Fashion Sensorium and Performing Fashion— that touch upon three different territories that amplify the importance of thinking of fashion exhibitions beyond garments. But, to look at the fashion exhibition beyond the garment does not aim to undermine the central role of historical garments and other wearable objects in fashion exhibitions. On the contrary, this chapter shows how these alternative cases may help us to rethink the properties of garments and expand the field of fashion curating as practice and discourse,2 putting it in dialogue with branches of curatorial studies like graphic design (Camuffo and Dalla Mura 2012), performance art (Sedgwick 2007), and studies on the sensorial in museums (Elizabeth Edwards et al. 2006).

Fashion materialities A first terrain in which it is possible to explore the importance of widening fashion exhibitions beyond garments is the field of fashion materiality and the idea of thinking about it in relation to non-wearable fashion objects. In fact, the interpretation of the garment as a material manifestation of fashion has first of all engendered a tendency for researchers and curators to overlook other forms of fashion materiality and their epistemological potential. As Tom Fisher and Sophie Woodward argue, the problem in studies—and exhibitions—on fashion has been to identify materiality only in sartorial and vestimentary practices in spite of the fact that many other overlooked forms of materiality construct, manifest and perform the culture of fashion as well (Fisher and Woodward 2014: 3–7). For example, fashion plates and magazines have been, as Alexandra Palmer explains, seminal visual sources in the study and preparation of early dress exhibitions (from the study of wigs or poses to the verification of dates), but hardly investigated for their material properties or exhibited as objects per se (Palmer 2012: 34). An exhibition that disrupted this tendency and symbolized a turn toward a new museological appreciation of fashion objects other than wearable ones, is Fashion Plates, held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) in 1971 and curated by Adolph Cavallo. As the title recalls, the exhibition focused on fashion plates and, although garments were coupled with fashion images, the aim was to re-direct visitors’ attention to fashion materialities other than clothing. As Cavallo argues in the presentation of the exhibition, this shift is stressed by the use of the word “fashion” instead of costume or dress, to identify a social phenomenon that includes different types of objects beyond garments: So much has been written and said about fashion that most of us have forgotten it is something. It is also not something. It is not clothing, although it has something to do

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with clothing. [. . .] This (fashion) involves an enormous industry based on the activities of designers, manufacturers, buyers, retailers, the fashion press, and people in related fields. The word itself, fashion, has been made synonymous with that industry. CAVALLO 1971: 44 The curator stresses the capacity of “fashion” to be more than just clothing, instead becoming synonymous with the industry and its multiple professionals and practices. Although not explicit, what Cavallo alludes to is the immaterial culture of fashion and the capacity of ephemeral objects, like fashion plates, to better grasp this condition, documenting practices and actors of the industry that may not be directly revealed by the analysis of dress or other wearable fashion objects alone. But, while Fashion Plates draws attention to fashion objects other than garments, it does not, however, fully recognize the scope of these materials as objects per se. This was not only manifested in the decision to couple images with garments but also in the installation of enlarged poster reproductions of original fashion plates, not paying attention to the scope of their original material properties (size, material, paper). This predominance of visuality over the materiality of fashion images became a recurrent tendency in fashion exhibitions (Williams 2008) and especially in exhibitions focusing on fashion photography or fashion magazines that, similarly to academic studies on fashion media, mostly investigated these media exclusively through their visual and textual properties.3 Although the exhibition of media materials in cabinets does inevitably manifest an understanding of their material qualities by curators, such a static presentation partially overlooks the complex conceptual scope of their materiality. A relevant and much more recent example that pays attention to the materiality of fashion images and stresses their material scope can be seen in the exhibition Not In Fashion: Fashion Photography in the 90s, held at the Museum für Moderne Kunst of Frankfurt in 2010, curated by Sophie von Olfers.4 The exhibition aimed to show different collaborative practices in fashion, mostly focusing on photography and the creation of images, celebrating those different figures who, during the nineties, “contributed to fashion becoming engrained in society as a form of artistic expression” while also constructing “the social, cultural, and political sensibilities of the time” (Van Olfers 2010: 13–17). Amongst the various installations by fashion practitioners invited by the curator Sophie von Olfers, there was the graphic design duo M/M Paris5 who presented “Fashion Archive 1995–2010”: a retrospective of their work in the creation of promotional materials for fashion designers like Yohji Yamamoto, Givenchy or Balenciaga, based on their own private archive.6 While on the one hand, this installation problematized the absence of a public archive of these seminal fashion ephemera, it is also important for the manner in which the designer duo created a specific discourse on the problematic of exhibiting these materials. Inspired by the idea of hangers, M/M Paris conceived a novel display tactic to present their original posters, catalogues and invitations and created specific cabinets and supports, named by the duo designer as “Portants” (see Plate 23). These “Portants” aimed both to allow an adequate reading of the artifacts (posters and invitations) by the visitors, while also aesthetically recalling the use of fluid and melting shapes by the Parisian duo in their graphics. The decision to create specific installation devices not only showed

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the artistic approach of M/M Paris to the presentation of their work, but also symbolically evoked the importance of adapting and creating ad hoc exhibition design for forms of fashion materiality other than garments. M/M’s “Portants” functioned as interpretational structures that conceptually donated agency to non-wearable fashion objects, like posters, invitations and catalogues. They helped to construct a discourse on the material nature of these images, liberating them from the garment and the fashion designer as dominant narratives in fashion. To some extent, this installation is a testament to the potential of exhibition design to highlight other practices and histories of fashion. While the “Portants” donate agency to these ephemeral objects emphasizing the role of graphic designers, photographers, models, art directors, make-up artists in the production and dissemination of fashion, they also open up the debate on authorial negotiation and commission within the fashion industry. Borrowing from graphic design languages, the above example shows the possibility of overcoming the tendency to highlight the linguistic and semiotic meanings of visual representations and privilege the analysis of their material aspects and scope. As Elizabeth Edwards argues, the understanding of photographs as two-dimensional not only fails to recognize their materiality but, most importantly, “to offer a penetrating understanding of photographs as social objects” (Edwards 2010: 25). Such a perspective is clearly staged in the retrospective exhibition Het Totaal Rappel—Bernhard Willhelm, curated by Bernard Willhelm in collaboration with Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, and held at The Fashion Museum of the Province of Antwerp (MoMu) in 2007. Like other retrospective exhibitions at MoMu, Willhelm’s show not only presented garments, but also put media materials (invitations and catalogues) on display created by the duo Dutch designer Freudenthal & Verhagen. While these materials were culled from the designer’s archive, the designer decided not to store them in cabinets placed alongside his collection pieces. Instead, the curators dedicated an entire section/room of the exhibition to them in which visitors could sit down, touch them and flip through them. Here Willhelm, Onorato and Krebs did not privilege an isolated example of an invitation or a catalogue but instead displayed multiple copies, allowing a number of visitors to interact with them simultaneously. The multiple copies recalled the reproducible nature of these objects and the visitor’s attention was directed from a single sacred object to multiple reproduced “valueless” objects, which could be directly experienced and felt. This gesture transformed multiplicity and reproduction into resources, which disrupt ideals of authenticity and originality in fashion and allowed visitors a more sensorial engagement with the objects. Yet, this engagement was not merely a strategy to entertain but reframed these materials as “social agents.” Visitors’ interaction with these objects evoked both their being objects of exchange and value in the industry, while also accentuating how, in fashion, sensuous qualities like looking, touching and interacting are not restricted only to garments.

Fashion sensorium The attention to the sensorial properties of fashion entails a need for curatorial discourse and practice to move beyond the paradigm of visual representationality and move towards

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a more mimetic experience of fashion. This transition has been recently identified in a search and discussion of the immaterial potential of the material in fashion exhibitions (Healy 2014) and, as fashion scholar and curator Robyn Healy argues, it “has opened up ways to disseminate fashion knowledge broadly and test alternate fashion spaces of display” (Healy 2014: 326). While Healy stresses the role of technology and the virtual as new curatorial tools that enhance the experience of the visitor, another way to understand this shift toward the sensorial is aligned with more direct attempts to perform, in exhibitions, less permanent and ephemeral elements of fashion like smell or sound. This is not to say, however, that fashion exhibitions have altogether ignored the role of senses other than sight. To the contrary, fashion exhibitions have long included scenographic elements in order to overcome the static showcasing of garments. In this sense, Diana Vreeland has probably been the most influential figure, dedicating much attention to the multi-sensorial experience of fashion. For example, in her very first show on Balenciaga in 1972, she mixed traditional Spanish music with Balenciaga’s Le Dix perfume, sprayed in the galleries (Koda and Glasscock 2014: 28). In more contemporary times, the use of sound and light has become a recurrent practice in fashion exhibitions, augmenting, in many cases, their nature as spectacle and marking a difference with art or historical exhibitions (Riegels Melchior 2014: 11). For example, this became particularly evident in the case of China: Through the Looking Glass at the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of New York (2015), curated by Andrew Bolton, where lights and music distinguished the boundaries of the fashion exhibition within the museum’s Chinese art galleries.7 Despite such attention, these sensorial scenographic elements have usually been utilized as mere decorative props, assigning them a supportive role, rather than “exhibiting” them as central elements in the construction of fashion sensibilities. In this sense, more contemporary fashion exhibitions, outside the regime of established museums, have started to pay more direct attention to the sensorial and immaterial elements of fashion, following a recent tendency within art and design museums.8 One example is the exhibition Dysfashional: From Concept to Construction, curated by Emanuele Quinz and Luca Marchetti, at the exhibition space Rotonde1 in Luxemburg in 2007. As the two curators write, Dysfashional was “a reaction against a literal notion of fashion, as uni-dimensional collections of clothing and accessories” (Marchetti and Quinz 2007: 6). The exhibition is an example of fashion exhibitions that follow what art critic Paul O’Neill has defined as the “group exhibition” in contemporary art curating (O’Neill 1996: 242). In fact, the curators gathered temporary projects (videos, performances and installations) that explored fashion beyond the very materiality of the garment as designers were not invited “to present their collections but [. . .] their artistic proposal, their installations or ideas” (Marchetti and Quinz 2007: 6). According to the curators, Dysfashional “shows that fashion is, beyond the objects that materialize it, an unstable state of sensibility” (Marchetti and Quinz 2007: 7). This idea was particularly tangible in an installation entitled The Sound of Clothes: Anechoic that, rather than exhibiting objects, evoked an immaterial sensation of fashion through sound. Originally created for the online platform SHOWS tudio. com, this sonic piece was a kind of report about the Autumn/Winter 2006 collections by leading fashion brands, and it was a collaboration between the fashion photographer Nick

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Knight, the art director Paul Hetherington and the Multimedia designer Ross Philips. The installation staged the recorded sound of the model Zora Star, wearing, touching and moving in the collection’s pieces in order to expose and evoke in the visitor the different sound of fashion materials such as feathers, sequins, beads, nylon, taffeta, leather, velvet, zips and metallic chains. By exhibiting this sound project, the curators Marchetti and Quinz move beyond the paradigm of exhibiting fashion representationally. Rather than a visual or material symbolic representation, here the visitor is faced with an immaterial sonic experience. The material of the garment is not simply represented but the sound of engaging with the garments and fabrics is foregrounded. Here the sound becomes the exhibited artifact and not a supportive element to the exhibition of garment. In this manner, the sonic installation does not simply augment the potential of the garment beyond its visual properties, but seems to ask: what is the role of sound in the way we know fashion and experience garments? While fashion is interpreted as an embodied phenomenon where knowledge is transmitted through matter, how is this practice of diffusion activated and what specific potential does sound (or other senses) place in this embodied practice? Another exhibition focusing on the multisensory dimensions of fashion is The Temporary Fashion Museum curated by Guus Beumer held by Het Nieuw Instituut in Rotterdam (2016). The exhibition explored the role of fashion museums in contemporary society, while challenging entrenched canons and paradigms of display and representation in fashion museums (Pecorari 2016). As the curator Beumer attests, the aim was to play with “all the clichés of fashion and all the clichés of the museum” in order to rethink what a fashion museum could be today, “being concerned less with designed objects but more with structures and feelings that are connected to the industry” (Haagsma 2015). A testament to this intention was the idea of starting the exhibition with an olfactory room. Placed at the entrance of the Het Nieuw Instituut’s building, a small glass vestibule was heavily scented with perfume created exclusively for the occasion by the avant-garde perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri. As the press release argued, the idea was to create a new fragrance that combined “ ‘the smell of fashion’ and ‘the smell of the museum.’ ” In concrete terms, Gualtieri combined two fragrances: one, a heavy, dry scent that recalled the smell of a museum, and a light synthetic fragrance that represented the ephemerality of fashion. Mixed together, the fragrances produced the scent of the entrance room throughout the duration of the exhibition. Even before entering the exhibition galleries and encountering a garment, the visitor was immersed and welcomed by an olfactory experience reminiscent of the entrance of a department store, which more often than not are inundated with the intermingling scents of designer perfumes from the cosmetics section (see Figure 11.1). By entering a room of smell, the visitor was demanded to bodily engage and interrogate his/her senses. Here the scent was used to evoke a multitude of allusions, staging the epistemological capacity of smell. First of all, this sensorial installation referred to the crucial merchandising role of perfumes for the fashion industry. Secondly, it aimed to instigate in the visitor a parallel between the museum and the department store in order to stimulate a critical point about the commercial drive and commodification of contemporary museums. Last but not least, the use of smell also made a more conceptual point about the importance

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Figure 11.1 Parfumerie du Parc, 2015–2016. Exhibition view, “The Temporary Fashion Museum,” Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Holland. Photo: © Johannes Schwartz.

of the multisensory experience of fashion, indicating the need to create an exhibition that would touch the visitor through other senses apart from sight. Smell was used as a curatorial tool invoking its capacity to provoke reminiscence in the visitor—an alternative way of experiencing and knowing fashion. As film scholar Laura Marks explains, smell represents an instinctual tool of knowledge that “acts on our bodies before we are conscious of it” (Marks 2002: 115). Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s idea of “recollectionimage,” Marks explains how smell is intrinsically connected to mnemonic narratives that, despite being possibly stimulated via symbolic representation, are “the most mimetic of the senses” (Marks 2002: 115). It is this mimetic character that the olfactory installation at The Temporary Fashion Museum aimed to stage. In doing so, however, Beumer did not aim to recollect the smell of clothing but rather the smell of fashion. According to Karen de Perthuis, for example, people grieving the death of their loved ones and attempting to overcome loss happens through the smell of their clothing. The dead become alive, as it were, through their personal smell which “the garment is impregnated by” (de Perthuis 2016: 65). While still utilizing the epistemic potential of smell, the olfactory room of The Temporary Fashion Museum recalled a more sterile and novel feeling than the one defined by de Perthuis. The smell here staged the sensation of newness—rather than oldness—performed in (and by)

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department stores as iconic spaces of fashion consumption. In the exhibition, the smell was not used to evoke the presence of a human body, but it aimed to provoke a sensorial consciousness in the body of the visitor and evoke his/her role as consumer of fashion. In different ways, Dysfashional and Temporary Fashion Museum rethink the ways in which fashion curating can enact what I call a fashion sensorium, intended as a spectrum of senses involved in the collective and individual experience of fashion in both vestimentary and consumption practices. By exhibiting sound (in the act of wearing a garment) and smell (as perfume), the two exhibitions put the accent on the embodied and sensorial means of fashion, not simply as supportive elements but as a central feature in the experience of fashion. In order to overcome the impossibility of touching in fashion exhibitions and the consequent predominance of visuality, the above-mentioned exhibitions exceed the garment for the sensuousness of fashion. They move from a material visual symbolism to a mimetic experience of fashion stimulating a more embodied, performative and subjective reaction in the visitor. At the same time, these exhibitions also create a counter discourse to the predominance of the visual and sight in museums, reflecting a Western construction of sight as the dominating sense through which knowledge can be obtained and experienced (Edwards et al. 2006: 7). Thus, the attention given to other senses by exhibitions like Dysfashional or Temporary Fashion Museum, may give rise to a new landscape for fashion curating, where the senses may play a more central role the understanding the shifting nature of fashion sensibilities in both Western and (especially) non-Western cultures. Paradoxically, by eliminating the garment, these exhibitions actually reinforce the garment’s carnal properties, reminding us how, in fashion, the materiality of dress is not its sole defining element but rather is part of a network of affects and sensorial activities.

Performing fashion The shift in curatorial practices towards other (connected) sensorial properties highlights the possibility of thinking of other sensorial domains that may escape a traditional ordering of the senses and that are crucial in understanding the culture of fashion. As Edwards suggests, smell, taste, sight or hearing may not always be sufficient in fully “refigur[ing] the relationships between body, sensory perception, and cultural praxis” since “different cultures, [then], create their own material orders and in the process make slightly different senses” (Edwards et  al. 2006: 5). Thus, to enlarge the categories of the senses in a specific culture requires the recognition of other practices that characterize a specific sensibility within that specific culture. This is indeed the case of fashion, where practices like walking, gesticulation and posing are central to the construction of the culture of fashion as much as smelling, looking or touching. Such understanding of fashion sensibilities has been at the center of different recent performances that have tackled these issues through the idea of motion and that are seen as a sort of predecessor in the series of events, titled Fashion in Motion, and organized by fashion curator Claire Wilcox at the Victoria and Albert Museum of London from 1999 until today. According to Wilcox, these events aimed to show contemporary fashion couture and ready-to-wear to a larger

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audience and “bridge the gap between live catwalk shows and static museum display” (Wilcox 1999). Organizing fashion shows within the rooms of the V&A, Fashion in Motion transformed the museum into a bridge between the general public and the industry while recalling the need to endow the visitor with an embodied sensation of the garment, to recreate an e-motion through motion (Anderson 2000: 377). If this early case has set a precedent in the live exhibition of garments in museums,9 it has also highlighted the linkage between the motion of a garment and the specific set of sensorial stances connected to it that are at the center of attention of the performances created by the fashion curator Olivier Saillard. Starting in 2005 with the performance Salon de couture created in collaboration with former model Violeta Sanchez at Les Arts Dècoratifs (Paris), Saillard began to explore the use of performance as a curatorial tool in order to re-animate immaterial sensibilities of fashion connected to the practice of fashion modeling, fashion design or even everyday life. These performances (many of which were conceived in collaboration with Tilda Swinton) aimed to adopt this medium as an alternative tool for exhibiting fashion practices and for problematizing the static-ness of exhibiting fashion in museums (Pecorari 2016). A particularly relevant case is Models Never Talk, which functions as a sort of evolution of Models at Work created for the series “Fashion in Motion” at the V&A. Originally staged at Milk Studios in New York, the performance aimed to stage the role of models and redonate agency to them. Here, Saillard regrouped former models (Axelle Doue, Anne Rohart, Violeta Sanchez, Claudia Huidobro, Amalia Vairelli, Christine Bergstrom and Charlotte Flossaut) who acted as iconic faces and bodies behind some of the most notable fashion houses of the 1980s and 1990s. Wearing black bodysuits, opaque tights and stiletto heels, the former models were asked to walk about the minimalist stage— resembling a photo shoot—and re-enact gestures and poses that have characterized a specific aesthetic in a specific time. In a sort of fashion anamnesis, the models re-enact the voices and dictations of famous designers and the specific ideas they wanted to be represented through their bodies (see Figure 11.2). While Models Never Talk highlights the performative role of models staging the scope of walking, posing and gesturing as essential elements through which fashion is experienced immaterial, it most importantly creates a discourse on the practices of exhibiting these immaterial elements of fashion. The performance seems to ask: how do we deal with all those immaterial aspects that also characterize fashion beyond garments? And, more importantly, how do we exhibit them? Indeed, the performance poses these questions, while also proposing some answers. First of all, it proposes the performance as a medium to bring back the body, usually absent in fashion exhibitions. By using former models, Saillard not only stages “original” bodies but also stresses how, in performance, bodies can be used as archives of ephemeral fashion practices. The body is used to re-enact time and this becomes particularly evident in the final moment of the performance when all the models mimic one of their old poses that is printed on a paper and placed in front of them. Here the lived body is used to highlight the fact that fashion is not only a phenomenon that permeates and leaves traces in the object but also in the subject. As Rebecca Schneider argues in relation to female art performers emerging in the Seventies, the body in performance can

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Figure 11.2 Models Never Talk, 2015. Performance view, “Models Never Talk,” Milk Studios, New York. Photo: Milk Studios. © Giovanni Giannoni.

be used as “stage[s] across which [they] re-enact social dramas and traumas which have arbitrated cultural differentiations between truth and illusion, reality and dream, fact and fantasy, natural and unnatural, essential and constructed” (Schneider 1997: 7). While Schneider is here referring to the work of artists like Hannah Wilke or Marina Abramovic who, at the time, were very critical of how fashion forces ideals of female bodies, it seems paradoxical that such an understanding of the body as an archive of traumas is then reutilized in Saillard’s performances as a way of re-enacting the forces and practices that contributed to generate those traumas. In fact, the models in Models at Work use their own “disciplined” body and a rhetoric of the pose to re-enact and resuscitate the “discipline” of bodies in fashion. Models Never Talk is also a moment to understand the performative potential of speech in fashion. Here the models not only walk but also perform the ways in which their bodies were “disciplined,” vocally recalling their relationships with designers as well as the experience of wearing dress. As Axelle Doue recollects when speaking about Madame Grès’ creations: “The weight of the fabric was such that it forced me to hunt with my legs. It’s an approach that was to accompany me throughout my career.” While, as Barthes suggests, fashion proliferates as object, image and text, these performances suggest that it is also important to recognize the role of spoken fashion as another crucial shifter of meaning and variable in the proliferation of discourses in/about fashion. Here voices are not simply attributing agency but they also stage controlling forces and practices of the industry while, even expressing garments’ sensorial memories. This latter potential becomes even more evident in another performance titled Imagining Chanel. An

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Figure 11.3 Imagining Chanel. An Interpretation of the V&A Archive, 2012. Performance view, “Imagining Chanel,” The Rocks, Sydney, 2012. Originally performed at the Fashion Space Gallery, London 2012, and then re-performed at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA ) Melbourne 2014. Photo: © Alex Davis.

Interpretation of the V&A Archive created by Australian artist and designer Adele Varcoe. Originally staged at the Fashion Space Gallery in London 2012, the performance aimed to re-enact a Chanel salon and restaged the presentation of iconic silhouettes by the French designer. To do so, Varcoe gathered the audience around small tables aiming to re-enact the idea of the salon while an announcer, played by Anna Burgess, read the V&A’s description of Chanel’s iconic pieces. When the models enter, however, Chanel’s garments have not been presented but instead naked models have walked through the tables of the salon, enacting the experience of wearing iconic garments (see Figure 11.3). Here visitors faced naked bodies that pretended to wear Chanel clothes, following the description read by Burges, and mimicking, through gestures and poses, the details of garments such as a specific lining, a specific shape of a jacket or a material. The garment is completely absent and it is evoked via a naked body, a gesture and vocal description. The performances discussed here show the potential of this medium as a curatorial tool. In both cases, there is not just an attempt to stage contemporary fashion but the performances also share a retrospective attitude. They both have an historical quest and they decided to stage it through a live performance able to reintegrate all those dynamic and “in-time” ingredients of fashion such as the walk, the gesture and even the voice. By staging the liveness of fashion, these performances do not propose a re-enactment as a strict re-performance of the past in the present, but as a discursive practice on the subjectivity of historical representation and fashion curating at large. This is particularly

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evident in their method of engaging the visitor/spectator. In both cases, the visitor is asked to participate to the performance by imaginatively “creating” the garment, by following the re-enactments and voices of the Saillard’s models, or listening to the intonation of Burgess’ voice in connection to the gesturing of the naked models. As particularly evoked by the title of Varcoe’s performance, these re-enacted gestures or spoken garments stage the imaginative role of the visitor in a fashion exhibition where garments are indeed usually present but are missing other sensorial aspects of fashion. The performance, in this sense, faces the visitor with his/her role as visitor, confronting her/him with the imaginative exercise required in an exhibition. But, paradoxically, here the visitor is not asked to imagine the absent body but rather asked to consciously understand his/her agency in the exhibition of fashion by facing the task of imagining the absent garment.

Conclusion By analysing the exhibition and performances discussed here, the aim was to enlarge the debate on fashion curating beyond the exhibition of garments and their central role in fashion exhibitions. If exhibitions like Not in Fashion expand the category of fashion materiality to other non-wearable objects like invitations or catalogues, they also reveal the role of curatorial practices in exposing the crucial function of these fashion objects, in disrupting canons of authorship in fashion, constructing relationships of intimacy between professionals, or even transmitting material and visual knowledge in fashion. Exhibitions like Dysfashional or The Temporary Fashion Museum stage the role played by the senses (e.g. sound and smell) in the experience of fashion, while also staging their pervasiveness in engaging visitors in more embodied forms of knowing fashion. Finally, performances like Models Never Talk or Imagining Chanel suggest a new landscape for exhibiting fashion history through performance, restating the role of fashion sensibilities—like walking, gesturing and even talking—and the role of visitors in fashion curating. All these cases focus on what is commonly perceived in the fashion exhibition as paratextual to the exhibition of the garment—thereby transforming the paratextual into the primary entity of investigation. While other exhibitions or performances have previously considered the role of the senses or other forms of fashion materiality, the exhibitions and performances discussed throughout this chapter outspokenly address the scope of these fashion elements. They move beyond the supremacy of the visual in fashion exhibitions and, by embracing the role of different senses in exhibitions, propose a more embodied approach to both the understanding and exhibition of fashion. In doing so, they trace some alternative directions for fashion curating without, however, denying or marginalizing the role of garments. Rather, they initiate a meta-discussion on the potential of the sensorial in exhibitions, enlarging our understanding of fashion and, even, the properties connected to the garments. In a sort of short circuit, these cases paradoxically bring visitors to rethink the garment’s potential by not exhibiting it. It is in this sense that the exhibitions and performances discussed here reorient the discourse and practice of fashion curating beyond the garment. By experimenting with

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alternative curatorial practices, these exhibitions and performances augment and enhance the curatorial practice of exhibiting fashion, presenting ways to overcome certain museological restrictions (e.g. the common “do not touch” policy). And, while it is indeed important to note the context and curatorial freedom behind these exhibitions and performances, it is also useful for us to think of these cases as critical laboratories for fashion curating. Indeed, they should not be simplified as creative or artistic practices to fashion curating, but also as critical and political ones. They question the curatorial processes and structures of control expressed in current fashion museums— problematizing the way we understand, collect and exhibit fashion—and reframe this phenomenon as a multi-sensorial culture where hierarchies of objects and specific forms of sensibility constantly change through time and space.

Notes 1 An example of this tendency can be seen in the book Exhibiting Fashion. In the section “An Incomplete Inventory of Fashion Exhibitions,” Jeffrey Horsley explains how “for the purpose of the inventory, the term ‘fashion’ is used to describe those exhibitions whose topic was primarily clothing and accessories, whether historic or contemporary” (Horsley 2014: 170). 2 The idea of curating as discourse and practice is here referring to the definition of curating advanced by Paul O’Neill in his seminal article “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse” (2007: 240–259). 3 In fashion studies a recent example is the book Fashion Media: Past and Present (Bartlett, Cole and Rocamora 2013). To read about the problem of materiality and material context in fashion photography in exhibitions see Williams (2012). 4 Other examples of exhibitions dedicating exclusive attention to these fashion media are: Trust Me, curated by Paul Boudens, at the Wapping Project in London (from September 3, 2010 to October 10, 2010) which showcased the work of the graphic designer Paul Boudens and Couture Graphique: Fashion, Graphic Design & the Body, curated by José Teunissen and held at the Museum of the Image in Breda (Holland) in 2013. 5 M/M Paris is a Paris-based graphic design agency created in 1992 by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag. 6 Such curatorial attention was not occasional for the designer duo who were asked already in 2005 to create the exhibition design for the exhibition “Translation” at the Palais du Tokyo. Accessed June 21, 2017, http://archives.palaisdetokyo.com/fr/presse/communiques/ translation/dptranslationen.pdf 7 As the exhibition occupied different galleries of the museum, sound and light became a way to create a trajectory for the visitor, marking the distinction between fashion objects and archaeological or art historical artifacts. This is stressed in The New York Times review of the exhibition. “In terms of real estate, the show is one of the museum’s largest ever. And it feels large, exhaustingly so, with acres of objects, photographs, film clips and apparel punched up by sound-and-light special effects” (Cotter 2015). 8 Two examples are representative of this tendency. One can be seen in the exhibition Surroundings: A Contemporary Score, organized by Barbara London with Leora Morinis, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, from August 10 to November 3, 2013. The other example is Tate Sensorium at Tate Britain, curated by Flying Object, London, from August 26 to October 4, 2015.

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9 It is important to record how the use of live models was a common practice until the sixties when this practice became subject of regulation by ICOM (Taylor 2002: 24–50).

References Anderson, F. (2000) “Museum as a Fashion Media,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London: Routledge, 371–7. Bartlett, D., Cole, S. and Rocamora, A. (eds) (2013) Fashion Media: Past and Present, New York and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic. Breward, C. (1998) “Cultures, Identities, Histories: Fashioning a Cultural Approach to Dress,” Fashion Theory, 2(4): 301–13. Camuffo, G. and M. Dalla Mura (eds) (2012) Graphic Design, Exhibiting, Curating, Bozen: Bozen University Press. Cavallo, A. (1971) “Fashion Plate. An Opening Exhibition for the New Costume Institute,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, August/September: 44–9. Cotter, Holland (2015) “Review: in ‘China: Through the Looking Glass,’ Eastern Culture Meets Western Fashion” The New York Times, May 7, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/arts/design/ review-in-china-through-the-looking-glass-eastern-culture-meets-western-fashion.html (accessed April 9, 2016). De Perthuis, K. (2016) “Darning Mark’s Jumper. Wearing Love and Sorrow,” Cultural Studies Review, 22(1): 59–77. Edwards, E. (2010) “Photograph and History. Emotion and Materiality,” in S.H. Dudley (ed.), Museum Materialities. Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, Oxon, New York: Routledge, 21–38. Edwards E. et al. (eds) (2006) Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, Oxford and New York: Berg. Fisher, T. and Woodward, S. (2014) “Fashioning through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Process of Materialization,” Critical Studies of Fashion and Beauty, 5(1): 3–24. Haagsma, L. (2015) “Interview with Guus Beumer on The Temporary Fashion Museum,” http:// tijdelijkmodemuseum.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/guus-beumer-temporary-fashion-museum-0 (accessed June 23, 2016). Healy, R. (2014) “Immateriality,” in Sandy Black et al. (eds), The Handbook of Fashion Studies, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury, 325–45. Horsley, J. (2014) “Introduction to the Inventory,” in Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye (eds), Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971, Durham, NY: Yale University Press, 170. Koda, H. and Glasscock, J. (2014) “The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan of Art: An Evolving History,” in M.R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museum: Theory and Practice, London, New York: Bloomsbury, 21–32. Marchetti, L. and Quinz, E. (2007) Dysfashional, Luxemburg: Bom Publisher. Marks, L. (2002) Touch. Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Melchior, M.R. (2014) “Introduction: Understanding Fashion and Dress Museology,” in M.R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museum: Theory and Practice, London, New York: Bloomsbury, 1–18. O’Neill, P. (1996) “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in Jelena Filipovic et al. (eds), The Biennial Reader, Osfildern: Hatje Cantz, 240–59. Palmer, A. (2008) “Untouchable: Creating Desire and Knowledge in Museum Costume and Textile Exhibitions,” Fashion Theory 12(1): 31–63.

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Pecorari, M. (2016) Re-fashioning the Institution: Some Reflection on the Temporary Fashion Museum, Rotterdam: The Nieuw Instituut, http://tijdelijkmodemuseum.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/ refashioning-institution-reflections-temporary-fashion-museum (accessed June 21, 2017). Pecorari, M. (2016) “The Liveness of Fashion: Performance as a Curatorial Practice,” in L. Marchetti (ed.), Fashion Curating. Understanding Fashion Through Exhibition, Geneve: HEAD Geneve Publishing. Schneider, R. (1997) The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge. Sedgwick, M. (2007) Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Ltd. Taylor, Lou (2002) The Study of Dress History, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 24–50. Van Olfers, S. (2010) “Introduction—Memory Test,” in S. Von Olfers (ed.), Not In Fashion. Photography and Fashion in the 90s, Frankfurt: MMK Museum fur Moderne Kunst. Wilcox, C. (1999) “Fashion in Motion,” in Brochure Fashion In-Motion, London: V&A, www.vam. ac.uk/page/f/fashion-in-motion/ (accessed June 21, 2017). Williams, V. (2012) “A Heady Relationship: Fashion Photography and the Museum, 1979 to the Present,” Fashion Theory, 12(2): 197–218.

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12 FASHION CURATES ART: TAKASHI MURAKAMI FOR LOUIS VUITTON Peter Bengtsen Introduction: the relationship between the fields of art and fashion In November 1976, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu gave a lecture about his field theory at École normale supérieure in Paris.1 Using as an example a failed attempt of Italian-born French fashion designer Pierre Cardin to be taken seriously by the art world on the basis of his position within fashion, Bourdieu explained that art and fashion constitute separate fields that recognize and operate with different types of symbolic capital that cannot simply be transferred from one field to the other. Much has changed in the forty years that have passed since Bourdieu gave his lecture to a group of philologists and literary historians in Paris. While the notion that art and fashion are separate fields that hold different values and recognize different kinds of symbolic capital still has some merit in a Western context, haute couture and its creators have long since found a place in major art institutions.2 Also, in addition to the inclusion of fashion in an art world context, many fashion brands today are associated with contemporary art in the form, for example, of sponsorships, commissions or through foundations that collect and exhibit art. This chapter will address the increasing overlap of the fields of art and fashion by examining the curation of art by fashion outside of traditional institutional settings. The main case explored is the collaboration between the luxury brand Louis Vuitton, under the creative direction of Marc Jacobs, and the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. It should be noted that while the chapter mainly focuses on this specific collaboration, it is far from the only instance in which Louis Vuitton has curated artists. As indicated by the publication of the 2009 coffee table book Louis Vuitton. Art, Fashion and Architecture, which describes eighty of the brand’s creative collaborations, associating itself more widely with upcoming as well as established artists has been an important aspect of the 199

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company’s branding efforts. The partnerships Louis Vuitton has established with a range of artists, as well as its work with Fondation Louis Vuitton—an exhibition space for contemporary art designed by architect Frank Gehry, that opened on October 27, 2014 in Bois de Boulogne in Paris’ 16th arrondissement—are prime examples of the increasingly close ties between art and fashion. Apart from Murakami, Louis Vuitton’s creative collaborators have included the American theater director Robert Wilson, who in 2002 was responsible for the Christmas window decorations in all the company’s stores. In 2006, the same task was undertaken by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, who created the installation Eye See You. Eliasson also contributed to another project in which Louis Vuitton overtly sought to mix the fields of fashion and art: the gallery Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, which opened on January 10, 2006 on the seventh floor of the brand’s flagship store on Champs-Élysées in Paris. In order to reach the art space, visitors had to first enter the building through a backdoor on Rue de Bassano and then proceed to step into Eliasson’s permanent installation Your Loss of Senses (2005). The installation has been described by art critic Simon Castets (2009) as a “working elevator linking visitors to the exhibition hall” which “plunges users into total blackness and absolute silence. By using a specific material that absorbs all sound waves, the black box cancels out all sound-based and visual stimuli and suppresses any trace of natural and artificial light. The twenty-second elevator ride seems like an eternity as the outside world disappears.” What struck me when I visited the flagship store and gallery in 2011 was that Eliasson’s installation constituted an interesting space of invisibility and inner reflection in a building that is otherwise dedicated to showing off and conspicuously consuming luxury goods. The inaugural exhibition at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton featured the work of the Los Angeles-based Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft. Using photo and video, she presented documentations of an installation entitled VB56 that took place in the Louis Vuitton flagship store in connection with its reopening on October 9, 2005. The exhibition also included the specially produced photographic work Alphabet Concept. The work consists of thirteen photographs of naked female bodies that are positioned in the shape of the brand’s LV monogram as well as the letters of the company name, thus creating a direct link between the artworks and the brand. Curating artists to collaborate on projects surrounding the brand as well as on the design of products has been a significant way for Louis Vuitton to associate itself with the world of fine art, including the art market, and this practice has arguably played a key role in the transformation of Louis Vuitton from “the brand your mother bought: expensive and well made, but boring and out of date” (Marinovich 2006) to an edgier, contemporary and living brand. The term “curating” is here being used to describe how the company selects certain artists to associate with its brand name. In much the same way as a gallery may curate a mix of artists that are established (to give an air of timelessness and class) and upcoming (to add edge to the gallery profile), fashion labels like Louis Vuitton associate themselves with artists they believe will contribute in a positive way to their brand image and in some instances expose new consumer groups to the brand. It can thus be said that fashion in this way curates art in order to supplement its brand equity with cultural capital.

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As will be discussed further at the end of the chapter, Marc Jacobs—who was the creative director of Louis Vuitton from 1997 to 2013—has been a major driving force behind this development. For example, taking on a role comparable to that of a curator, in 2001 Jacobs brought a subcultural flair to the brand by asking the American designer and artist Stephen Sprouse to work on a range of limited edition products featuring graffitistyle designs printed on top of the brand’s traditional monogram pattern. This first artist collaboration overseen by Jacobs for Louis Vuitton helped “transform what was a staid French luggage label, whose signature monogram was increasingly associated with cheap knock-offs, into one of the most valuable fashion brands in the world” (Judah 2013). Since the initial collaboration with Sprouse (which was followed by a range of products in 2006 despite Sprouse’s death two years prior), Louis Vuitton has continued its production of limited editions in association with different creative partners. Notably, in 2003 and 2005, the company curated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to re-imagine some of its products. To provide some background to understanding why Louis Vuitton specifically chose to work with Murakami, and why the creative partnership became the success it did, the following section will discuss some of the significant aspects of Murakami’s artistic practice.

Takashi Murakami: the art of commercial culture In 2003 a new brand of chewing gum was launched in Japan. Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Museum: Convenience Store Edition was a so-called shokugan product. “Shokugan” literally translates to “food toy” and is a sales combination of candy and a small plastic toy (Munroe 2005: 242). In the case of Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Museum, the shokugan product was a combination of a pack of chewing gum and one out of a series of small plastic figures designed by Murakami. Earlier that year, a 254 cm tall glass fiber version of one of the small figures, Miss ko2, had sold for $567,500 at Christie’s in New York (Munroe 2005: 243). The shokugan product was just one in a range of so-called art products that Murakami has been selling since the mid–1990s alongside paintings and larger sculptures that have been exhibited in high-end galleries. These products include plush toys, key rings, skateboards, enamel pins and t-shirts adorned with the characters that appear in his paintings and sculptural works. In order to understand why the symbiosis between Murakami and Louis Vuitton has been so successful, it is important to recognize that Murakami’s art products should not be seen as products that are derived from his work as an artist. Rather, they are examples of Murakami’s attempts to blur the boundary between fine- and mass culture—between art and commercial mass production—and his attempt to redefine his own role as an artist. This blurring of boundaries is mainly of significance to a Western audience, since in Japanese culture art has not traditionally been separated or distinguished from design as it has been in the West (Munroe 2005: 244f). Thus, as American art historian Katy Siegel has pointed out, when Murakami established his factory-like studios in Tokyo and New York and took on the role of “designer and supervisor,” it was “a fantasized return to the

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role of the Japanese artisan-craftsman” (2005: 278). A result of the blurred line between art and other artisan trades is that there has not been a domestic contemporary art market in Japan comparable to that found in Western countries. This is one reason Murakami turned his attention to an international audience early in his career. As he puts it: The art scene [in Japan] existed only as a shallow appropriation of Western trends, or an artificial construction of self-contained hierarchies, unable to support an artist’s career over many years. I realized this when I was a student, and stopped operating within the Japanese art market altogether, investing my energies instead into promoting my works overseas. [. . .] Another hurdle I have faced is the difference inherent in Japanese and Western artistic practices, and the frustrating “non-art” status that much of Japanese art bears, both within, and outside of the country. My first response to this was to [. . .] market artistic works in non-fine arts media. But after that, I thought: “why not just revolutionize the concept of art itself?” Kaikaikiki.co.jp 2005 From a Western perspective, it is significant that Murakami’s art products should be seen as an integral part of his artistic practice. Or, alternatively, that his artistic practice should be seen as a part of his commercial production. It is easy to draw parallels here with the American pop artist Andy Warhol, who to some extent attempted to achieve a similar dissolution of clear cultural distinction through the appropriation of mass cultural and commercial symbols (Siegel 2005: 273). However, according to French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, Warhol and other pop artists of the 1960s never managed to truly turn their art into everyday objects. This was because the artists removed their subject matter from its original context—a context that was paramount for the subject matter’s status as an everyday object.3 Murakami’s work, conversely, appears to be much more integrated in the spheres of commercial mass production and everyday life. As art critic Ben Luke has observed, “Andy Warhol had the Factory, but it was as much a countercultural place of decadence as a production line. Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki organisation is genuinely like a corporation” (2015). While Murakami’s work is rooted in old art traditions like Nihonga painting (Siegel 2005: 270), he is best known for his association with the Japanese Neo Pop and Super Flat (or Superflat) movements. According to Japanese art critic Midori Matsui, Japanese Neo Pop emerged as an art movement in the early 1990s as a reaction to the consumption culture that since the 1970s has been engulfing the country with kawaii (Japanese: cuteness) products like Hello Kitty and Licca, a Japanese version of Barbie (2005: 212). While Murakami and other Neo Pop artists were critical of commercial kawaii culture and adopted its “ ‘childish’ gestures in order to make a subversive attack on the ideological structure that keeps the Japanese infantile” (Matsui 2005: 214f), Murakami seems to have embraced commercial culture in a different way in his subsequent work within the Super Flat movement.4 To the artist, the notion of “super flat” is conceptually related to the extreme two-dimensionality of “[s]ociety, customs, art, [and] culture” (Murakami 2000: 5), but the term is also related to a Japanese heritage with specific visual characteristics:

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According to Murakami’s Superflat thesis, brilliant color, planar surfaces, stylized features, and the absence of illusionistic space define a lineage in Japanese art that links Rinpa screens to ukiyo-e woodblock prints to early modern Nihonga painting, and ultimately to postwar manga and anime. [. . .] Basic to Murakami’s Superflat “installation” of contemporary Japanese art is the radical interconnection and lack of distinction between Japan’s fine and popular arts. MUNROE 2005: 244 In addition to the above, Siegel argues that it is Murakami’s goal to create “an engagement with popular culture—not in order to subvert that culture or use it against itself, but to use its formal and emotional powers for his own purposes” (2005: 273). Thus, for instance, Murakami does not just reference Japanese otaku culture in his works.5 According to Siegel his artworks actually exist as legitimate parts of that culture. An example of this is the previously mentioned shokugan version of Miss ko2, which is now sold in specialty stores along with other collectable otaku objects (Munroe 2005: 243).

Murakami and Louis Vuitton: a symbiotic fusion of art and fashion Looking at Murakami’s artistic vision provides a useful basis for understanding why Louis Vuitton chose him as a creative collaborator. While his products are directed at audiences within diverse economic, cultural and social spheres, the aesthetics of his artistic output leading up to the initial Louis Vuitton collaboration had generally been relatively simple and polished. It may have been a combination of Murakami’s broad appeal and the visually clean style of his art—which could easily be adapted to patterns on the products of the company—that made collaborating appealing. Additionally, the curatorial choice was likely influenced by the wish on the part of Louis Vuitton to reinforce the company’s position in the extremely lucrative Japanese market.6 As for Murakami, teaming up with a brand like Louis Vuitton enabled him to spread his work to new spheres and target audiences, both within Japan and internationally. The collaboration thus served as a further step towards dissolving the division between fine art and mass culture. Visually, Murakami often uses multiple, vibrant colors in his artworks, and this also became a prominent feature of his first collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2003. Tasked with reimagining the brand’s classic gold-on-brown monogram pattern (see Figure 12.1), the artist opted to create a range of products that featured one of two new base colors, replacing the usual brown with either black or white. Whereas the monogram pattern was traditionally screen printed in a single color (gold), Murakami’s design—the so-called Eye Love Monogram—included thirty-three colors (see Figure 12.2). The colorful design of the Eye Love Monogram products was a radical, but also very popular, departure from the relatively muted look of the brand’s traditional assortment. According to a press release on September 12, 2003 from LVMH (the French multinational luxury goods conglomerate that owns the Louis Vuitton brand), the design was so popular that customer waiting lists had to be created (LVMH 2003).

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Figure 12.1 Louis Vuitton products featuring the brand’s classic gold-on-brown monogram pattern. Courtesy of Getty Images.

Figure 12.2 Customers at Louis Vuitton store in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo on September 4, 2003. The woman on the right is posing with a bag featuring Takashi Murakami’s Eye Love Monogram design. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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The curation of Takashi Murakami by Louis Vuitton likely helped increase the brand’s profile in Japan, which—as mentioned previously—was a key market for luxury products at the time. In addition to the already established customer base, Murakami’s design appealed specifically to alternative consumer segments, such as members of the otaku subculture. One reason for this was the strong connection Murakami’s design had to the Japanese ideal of kawaii, which is closely related to the gender role of young women in Japanese society in general and in the otaku subculture in particular (Matsui 2005: 210). The Murakami-designed products are linked to kawaii in a few ways. First, the connection between Louis Vuitton and Murakami’s name is important, as it creates a direct association between the brand and Japanese culture. Second, the eye, which is one of the most emotive and common means of expressing kawaii in otaku, is used both verbally in the title and pictorially in the design of the Eye Love Monogram. Third, the products designed by Murakami were much more colorful and lively, one might even say more youthful, than the traditional monogram pattern. This focus on the expression of youthfulness, bordering on the infantile, continued in the next collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Murakami with the so-called Monogram Cerises from 2005. Here kawaii was expressed by adding red cherries with smiling and surprised faces over the classic gold-on-brown monogram pattern. In LVMH Magazine (2005), the effect of the cherries was described as follows: “The cherry, fruit of an intense, bright and appetizing red, brightens up the Monogram canvas with communicative joy. This new pattern gives freshness and cheerfulness with all its different expressions: laughter, surprise and amazement!” I would argue that the combination of a classic luxury brand and the strong visual connection to the predominantly female ideal of kawaii created by Murakami’s design may have contributed to the success the products achieved among the female segment on the Japanese market. The focus on female consumers is further indicated by the fact that a later iteration of Murakami’s Eye Love Monogram—called Multicolore Canvas (the eye that was present in the original Murakami design was replaced with the four-petal flower from the classic Louis Vuitton monogram pattern)—was solely included in Louis Vuitton’s female collection. While members of the target female consumer base were able to live up to the central ideal of kawaii through the consumption of the Murakami-designed Louis Vuitton products, the latter also created an interesting sense of ambivalence. Due to the brand’s long history and high price, the consumption of the products could be interpreted as a way of communicating a certain sophistication, maturity and status. Through the consumption of the Eye Love Monogram, the Japanese female consumers at once presented themselves as youthful and mature, helpless and strong, traditional and modern; a combination of characteristics that fits well with the ambivalent state of the postmodern individual in Japan. In line with Murakami’s ongoing artistic ambition to transcend with his work the spheres of popular and fine culture, the collaboration with Louis Vuitton soon spread beyond the design of fashion products. Thus, while it is clear that Murakami influenced the brand by introducing elements of his established visual language in the design, it is interesting to note that this was not a one-way process. On April 11, 2003, shortly after the first Murakami-designed products were made available by Louis Vuitton, the artist’s third and

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eponymous solo show opened at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. The ten new works included in this exhibition made it clear that it was not just Murakami’s style, symbols and use of color that had moved into the commercial sphere of fashion products; the symbols of Louis Vuitton had also entered the world of fine art by being integrated in the artist’s paintings and sculptural works.7 One of the works featured in the show, LV Monolith, is an acrylic painting on canvas. It depicts a number of floral vines carrying an array of smiling flowers. Included in the painting is also a multi-colored “LV ” symbol, on top of which is standing a small, white anthropomorphic character with four flower petals on its head. The title of the painting is quite significant, as it creates a verbal connection between Louis Vuitton (represented by the shorthand “LV ”) and the word “monolith”. The latter connotes something solid and established; something impressive, unique and grand. In other words, the verbal level of the artwork associates the brand with a number of positive attributes. On the pictorial level, the prominent featuring of smiling flowers is a recurring motif known from many other works, both earlier and later, by Murakami. By way of example, an almost identical motif can be found in the painting Cube from 2001. When comparing LV Monolith and Cube, it becomes clear how Murakami in different ways has appropriated and incorporated the symbols of Louis Vuitton in his gallery art. The most obvious is perhaps the inclusion of the LV-symbol, which is the biggest depicted element in LV Monolith. The sharp, straight lines of the symbol are a significant departure from the rounded forms that otherwise characterize the motif, making the LV symbol stand out. However, Murakami has actually adapted the appearance of the symbol in order to make it fit the visual universe of the painting. This has in part been done by applying multiple colors to the symbol, and by covering some of the letters’ serifs with flowers and two white hands that create connotations of the sort of gloves cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse would wear. The colors and gloves serve to integrate the brand symbol in the world of kawaii which the smiling flowers also represent. As mentioned, the painting also includes a small, white anthropomorphic character, which is standing on top of the left half of the V in the LV-symbol. To the uninitiated viewer, it might be mistaken for a character solely made to invoke a sense of kawaii. While this is certainly one possible function, the character is in fact also a direct reference to Murakami’s design work for Louis Vuitton: the character, along with the whole scenario depicted in LV Monolith, can also be found in the artist’s short anime film Superflat Monogram which was published in early 2003 to promote Murakami’s designs for Louis Vuitton. In the film, the anthropomorphic gestalt serves as a guide for the protagonist, a young girl who is drawn into a magical and colorful Louis Vuitton universe while she is waiting for her friends outside one of the brand’s stores.8 The connection with Louis Vuitton can also be seen in the shape of the flowers in the paintings, which has changed between Cube and LV Monolith. Whereas in the older work all the flowers have twelve petals, the majority of the flowers in LV Monolith carry only four, which in some cases are contained inside a circle shape. With this change Murakami references a similar flower symbol which, as previously mentioned, is part of the original Louis Vuitton monogram. This is a concrete visual example of the exchange of symbols between the spheres of fashion and art, and between different cultures, which Murakami

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works towards: while the eye and smiling flowers, which have been dominating elements in Murakami’s gallery art, have migrated onto the products of Louis Vuitton, the shape of the flower symbol from the classic monogram pattern has travelled in the opposite direction. The link between Louis Vuitton’s luxury products and the artworks presented in the 2003 exhibition is underscored by the exclusive gallery environment in which the works are presented. This context emphasizes the monetary value of the artworks and their status as collectors’ items, as objects of desire. While the show at Marianne Boesky Gallery was the first instance in which Murakami explicitly drew on elements of his collaboration with Louis Vuitton in a fine art context, it would not be the last. As has previously been established, Murakami’s designs for Louis Vuitton should not be considered separate from his other artworks. In light of this, and given the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Murakami and Louis Vuitton, it makes sense that the show ©Murakami which ran from October 28, 2007 to February 11, 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA ) in Los Angeles would include examples of their collaboration.9 The exhibition was curated for MOCA by the museum’s then chief curator Paul Schimmel, who had worked with Murakami for years (Strick 2007).10 The show later travelled to Brooklyn Museum (April 5 to July 13, 2008), Museum Für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany (September 27, 2008 to January 4, 2009) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (February 17 to May 31, 2009). Although its core remained the same, the exhibition was adapted to each specific site. For example, due to its architectural layout, the Brooklyn Museum presented the artworks in a more chronologically oriented manner than had been the case at MOCA (Vogel 2008), and according to Artnews.org the Frankfurt iteration of the show “was site-specifically designed by Takashi Murakami with the specifics of the MMK ’s architecture in Frankfurt in mind, and [was] complemented by works specially produced for this situation” (2008). While showing the collaborative work of Murakami and Louis Vuitton was to be expected in a retrospective like ©Murakami, the inclusion in the exhibition of a fully functional Louis Vuitton boutique still raised some debate in the art world. As was reported in The New York Times, “[t]he show, with its $960 handbags and $695 agendas for sale, created a flap even before its opening on Oct. 29. Art-world purists charge[d] that it [. . .] eroded the line between culture and commerce.” However, in the same article, the show’s curator was reported to have “maintained that the boutique is integral to the artist’s message” and to have stated that “[o]ne of the most radical aspects of Murakami’s work is his willingness both to embrace and exploit the idea of his brand, to mingle his identity with a corporate identity and play with that” (La Ferla 2007). In addition to browsing and purchasing fashion products designed by Murakami, visitors could also acquire canvas editions featuring a selection of Murakami’s LV monogram designs. The canvases were editions of 100 each and were made from the same material as some of the available fashion products, mounted on a 16 by 16 inch chassis signed by the artist.11 The integration of an operating luxury brand store in the middle of an art show may seem like a gimmicky piece of installation or performance art, but according to an article in Los Angeles Times, “Louis Vuitton earned $1.4 million by selling 214 Murakami works in the MOCA boutique” (Boehm 2011). This information came to light in court documents

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in connection with a lawsuit filed by one customer, Clint Arthur, after he discovered that two canvases featuring Murakami’s multicolored LV monogram pattern, which he had purchased at the boutique at MOCA , were made from the same mass-produced material as the Louis Vuitton handbags and other accessories. Arthur initially went to court and demanded compensation on the basis that the products had fraudulently been presented as original works of art made for the exhibition, and that their material origin had been concealed. While these claims were dismissed by the US District Court in Los Angeles (Boehm 2011), the case highlights the common perception, and expectation, that art products and fashion products have fundamental differences. The idea of the artwork as an “original” is strongly connected to what the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin ([1936] 2008) has famously called aura. However, given that a major point in Murakami’s artistic practice is precisely the blurring of the boundary between art and commerce, it makes perfect sense to sell massproduced items as art. In addition, as was pointed out in a post by “juggernut3” on the art blog Arrested Motion, “there is one small difference between the bags and the canvas. Takashi Murakami signed each canvas and the bags were never touched” (2009). The signature is indicative of a direct connection between the artwork and the artist and adds some level of aura to the individual canvas, even if the motif of the latter has not been hand painted. In a contemporary art market where it is commonplace to publish large editions of multiples (e.g. prints, sculptures), and where artists often leave much of the work to studio assistants, and in some cases completely outsource production, the signature is often the only indication of the artist’s involvement.

Marc Jacobs and the curation of art for fashion As mentioned previously, Marc Jacobs’ has played a key role as a curator of artist collaborators for Louis Vuitton. The importance of Jacobs’ direct influence on the brand’s partnership with Takashi Murakami was indicated when the former stepped down as creative director for Louis Vuitton in November 2013, as his successor, Nicolas Ghesquière, soon opted to discontinue the line of Murakami-designed products (Milligan 2015). Another indication of Marc Jacobs’ personal involvement with, and influence on, artist collaborations is the fact that they have also been part of the work with his eponymous brand. As a recent case in point, echoing the initial graffiti-inspired collaboration with Stephen Sprouse for Louis Vuitton in 2001, since 2011 the Brooklyn-based artist Bast has contributed designs to the Marc Jacobs label.12 Like Sprouse, Bast— who has been doing street art since the late 1990s—has brought a certain subcultural flavor and edginess to the Marc Jacobs brand, blending high fashion with DIY street aesthetics.13 Continuing to blur the line between art and fashion, in 2014 the Marc Jacobs Collection Store in New York City hosted a so-called “celebration” of Bast’s art. On display was a mix of original artworks by Bast and products designed by the artist in collaboration with Marc Jacobs.14 A limited edition signed screen print featuring one of the artist’s designs for

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Marc Jacobs was also available on the evening. A comparable mixing of art gallery and fashion retail store had previously been seen at the opening of Agnès B’s “Galerie Boutique” on Howard Street in New York City on March 31, 2011. At this event, artworks by a plethora of artists, including Bast and New York-based South Korean artist Rostarr, were shown along with the brand’s apparel (“juggernut3” 2011). In a similar vein, during the spring of 2015, the young New York-based label Cocurata arranged so-called openings in select fashion stores around the world to promote its first collection which featured designs by Rostarr, Bast and British artist Paul Insect, all of whom are associated with the world of street art.15 Venues for Cocurata’s shows included Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, Ron Herman in Tokyo and Le Bon Marché in Paris. In addition to the clothes designed by artists for the brand, the displays comprised of other types of artwork, such as collaborative papier-mâché sculptures by Bast and Paul Insect and Bast’s screen prints pasted on the store walls (echoing the kind of street art aesthetic the artist is known for). It is worth noting that Bast created similar walls with paste-ups at the Marc Jacobs showroom in Milan in 2013, which were used as backdrops for a fashion photoshoot.16 The use of the opening, something that carries strong connotations to the inauguration of an art show, as an event to frame a brand’s fashion products, along with the mixing of artist-designed apparel and more traditional art objects, contributes to blurring the line between retail store and art gallery, and—indeed—between fashion and art. As such, the effect of the events arranged by Marc Jacobs, Agnès B and Cocurata was in some ways similar to that of the inclusion of the Louis Vuitton boutique in the ©Murakami show. However, a major difference is that the former approach turned on its head what Murakami and Louis Vuitton had done at MOCA , by moving the art out of the established institutional context (i.e. art museums and galleries) and physically embedding it in the world of fashion retail. The ongoing fusion of the art gallery and fashion store exemplified by Marc Jacobs, Agnès B and Cocurata suggests that the boundaries between the fields of art and fashion, which Bourdieu so sharply separated, will most likely dissolve further in the years to come. While this development is to a large degree driven by financial interests and marketing concerns, it does not necessarily mean that art is acquiescing to the values of the marketplace of fashion. Rather, fashion is becoming just another viable way for artists to express and market themselves. For artists, working with multinational fashion brands presents an opportunity to reach a global audience, whereas the collaborations can add to a brand’s cultural capital. While the blatant commercial nature of the fashion industry may cause some concern that the fusion of art and fashion risks compromising the purity often associated with art, it should be kept in mind that vast amounts of money flow through the art market, and that art has long been about both cultural and monetary capital. In terms of critical fashion curation, in a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to clearly separate the products and the valid forms of symbolic capital of the fields of art and fashion, the cases presented in this chapter serve as indications of ways both producers and consumers are encouraged to more fully embrace the artistic nature of fashion products as well as the commercial nature of fine art.

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Notes 1 The lecture was later reworked and published as the essay “Some Properties of Fields” (Bourdieu [1984] 1993: 72–77). 2 As for Pierre Cardin, on November 30, 2016, Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris hosted his fashion show 70 years of living sculptures. Apart from being a celebration of Cardin’s seventyyear career, the event also marked his twenty-fifth anniversary as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (AFP 2016). Cardin was elected as a member of Académie des Beaux-Arts on February 21, 1991 (Academie-des-beaux-arts.fr). 3 To explain this point, Baudrillard writes that “the everydayness of [a] chair [. . .] is precisely its context and, specifically, the mass-produced context of all similar or almost similar chairs [. . .]. Everydayness is difference in repetition. By isolating the chair on the canvas, I remove all everydayness from it and, at the same time, deprive the canvas of its character of everyday object [. . .].” ([1970] 1998: 118). 4 According to Murakami, “ ‘Super Flat’, one form of ‘Japanese’ ‘avant-garde’ ‘art’, is an ‘-ism’—like Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Situationism before it—only this one [the Japanese] have created” (Murakami 2000: 25). 5 Otaku literally means “ ‘your home’; obsessed fans, primarily of anime and manga” (Murakami 2005: xiv). However, otaku also refers to the products these fans consume. 6 In 2002, the year before the first results of the collaboration with Murakami were made available to consumers, Louis Vuitton sold product for $1.4 billion in Japan alone. This was equivalent to more than one-third of the company’s worldwide revenue for that year (Chandler and Kano 2003). 7 The works included in the show can be seen at www.marianneboeskygallery.com/exhibitions/ takashi-murakami/works (accessed December 2, 2016). 8 The film can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v—ha26vA-tkw (accessed December 2, 2016). 9 According to La Ferla (2007), Louis Vuitton “did not pay for the show; however, it did underwrite a splashy opening-night party that attracted celebrities like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Pharrell Williams.” The same observation is made by Drohojowska-Philp (2007). 10 While ©Murakami also blended the commercial and artistic spheres, 2012 saw the “departure under pressure” of Schimmel in response to the more populist direction of Jeffrey Deitch, who became director of the institution on June 1, 2010 (Smith 2012; Boehm 2012; Bengtsen 2014). 11 The Louis Vuitton boutique at MOCA was designed by Jean-Marc Gady. Images of the space, including some of the available fashion products and canvases, can be found at http:// jeanmarcgady.com/en/projets/lv-magasin-ephemere/ (accessed December 2, 2016). 12 This collaboration was ongoing from 2011 through 2015. At the time of writing it is unclear if Bast will be contributing further to the Marc Jacobs line. 13 Jacobs’ affinity with the world of street art can also be seen in the curation for Louis Vuitton of artists Retna, Aiko and Os Gemeos, who all designed scarves for the brand’s 2013 Spring and Summer Collection (Killip 2013). Jacobs’ engagement with street art and graffiti culture was also evident when in May 2012 the artist Kidult vandalized a Marc Jacobs store in SOHO by using a fire extinguisher filled with pink paint to write the word “ART ” in large letters across the façade. In response, Jacobs released a $686 t-shirt featuring a screen printed image of the vandalized store (Crotty 2012). The artist responded to this appropriation in June 2013 by spraying “686” (a reference to the price of the first t-shirt) in green paint across the façade of a Marc Jacobs store in Paris. The result of this action was also photographed and released on a T-shirt and a cap by Marc Jacobs, leading to speculation that the ostensible feud between the artist and the brand was in fact a consensual collaboration (Mau 2013).

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14 A video entitled Marc Jacobs Celebrates the Work of Bäst, documenting the event and promoting both the artist and the brand, can be found at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5wGykeg8cRs (accessed December 2, 2016). 15 Cocurata—which has described itself on Instagram as an “art & fashion atelier designed to exhibit culturally reflective artists through curated collections”—was co-founded in 2014 by George Gorrow, who also founded the Australian fashion label Ksubi, and George Benias, director and curator at the New York-based Allouche Gallery. Bast and Paul Insect are both represented by the gallery. 16 Images of the walls can be found at http://arrestedmotion.com/2013/07/streets-bast-x-marcjacobs-milan/ (accessed December 2, 2016).

References Academie-des-beaux-arts.fr, “Pierre Cardin,” available online: www.academie-des-beaux-arts.fr/ membres/actuel/libres/Cardin/fiche.htm (accessed December 2, 2016). AFP (2016) “A l’Institut de France, des ‘sculptures vivantes’ signées Cardin,” Le Parisien, November 30, available online: www.leparisien.fr/flash-actualite-culture/a-l-institut-de-francedes-sculptures-vivantes-signees-cardin-30-11-2016-6397314.php (accessed December 2, 2016). Artnews.org (2008) “© Murakami,” available online: http://artnews.org/mmkfrankfurt/?exi=12030 (accessed December 2, 2016). Baudrillard, Jean ([1970] 1998) The Consumer Society, London: Sage Publications Ltd. Bengtsen, Peter (2014) The Street Art World, Lund: Almendros de Granada Press. Benjamin, Walter ([1936] 2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, London: Penguin. Boehm, Mike (2011) “MOCA Customer Settles Suit against Vuitton over Murakami Canvases,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, available online: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/ 2011/03/murakami-louis-vuitton-moca-lawsuit-.html (accessed December 2, 2016). Boehm, Mike (2012) “MOCA Board Exits Pile Up,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, available online: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/entertainment/la-et-cm-moca-board-20120713 (accessed December 2, 2016). Bourdieu, Pierre ([1984] 1993) Questions in Sociology, London, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Castets, Simon (2009) “Elisson, Olafur,” in Louis Vuitton. Art, Fashion and Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 174. Chandler, Clay and Kano, Cindy (2003) “Recession Chic,” Fortune Magazine, September 29, available online: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/09/29/349902/ index.htm (accessed December 2, 2016). Crotty, Nora (2012) “Marc Jacobs Seems to be in a Feud with Graffiti Artist Kidult,” Fashionista, May 11, available online: http://fashionista.com/2012/05/marc-jacobs-in-a-feud-with-graffitiartist-kidult-releases–689-art-by-art-jacobs-cotton-tee (accessed December 2, 2016). Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter (2007) “© ART ”, artnet.com, November 9, available online: www. artnet.com/magazineus/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp11-9-07.asp (accessed December 2, 2016). Judah, Hettie (2013) “Inside an Artist Collaboration,” The Business of Fashion, December 4, available online: www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/inside-an-artist-collaboration (accessed December 2, 2016). “juggernut3” (2009) “Viewpoints: Murakami, MOCA & Louis Vuitton Sued by Disgruntled Speculator,” Arrested Motion, April 24, available online: http://arrestedmotion.com/2009/04/

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takashi-murakami-louis-vuitton-clint-arthur-moca-lv-lawsuit-allgeations/ (accessed December 2, 2016). “juggernut3” (2011) “Openings: Agnès B—Howard St. ‘Galerie Boutique’ Launch & Exhibition,” Arrested Motion, April 4, available online: http://arrestedmotion.com/2011/04/openings-agnesb-howard-street-galarie-boutique-launch-exhibition/ (accessed December 2, 2016). Kaikaikiki.co.jp (2005) “Laying the Foundation for a Japanese Art Market,” available online: http:// english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/whatskaikaikiki/message/ (accessed July 28, 2016). Killip, Teofilo (2013) “Louis Vuitton Unveils Collaborations with Retna, Os Gemeos, and Aiko,” Complex, January 31, available online: www.complex.com/style/2013/01/louis-vuittonunveils-collaborations-with-retna-os-gemeos-and-yayoi-kusama (accessed December 2, 2016). La Ferla, Ruth (2007) “The Artist’s Fall Collection,” The New York Times, November 8, available online: www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/fashion/08ART.html (accessed December 2, 2016). LVMH (2003) Press release, September 12, previously available online (accessed September 4, 2007). LVMH Magazine (2005) “Monogram Cerises, a New Creation by Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami,” February 11, previously available online (accessed September 4, 2007). Louis Vuitton. Art, Fashion and Architecture (2009) New York: Rizzoli. Luke, Ben (2015) “The Many Moods of Takashi Murakami,” Sotheby’s Magazine, February 20, available online: www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/blogs/all-blogs/sothebys-magazinemarch-2015/2015/02/takashi-murakami-louis-vuitton.html (accessed December 2, 2016). Marinovich, Slaven (2006) “Louis Vuitton—king,” Brandchannel.com, November 13, previously available online (accessed September 4, 2007). Matsui, Midori (2005) “Beyond the Pleasure Room to a Chaotic Street. Transformations of Cute Subculture in the Art of the Japanese Nineties,” in Takashi Murakami (ed.), Little Boy. The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Neew Haven, CT: Japan Society, Inc/Yale University Press, 208–39. Mau, Dhani (2013) “Marc Jacobs Responds to Second Kidult Graffiti Attack with Clever Marketing Push—Are They In Cahoots?,” Fashionista, June 26, available online: http://fashionista.com/ 2013/06/marc-jacobs-responds-to-second-kidult-graffiti-attack-with-clever-marketing-pushare-they-in-cahoots (accessed December 2, 2016). Milligan, Lauren (2015) “Vuitton Discontinues Multicoloured Monogram,” vogue.co.uk, July 17, available online: www.vogue.co.uk/news/2015/07/17/louis-vuitton-discontinues-multicoloured-monogram-takashi-murakami (accessed December 2, 2016). Munroe, Alexandra (2005) “Introducing Little Boy,” in Takashi Murakami (ed.), Little Boy. The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, New Haven, CT: Japan Society, Inc/Yale University Press, 240–61. Murakami, Takashi (2000) “A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art,” in Takashi Murakami, Super Flat, Tokyo: Madra Publishing Co., Ltd, 8–25. Murakami, Takashi (ed.) (2005) Little Boy. The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, New Haven, CT: Japan Society, Inc/Yale University Press. Siegel, Katy (2005) “In the Air,” in Takashi Murakami (ed.), Little Boy. The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, New Haven, CT: Japan Society, Inc/Yale University Press, 268–289. Smith, Roberta (2012) “A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support,” The New York Times, July 22, available online: www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/arts/design/hurdles-grow-at-the-museum-ofcontemporary-art-los-angeles.html (accessed December 2, 2016). Strick, Jeremy (2007) “Director’s Foreword,” in Paul Schimmel (ed.), © Murakami, Los Angeles & New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles & Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 6–7. Vogel, Carol (2008) “Watch Out, Warhol, Here’s Japanese Shock Pop,” The New York Times, April 2, available online: www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/arts/design/02mura.html (accessed December 2, 2016).

13 ARTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICITY: MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS OF LUXURY FASHION BRANDS IN CHINA Yuli Bai Introduction The legitimacy of luxury has long been connected with the rarity of materials, craft skills and feelings of privilege (Kapferer 2014). However, with the “democratization” of luxury since the 1980s, brand cachet faces the risk of being diluted because too many people have access to it. The resulting challenge for contemporary luxury brands is how to keep an authentic aura and loyal customers while sustaining company growth. Addressing the issue of “authenticity” becomes more crucial for luxury fashion brands by linking with a broader background in which consumers’ aspiration for authenticity is a cornerstone of contemporary marketing (Brown, Kozinets and Sherry 2003) and the new business imperative (Gilmore and Pine II 2009). This means that the search for authenticity is now not just limited to luxury consumers, but also extends to general consumers. Among diverse approaches to crafting authenticity, one effective technique is to connect brands with art. That is, with moral and aesthetic endorsement, artification (i.e. the transformation from nonart to something art-like) (Naukkarinen 2012) is utilized to contribute to the balance of company growth and exclusivity by obfuscating commercial operations and concealing realities such as the decline of craftsmanship (Kapferer 2014). While the artification of luxury brands in practice occurs in multiple sectors such as architecture, products, window display, interior design, and the sponsorship of art exhibitions, this chapter deals with the scenario of the exhibition—more precisely, the museum exhibition of luxury fashion brands, which is taken as a form of intensive brand artification and authenticity building. In recent years, there has been a boom in museum fashion exhibitions, which has been well documented by scholars and professionals (e.g. Steele 2008; Palmer 2008; Potvin 2012). These studies have typically covered issues of 213

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curatorial approaches such as costume display, conservation and exhibition design (Frisa 2008; Palmer 2008; Romano 2011); the history of museum fashion exhibitions; and more controversial issues such as finances and curatorial integrity (Steele 2008; Stevenson 2008; Potvin 2012). Research on museum fashion exhibitions from the brand’s point of view has received comparatively little attention. This is where my research originated. This chapter focuses on curatorial performance in China, and analyzes specifically the following four exhibitions: Hermès’s The Tale of Silk in Beijing (2008), Louis Vuitton’s Voyages in Beijing (2011), Chanel’s Culture Chanel in Beijing (2011) and Dior’s Esprit Dior in Shanghai (2013). These curatorial projects beg the question of how and in what ways exhibitions can serve as sectors of artification through which luxury brands can obscure aggressive commercial intentions by projecting authenticity. The chapter also examines the exhibitions’ connection with Chinese culture, and it aims to explore how the four luxury brands sharpen their competitive edge in China, which is predicted to become the number one luxury consumer market in 2020 (Bain & Co. 2014), together with the advantages that collaboration with Chinese artists can bring to the luxury brands.

Issues of authenticity: the rationale behind artification of luxury brands While the term “authenticity” is widely used in marketing and consumption (Fine 2003), its nature is contested. In general, explanation of the term includes objective and subjective perspectives. Objectively speaking, authenticity inheres in the object, depending on its connection with a historical period, spatial origin or other factors (Grayson and Martinec 2004). But according to another point of view, authenticity is primarily a socially constructed concept, the meaning of which is negotiable and subject to continual change (Peterson 2005). Consequently, an explanation of authenticity includes multiple dimensions, such as the original and staged (MacCannell 1973), the iconic, indexical, and hypothetical (Grayson and Martinec 2004), and the sincere (Beverland 2006). Accordingly, diverse approaches can be used to craft an authentic brand image, one of which is to intersect with the art world. There has been a long history of association between luxury brands and art, which can be dated back to the end of the nineteenth century (Stern 2004). Yet when compared to its history, the depth of integration between contemporary luxury and art is so unprecedented as to have been referred to as a “current art-luxe wave” (Kastner 2014). Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, by overtly incorporating art as an integral element of their commercial core, luxury houses like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, have reconstituted themselves with artistic identities (Ryan 2007), engaging in a process of artification. The impact of this crossover led to the emergence of new terms, such as “Artketing” referring to a mix between branding and art (Boche 2010) and “M(art) worlds” (i.e. a market containing art within its very identity) (Joy, et  al 2014). In response, it is increasingly acknowledged that art has gone far beyond gimmicks for luxury brands to become an important branding strategy (Kapferer 2014; Gilmore and Pine II 2009). The reason art occupies such a strategic position can be put down largely to its close connection with authenticity. As Gilmore and Pine II (2009) put it, “Authenticity

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appeals to the senses and perception and is closely related to values and meaning. In this light, culture and the arts have inherently and from various perspectives been considered authentic, with their emotional appeal to expression and creativity” (66). Furthermore, as distinct from commodities, the essential criteria of art lie in its immaterial aspects (meaning, moral, exclusivity, aesthetic superiority, distinction, etc) (Kapferer 2014), which would not be diluted in mass distribution because they are not measured through the raw material of the object itself, but largely through singularity and authority of the artists and narrative manipulation of their lifestory and success (Fine 2003; Fillis 2015). This means the work of art is not incompatible with technical reproduction. This perspective may be in conflict with Benjamin’s (1970/1936) celebrated idea of “aura” which is closely related to the presence of authenticity. For him, it is the presence of the original object and its physical location that shape its aura. In other words, the aura will be lost due to the production of identical copies. How to understand this conflict? As Postrel (2003) pointed out, Benjamin defined aura (and authenticity) based on objective standards in relation to time and space. However, in actual situations, factors impacting on the construction of aura are not simply limited to original artworks, but instead cover a wide range of aspects such as the singularity of the creator, customer valuations, media relationships, and marketing strategy (Postrel 2003; Fillis 2015). Besides, instead of shattering charismatic aura, technical reproduction can enhance even the values of works of art and artists themselves with its ability to heighten the visibility of artistic aura when combined with creative marketing techniques (Fillis 2015). Arguably, it is mainly due to these reasons that luxury brands are obsessed with the intersection with art.

Manifesting historical patrimony of luxury giants through story-telling exhibitions History is an important cue used to signal authenticity (Beverland 2005). As luxury giants with a rich heritage, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, and Hermès often reinforce their links to time through exhibitions and ceremonies (Mendes and Rees-Roberts 2015). Three of the four exhibitions mentioned put the focus on the history of the brand while also addressing particular themes. The 2011 Louis Vuitton exhibition for instance retraced the brand’s 157 years of development with the theme of “voyage” (from 1854 to present). Nevertheless, it is unlikely that brands present their history to the public in any detail. Nor indeed is it desired by the brand. Rather, with the objective of constructing an authentic image, it is often the case that specific objects and materials surrounding luxury brands are selected for exhibit. It could be said that the history presented in public is a deliberate construction. More precisely, an ideological method of storytelling is employed as a means to craft a brand’s authentic aura (Björkman 2002). In so doing, brands can make their didactic messages understandable and easy to remember as well as fostering charismatic aura (Weischer, Weibler and Petersen 2013). Overall, these exhibitions were organized by concentrating on four main aspects: historical events and activities; the founders; classic designs; and associations with the art world. Documentary evidence such as designs, sketches, texts, artworks, manuscripts,

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and photographs constitute the narrative content of the exhibitions. For instance, Culture Chanel displayed more than 400 items, covering original manuscripts, drawings, photographs, fashion designs, perfumes, and jewelry (Wang 2011). Esprit Dior included approximately 100 Dior dresses, sketches, objects of art, jewelry and perfumes from throughout Dior’s history (Mcinerney 2013). Serving as materialization of memories and the content elements of the story, these intermediary agents which are composed of a juxtaposition of the old and the new visualize the brand’s past and present. The objects from the past represent the presence of time and space which is important in constructing an object’s authenticity (Benjamin 1970/1936). They evoke a powerful sense of the past, and trigger nostalgia which could provide a sense of comfort and safety to consumers (Brown, Kozinets and Sherry 2003).

Achieving legitimacy: taking museums as the venue of storytelling The four exhibitions under discussion were held in major Chinese institutions of art and culture. Detailed information about the venues is presented in Table  1. Following the thinking of story construction, the values of the museums are discussed in link with the venue of storytelling.

Table 1. Information about the exhibition venues Exhibitions

Presence of the brand in China

Venue

Features of the buildings

Hermès The Tale of Silk From March 25 to April 16, 2008

Since 1997

Today Art Museum, Beijing Features: founded in 2002, the first private and non-profit art museum in China, dedicated itself to maintaining a modern vision.a

Its avant-garde exterior stands out among others, fusing industrial relics with the contemporary for a look that is as unique as the art it holds.

Culture Chanel From November 5 to December 13, 2011

Since 1999

The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing Features: formally open to the public in 1963. A national cultural landmark after foundation of New China, dedicated to collection, research and exhibitions of modern and contemporary artistic works in China.b

One of the “Ten Great Constructions” which are ten public buildings built in Beijing in 1959 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (Wang and Heath 2008).

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Exhibitions

Presence of the brand in China

Venue

Features of the buildings

Louis Vuitton Voyages From May 31 to August 30, 2011

Since 1992

The National Museum of China (NMC), Beijing Features: an integrated national museum under the Ministry of Culture of China, was founded in 2003, based on the merging of the National Museum of Chinese History, the predecessor of which is the Preparatory Office of the Museum of Chinese History, founded in 1912, and the National Museum of Chinese Revolution, the predecessor of which was the Preparatory Office of the National Revolution Museum, founded in 1950.c

One of the “Ten Great Constructions” for the anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.

Esprit Dior From September 13 to November 10, 2013

Since 1993

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Shanghai Features: founded in 2005, the first private non-profit art museum in Shanghai, committed to promoting contemporary art and design, with the aim of cultivating the appreciation of contemporary art and design for the general public.d

The building was transformed from a flower pavilion located in the People’s Park, Shanghai and is described as mediation between landscape and city.

Source: a. www.todayartmuseum.com/entemplateone.aspx?type=curatormessage (accessed March 12, 2016) b. www.namoc.org/en/about/history/ (accessed February 18, 2016) c. http://en.chnmuseum.cn/english/tabid/497/Default.aspx (accessed April 18, 2016) d. www.mocashanghai.org/en/about.aspx (accessed March 20, 2016)

Besides carefully selecting narrative content as mentioned above, manipulating the atmosphere of storytelling also has an important influence on the authority of the story. As stated above, it has been widely agreed that as a social construct, authenticity is not intrinsic to the object, but rather related to subjective feeling and experience as well as contexts (Jones 2010). That is, emotions are central to the experience of authenticity (Lenton, et  al 2013). In this sense, ambiance and setting play critical roles in crafting authenticity (Botterill 2007). It is here that museums occupy a unique advantage. Apart from offering educational and intellectual perspectives, museums are regarded as authorized institutions defining art (McEvilley 1997, cited in Kastner 2014:11) and hence,

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as guarantors which have the power to assign artistic identity to a luxury brand (Kapferer 2014), and one of the most important collective rituals of fostering consecration and charismatic authority (Dion and Arnould 2011). With almost “magic” power and authority, it can be imagined that taken as the platform of storytelling, the museum can in effect “turn stone into gold” by significantly endowing the stories (and brands) with credibility, including embedding the brand in the art world. By decontextualization and isolation from their connection with commerce, artifacts (even the most mundane objects) are endowed with a symbolic value and invested with authority and significance (Potvin 2012). From this perspective, it is easy to understand why these four major brands chose museums as the venues for their exhibitions. Besides the charismatic ambiance coming from the remarkable design of the four buildings as illustrated in Table 1, the four venues are recognized authorities in the Chinese art world, possessing the privilege of defining art. This privilege appears further strengthened considering their historical position in China: both the Today Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art are pioneers of Chinese private and non-profit museums despite their comparatively short history. The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC ) is a country-level art museum, existing as a national cultural landmark. The National Museum of China (NMC ) in particular is a world-class museum with a deep historical and cultural heritage in China. Briefly, presenting in such settings helps the luxury houses to achieve artistic credibility, particularly exhibiting in NMC . NMC is viewed as the ancestral shrine of Chinese culture with an undeniable supremacy amongst museums in the minds of many Chinese. Therefore, it was a highly significant choice for Louis Vuitton to hold an exhibition there. By association, it put the brand on a par with the elite of Chinese culture in being recognized by the most authoritative art and culture institution in China and provided something of a coronation ceremony in China.

Making legends of brand founders Although the founders of the original companies are long deceased, their charismatic aura can be inherited and managed via sanctified rituals such as fashion shows and ritualized gestures (Dion and Arnould 2011). This contributes to the emergence of the “magic” of the successor, of the brand and its products, and simultaneously, helps to ease the constraints based on the rarity principle which could have the effect of impeding the growth of luxury brands (Kapferer 2014). The Chanel exhibition curated by Jean-Louis Froment, started with the childhood life of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in a monastery as epitomized by the sculpture of a nun. It presented her creative world and personal life, the classic designs and her inspiration from art and literature. The Louis Vuitton brand (owned by LVMH ) traced the initial moment when its founder Louis Vuitton created canvas trunks 160 years ago. This way of canonizing the founders concurs with Dion and Arnould (2011) who analyzed how the Dior and Chanel brands mythologized their founders through explicit images and symbols so as to create an auratic connection between the founders, the salespeople and the customer. Additionally, it is not surprising that beyond tracing the founder’s life and career, the exhibition in question involved the works of the founders’ successors (such as Chanel’s

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current creative director Karl Lagerfeld). This can be viewed as a strategy to manage the succession between artistic directors and avoiding any evaporation of charisma with the demise of the founder (Dion and Arnould 2011). It is worth noting that besides general rituals of sanctification as noted above, the founders’ links with the art world were overwhelmingly underscored. This was epitomized in Culture Chanel and Esprit Dior, both of which set out to build the founders’ artistic identity by reiterating the imbrication and mutual influences of founders and artists (Proudhon 2011; Esprit Dior 2013a). Culture Chanel focused on the life and art of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel by illustrating her diverse connection with the titans of art including figures such as Picasso and Dali (see the next section on “artistic contagion”). Esprit Dior curated by Florence Muller aimed to display the brand’s history in relation to art, fashion, society, and culture. When starting the exhibition in an introductory film (Esprit Dior 2013a), Muller emphasized that Christian Dior built his artistic sensibility from his childhood and his linkage with the artists in the 1920s–1930s. His identity as the director of a gallery before he launched his brand was also specifically mentioned. The importance of artifying the founder resides in the establishment of an organic connection between the brand and art. By doing so, on the one hand, the brand is portrayed as possessing artistic roots and hence, art becomes a part of its historic heritage; on the other hand, this connection justifies the brand’s present alliance with art, defusing its commercial undertones (Beverland 2005; Botterill 2007).

Manipulating artistic “contagion” If museums, as institutions of consecration with purifying power and hallowed space (Potvin 2012), endow brands with significance, then the diverse routes of connection with art in the exhibitions strengthen luxury brands’ artistry in a more visual and controllable way, as well as rendering the brands’ authenticity (Gilmore and Pine II 2009). This argument is based on the concept of “contagion,” which allows us to understand the mechanisms of association in a systematic way. Contagion is used here to denote a form of magical thinking in which people believe that a person’s immaterial qualities or essence can be transferred to an object through contact which can be both physical and metaphysical modes (Rozin et al 1989). Following Dion and Arnould (2011), the multiple artifying routes identified in the four exhibitions were grouped into two contagious modes: similarity and contiguity.

Contagion through similarity The theory of similarity stipulates that sympathetic effects are transmitted by actions of absorption, touch, infusion and the like (Mauss and Hubert 1902/1993, cited in Dion and Arnould 2011: 510). In my research, two forms were identified: collaborative design and designs as artworks.

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Collaborative design refers here to a process whereby a brand/designer and an artist as independent units, co-work on designs, and the artist is introduced to the public together with the brand (Bai 2010). In this situation, brand/objects are contaminated (Newman, Bartels and Smith 2014) by the artist through his personal involvement following a mechanism of transformation. The effectiveness of the transformative power largely resides in the importance of the creator’s authority in legitimating works of art. In other words, any object can be turned into an artwork by the force of an artist’s name (Becker 1982); artworks created by an artist have a unique privilege (Fine 2003). Likewise, artists are able to transfer these unique merits to other fields by acting as product designers (or co-designers); the “signature” of the artist gives brands a particular promise, a notable mark of distinction, just as it does in the art world (Szmigin 2006). Contagion through similarity is typically reflected in Louis Vuitton’s Voyages exhibition in the National Museum of China, where a section of collaboration with art was specifically installed to show the brand’s collaborative designs with well-established, international artists since 1980s. The focal point was put on a series of collaborations (bags, trunks, and luggage, etc) launched by their artistic director Marc Jacobs. Artists in question included the likes of Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Damien Hirst. The crossover products were conflated with the artists’ symbolic image or recognized sign, such as Murakami’s cherry blossoms and eye symbol, or Stephen Sprouse’s iconic graffiti rose. In this way, these products existed as the physical extension of the artists and were imbued with the artists’ essence (Newman, Bartels and Smith 2014). That is, they were artified. Apart from that, art also works as a mode of display to enshrine objects and transfer meaning (Melot 1994 cited in Dion and Arnould 2011: 511). Here, it refers to making the object appear less material and to concealing its use value treating it as an artwork. As Kapferer (2014) stated, moving beyond the functional level is an effective path for luxury to become art and require lasting value given that “function creates temporality and a built-in obsolescence (5).” At the Hermès exhibition, The Tale of Silk, curator Hilton McConnico did not show the scarves’ being worn functionally but abstracted them out managing them as art installations or framed paintings and propagating the pattern designs created by scarf artists from around the world. As such, by presenting them in the mode of canvas or as artworks, the scarves lost their function and implemented brand contagion through similarity in the context of the art world. One might recall Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). By exhibiting a urinal as a work of art, under a new title and signed by a mythical “artist” (R. Mutt), the useful significance of an ordinary object disappeared and a new identity was created (Danto 2003).

Contagion through contiguity The second form of “contagion” is presented through contiguity, where things that have once been in contact may continue to effect each other across time and space even after contact has ceased; here, contiguity is a form of symbolic contagion that focuses on temporal or spatial proximity, rather than the physical contact (Rozin, et al 1989).

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It was not unusual in the exhibitions of Culture Chanel and Esprit Dior that the exhibited artworks were not directly associated with the luxury exhibits but simply juxtaposed. Even so, following the magic of contiguity, luxury products still can be artistically contaminated by “bathing in an artistic ambiance” (Dion and Arnould 2011:512). Or, put it in another way, they are related in a metaphysical sense. Points of connection typically include friendship, working together and shared meaning. With these associations the authenticity of artworks (and other objects created by artists) was transformed into the luxury exhibits (Gilmore and Pine II 2009). One of the focuses of The Culture Chanel exhibition was the connection between the founder Coco Chanel and artists. Accordingly, sketches, paintings, and manuscripts from multiple artists were displayed. These were not actual collaborations, but referred to the likes of works of art or letters written to Coco. The collaboration mentioned in the exhibition booklet offered at the entrance of the exhibition was simply described in texts. For example, the interpretative texts attached to some sketches, self-portraits and letters by Salvador Dali referenced the close friendship between Chanel and Dali, including Dali’s short stay at Chanel’s villa La Pausa and their direct professional collaboration in the costume design for the ballet Bacchanalia in 1939. Moreover, some so-called “collaborations” which were noted in the booklet actually were not what this research means, but “working together,” as illustrated in the description of the Cubist Picasso’s works (Proudhon 2011). Picasso and Chanel apparently got to know each other in 1921. In 1922, they worked together for the first time for Cocteau’s Antigone: Picasso designed masks and backdrop and Chanel created costumes (Proudhon 2011: 30). In 1924, they worked side by side for Cocteau’s ballet Le Train Bleu; Chanel designed costumes while Picasso was responsible for a backdrop and illustrations for the piece (Proudhon 2011: 30). Briefly, by illustrating the close bonds between Chanel and the artists with the aid of stories and related evidence such as letters, the involvement of the works of art and other relevant documents in the exhibition was justified and hence the effectiveness of contagion is strengthened. Additionally, it should be noted that the exhibition also involved works and design manuscripts which have little crossover with Chanel, except that they existed at a same time. The exhibition of a manuscript by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s (1872– 1944) is a case in point—he and Chanel never even met (Proudhon 2011). The reason given for the juxtaposition was the common features and the boldness of their aesthetics and their practices. As Proudhon (2011) noted, “since 1917, Mondrian has begun his creation following neo-plasticism criterion deriving from spatial perception of Cubism. Mondrian abandoned the changes of all geometric shapes and tended toward pure abstraction which updated the vocabulary of visual art” (32). Chanel similarly “constructed her world via the application of aesthetic signals she selected. All her works reflected a type of flawless simplification and purity . . .” (32). Such a far-fetched analogy further underscores the brand’s intention to enhance its heritage and artistic DNA . Similarly, Esprit Dior showed the founder’s association with famed artists such as Picasso and Matisse, mixing their artworks and the designs by Dior which, according to the curator Muller, was inspired by these artists (Esprit Dior 2013a). Meanwhile, several pieces from Chinese artists were also exhibited. These works were directly inspired by the brand and the founder, such as the portrait of Christian Dior made by Zhang Huan who

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Figure 13.1 Zhang Huan, “North Star II .” Courtesy of Zhang Huan.

visualized Dior’s collective soul surrealistically by using incense ash from Buddhist temples (see Figure 13.1), and a huge Marilyn Monroe wearing a Dior dress painted by Yan Lei (see Figure 13.2). Through the subject association, the brands are infused by art. Other artists involved included Zeng Fanzhi, Yan Pei-Ming, Qiu Zhijie, Lin Tianmiao, Liu Jianhua, and Zhang Shujian. Their works were combined with Dior’s pieces throughout the exhibition. The same can be said of Louis Vuitton’s Voyages exhibition. This show started with Chinese contemporary artist Zhan Wang’s piece “The Beginning,” which employed a high-speed camera to shoot the explosion of a five-meter-long stone from six different vantage points to create a visual impact. According to the artist, the visual impact is expected to lead the viewers into “a state of spiritual reflection to embark on a journey of time and space” (NMC Information and Network Department 2011) (see Plate 24). This concept is completely consistent with the theme of the Louis Vuitton exhibition which told a story of a beginning, an initial voyage, a long journey through time (NMC 2011) (see Plate 24).

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS OF LUXURY FASHION BRANDS IN CHINA

Figure 13.2 Yan Lei, “Marilyn Monroe wearing a Dior dress.” Courtesy of Yan Lei.

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Establishing connections with Chinese art In general, it could be argued that collaboration between luxury brands and Chinese artists is an antidote to the negative effect caused by the massification of luxury brands; by establishing a dialogue between art and brands through hosting exhibitions, luxury brands participate in a process of individual expression, or meaning-making, which in turn contributes to the construction of the brand’s social identity. More specifically, the involvement of Chinese artists who represent Chinese contemporary culture consolidates the conceptual interaction of the art and fashion worlds and enriches the meaning of brands by providing particular interpretations. These alliances can also come to imply that the artistic identity of luxury brands was sanctioned by the Chinese art world. My research revealed that these artists seldom criticize the brands and the exhibitions, whether in interviews or in their works. Rather, when talking about the relationship between art and the luxury brands they tend to blur the boundaries and treat them equally. As artist Pei Yan-Ming expressed in an interview: “Nowadays, all designers are artists. Boundaries between them no longer exist. Movie is art. Documentaries, dance . . . The notion of art is broad. Achievements Christian Dior obtained are based on years of work, efforts and imagination, rather than overnight. After his past, the brand continues to blossom. For me, Christian Dior is an artist” (Esprit Dior 2013b). Further, through such a symbolic hybridization of Western and Eastern cultures, the brands can manipulate their “local savoir-faire,” strengthening their global image and reach (Riot, Chamaret and Rigaud 2013). The Tale of Silk exhibition is a good case in point. McConnico created associations between scarves and Chinese culture and art forms in multiple ways. For example, one piece of artwork named Martial Silk combined Kung Fu with silk. By weaving through 360 sabers, the softness, fineness and firmness of the silk was creatively demonstrated. In addition, Chinese film director Li Yu made an art film Silk Tide, with one of China’s most famed dancers, Huang Doudou, who led the dance holding a piece of red silk; and artist Ding Yi designed an exclusive scarf named The Rhythm of China for the exhibition (Hermès 2008). Their participation vividly strengthened the cultural connection between the brand and China. There were similar instances in the Dior exhibition, which invited eight Chinese artists as aforementioned who created paintings, sculptures, videography and photography inspired by the brand. Besides, as a symbol of linking with local culture, such alliances hope to help to establish emotional bonds with local consumers (more precisely, local cultural elite and opinion leaders), which fosters the emergence of authentic feeling (Beverland and Frarrelly 2010). This issue may also be understood in combination with the strategy of artification. Luxury brands must reinforce and manage their artistic identity, just as they need to manage the succession between artistic directors, in order to maintain the aura and also their relationship with art world (Dion and Arnould 2011). In this sense, it can be argued that collaboration with Chinese artists is a way of bringing the latter into the brand’s milieu, expanding the territory of the brand-art story and inventing its traditions (Brown, Kozinets and Sherry 2003). As a reciprocal process, the association with these global luxury brands brings the artists greater international reputation and can even fund support.

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Moreover, given that strategic alliance is a way of reaching untapped market segments (Rodrigue and Biswas 2004), associations with Chinese contemporary art are being utilized in the hope of attracting new and expanding collectors of Chinese contemporary art. China is now the world’s second biggest art market, just behind the United States (Flora 2015). Chinese art enthusiasts and investors have reached the 100 million figure and annual turnover is ¥90 billion (approximately US $ 13.5 billion). In addition, the number of participants, as well as turnover, continue to increase at a rate of 10–20 percent a year (China Daily 2014). Given such a huge potential market, it can be imagined how significant this form of strategic alliance is for luxury brands as a means of attracting the attention of the new audience.

Conclusion This chapter aims to provide an insight into the role the museum exhibition plays in the process of artification of luxury brands in general and its relationship with Chinese culture in particular. It should be noted that in the luxury sector, the strategy of artification including curating exhibitions is a global brand marketing strategy, pervasive across cultures. Although China has become the world’s second largest consumer of luxury goods (China Daily 2010), the exhibitions were not specifically designed for the Chinese market except for the Louis Vuitton Voyages. For instance, after finishing its installation in China, Esprit Dior traveled to Tokyo (2014) and Seoul (2015), all curated by Florence Muller. Likewise, the Hermès exhibition The Tale of Silk was presented in Hong Kong (2007) and Milan (2008) as well as Shanghai (2007) and Beijing (2008). While there were differences in terms of exhibition design and themes, the projects similarly highlighted the brands’ heritage, craftsmanship and association with the art world. On this basis, a connection with local culture was incorporated into the projects. While the Louis Vuitton Voyages exhibition was designed specifically for a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the brand’s introduction to the Chinese mainland, this brand has hosted more than one similar exhibition in other countries and regions. This can be seen its latest curatorial project in Tokyo, Volez, Voguez, Voyagez—Louis Vuitton exhibition (April 23 to June 19, 2016), which was first shown in Grand Palais, Paris from December 4, 2015 to February 21, 2016. Curated by Olivier Saillard, this exhibition retraced Louis Vuitton’s great journey from 1854 to the present, including its strong ties with Japan since the nineteenth century (Louis Vuitton 2016). This surely will not be the last example of a global luxury brand employing strategic and culturally-specific marketing. In an era of longing for authenticity, luxury brands increasingly turn from well-known ostentation to an inconspicuous brand imagery, leading to increased attention to immaterial values such as the sensorial, the moral and the noncommercial (Mendes and Rees-Roberts 2015; Kapferer 2012). This tendency is typically reflected in the intersection between the art and luxury sectors. In this context, it is expected that fashion curating, serving as a way of holistic artification and an important intermediary of brand communication, will continue to flourish as a tool of brand promotion and meanwhile, museums, as authoritative institutions of art and culture, will retain their prestigious appeal for luxury worlds for a long time to come.

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Headings in italics are exhibitions, installations, books or magazines. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations and those followed by n refer to notes. Abbott, Janelle 126–7 Abramovic, Marina 192 Absolutely Mardi Gras (1996) 145 accessories 146, 173, 178 handbags 7, 207 scarves 220, 224 Acne Studios, Berlin 9 actor-network-theory 22 advertising 45, 77, 105, 113, 123–4 Aghion, Gaby 100 Agnès B 209 Ai Weiwei exhibition (2015) 110 AIDS related materials 45, 141, 145, 147 Alberta Ferretti 180 Alexander, Sally 156 Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015) 17, 41, 107, 110 Alphabet Concept (Beecroft) 200 Ämmät, Tärähtäneet 124, 131 Amos Anderson Museum, Helsinki 119, 122 Anderson, J.W. 106 Anna Mustonen & Co 124 Anna Piaggi: Fashionology (2006) 99 Antwerp Six 12 architecture 111–12 Archiva di Ricerca Mazzini 177–8 archives 60, 154, 185 Chloé 100 Contemporary Fashion Archive (CFA ) 77, 85n.7 digital 77–9, 174 LGBTQ materials 143–4 London College of Fashion 149n.4 Louis Vuitton 101–2 Mazzini Archive 177–8 Valentino 114, 174 Women’s Library, London 159–60

Armani, Giorgio 177 Giorgio Armani retrospective (2000–1) 6, 174–5 Armani Sylos, Milan 177 Aronson Gallery, Parsons School of Design, New York 127, 129 art commercial culture 6, 201–3, 207, 209 critique of fashion 65–7 merging with fashion 6–8, 151 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 58 The Art of Fashion (1967) 41 Art of Travel (2013) 169 Arthur, Clint 208 artification 213–19, 224–5 artisans 180, 202 See also ateliers; hand made fashion artists artistic practice 202–3 collaboration with fashion industry 6–8, 92, 199–209, 214, 220–1, 224–5 Artketing 214 Arzalluz, Miren 82 AT Kearney Global Cities Index 106 ateliers 53, 114 See also artisans; hand made fashion attributes 94–6, 99, 100, 102 Au Courant: Contemporary Canadian Fashion (1997–98) 44–5 audiences attraction 2, 8, 40–1, 53, 57, 68–9 circulation 46 feedback 132, 141 footfall 17, 106, 110, 111, 132 interpretation by 131–2 participation 62–7, 73, 83–4, 112–13, 161–2, 186, 194

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230

Audrey Hepburn exhibition (2015) 110 Aulenti, Gae 92 aura 215, 224 Australian fashion diplomacy strategy 60 Australian Fashion Week 59, 60 authenticity 169, 213–17, 219, 225 Avvakumov, Yuri 75, 77 Back, Ann Sofie 162 Bai, Yuli 168, 169 Bailey, Brian 45 Baker, Josephine 142 Bakst, Leon 99–100 Balenciaga 77, 82, 185, 187 Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum, Getaria 18 Balenciaga, Cristóbal 146 bananas 99 Barbican Art Gallery, London 147 Barton, Del Kathryn 64 Bast 208–9 Baudelaire, Charles 116 Baudrillard, Jean 202 Beauty Curators 10, 11 Beecroft, Vanessa 200 Belgian fashion 12, 19, 73 Bellissima. L’Italia dell’alta moda (2014) 175–6 Belvedere, Florence 92 Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia 57, 67–9 Benetton 123 Bengtsen, Peter 168 Benjamin, Walter 208, 215 Bergstrom, Christine 191 Berlin Fashion Week 130 Berman, Marshall 116 Bernadette Corporation 161 Bertelli, Patrizio 177 Bertola, Paola 176 Bët, Xuly 162 Beumer, Guus 188–9 Beuys, Joseph 7 Biba 138 BIG exhibition (2012–14) 49–50, 53 Bigolin, Ricarda 65–7 Bishop, Julie 60 Black British Style (2004) 142 black style 141–2 Blackman, Inge 138, 142 Blair, Rikki Beadle 142 Bless 77 Bloomfield, Nicole 29–32 Blow, Isabella 114–15 Blum, Stella 58

INDEX

Blumstein, Madeleine 3 body absent 140, 183 fashion industry attitudes 124–5, 191–3, 200 female silhouette 82, 115, 193 and garments 29, 33, 53, 107, 140, 156–9, 191–2, 193 male body shape 79 posture 98 See also mannequins Body Beautiful (Remix) installation (Puha, Muurikmäki) 123–4, 123 Bologna, University of 177–8, 180 Bologna Design Week 178 Bolton, Andrew 21, 41, 107, 187 Bolzoni, Monica 178 Bosschaert, Wout 80–1 Boudens, Paul 195n.4 Bourdieu, Pierre 199, 209 Bourdin, Guy 105, 113 Bourn, Gabrielle 141 Boutique—Where Art and Fashion Meet, Helsinki (2012) 88, 119–20, 129–32 first edition, Fashion Interactions, New York (2013) 125–7, 129 second edition, Thinking about Fashion Through Art, Tokyo (2014) 125–7, 129–30, 132 third edition, Berlin (2016) 126–7, 130–1, 132 Bowery, Leigh 138, 146 Brady, Cornelius 138 Brancati Costume Teatrali 93 brands 65–6, 75, 77, 123–4 artification 199–209, 213–19, 224–5 collaboration with artists 6–8, 92, 199–209, 214, 220–1, 224–5 exhibitions 7–8, 99, 154, 168–9, 221 fashion curation 10, 58 marketing 214, 220–1 museum exhibitions 213, 217–18 See also contemporary fashion; designers; fashion industry Brett, Katharine B. (née Maw) 43 Breward, Christopher 5, 88, 107, 147, 167 Brighton Museum & Art Gallery 145, 146 Brighton Ourstory 145 British Fashion Council 88, 106, 111 British Library 78 Brook, James 147 Brooklyn Museum, New York 207 Bunny, Rupert 63

INDEX

Burberry 106 Burgess, Anna 193–4 Burnham, Dorothy (née MacDonald) 42–3 Burnham, Harold 42–3 Burrows, Stephen 142 Bus Projects, Melbourne 66 Bush Magic collection (Plunkett, Sales) 64 Butazzi, Grazietta 175 Byrne, John G. 140, 145 Cabrera, Federico 125 Cairo Under Wraps: Early Islamic Textiles (2014–15) 50 Callon, Michael 22 Calvin Klein 123 La Camicia Blanca Secondo Me (2013) 174 Camilleri, Izzy 50–3 Campbell, Edie 102 Canada, contemporary fashion 44–5 capitalism 152, 160–1 Cappella dei Principi, Florence 92–3, 93 Cardin, Pierre 199, 210n.2 Caribbean style 142 Casati, Marchesa 102 Catterall, Claire 111, 112 catwalks 77, 79, 161–3, 191 Cavallo, Adolph 184–5 Celant, Germano 6, 92, 175, 177 celebrities 67, 124, 154 Central Saint Martins, London 107, 114 Centre for Fashion Curation, London College of Fashion 107 Centro di Firenze per la moda italiana 176 Chalayan, Hussein 7, 106, 112 Chamberlain Mary 156 Chanel 82, 192–3, 215 Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, New York 7–8, 8 Culture Chanel (2011) 169, 214, 218–19, 221 exhibitions 7, 107 Chanel, Gabrielle “Coco” 218–19, 221 charismatic authority 218–19 Charles James: Beyond Fashion (2014) 28–9 Charles Jourdan 105 Cherkaoui, Sidi Larbi 82–3 Chicks on Speed (2009) 155 children’s exhibitions 62–4 China 169, 214, 218, 221–2, 224–5 China: Through the Looking Glass (2015) 187 Chloé 88, 100 Chloé Attitudes (2012) 88, 91, 99–100 Christian Dior Couture (2011) 53

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Christian Dior Museum and Garden, Granville 18 Cinderella installation (Matusui, Tatehana) 124, 179 Clark, Hazel 129, 130–1 Clark, John Matta 161 Clark, Judith 75, 88, 107 Judith Clark Costume Gallery, London 87 Judith Clark Studio Ltd 97–8 Clark, Michael 146 clothing See garments Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s (2013–14) 147 Cocteau, Jean 146 Cocurata 209, 211n.15 Cole, Shaun 89 collaboration artists 6–7, 62–4, 115, 121–8, 168–9, 199–209, 221, 224–5 celebrities 191 collaborative turn 120 conservators 22, 27–8, 34, 40 creative networks 73, 77–8, 84, 131, 186 exhibition-making 1–2, 5, 57, 60, 62–4, 75, 84, 92, 115, 119–28, 158 image making for fashion 185–6 photograpers 113 triangulation of expertise 107, 112, 115 collections 2–3, 42 collection management 39, 75, 77, 141, 143–5 global collections 42, 44, 49 LGBT materials 137–8, 143–6 See also exhibitions Collette Dinnigan: Unlaced (2015–16) 59–62, 61 Columbia University 32 Comme des Garçons 12, 82, 131 commercial approach 9–10, 13, 64, 75, 154, 162, 207–9 blurred with culture 6, 169, 201–3 company museums 173 conservation 23–31 interventions 33 technical precision 25–6 See also transience of fashion objects conservators 22, 24 construction techniques 28, 31–2, 43, 53–4 See also three-dimensional form constructivism 77, 128 consumerism 9–10, 155, 160

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contagion 219–22 artistic contagion 219 contemporary art collaboration on exhibitions 122–31 collaboration with fashion industry 6–8, 92, 199–209, 214, 224–5 contemporary design 105, 111 contemporary fashion 3, 5, 44–5, 73, 77, 84, 152, 164n.1 See also brands Contemporary Fashion Archive (CFA ) 77, 85n.7 contiguity 220–2 Cool Britannia 106 copyright 19, 28, 77, 124 Costume Museum of Canada, Winnipeg 18 costume museums 18, 42, 173–4, 176 See also fashion museums Courtauld Institute, London 110 couture 21, 31, 43, 53, 57–8, 114 collaboration with artists 8, 199–209, 214 Italy 175–6 Couture Graphique: Fashion, Graphic Design and the Body (2013) 195n.4 Coveri, Enrico 174 Coveri Story. Da Prato al Made in Italy (2012) 174 Cox, Patrick 45 crafts 82, 154–6, 159, 180, 202, 213 See also hand made fashion creative networks 73, 77–8, 84 creative process 75, 121, 128 Crisp, Quentin 139 Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum, Getaria 18 critical curation See curation critical fashion 160–3 Cube art work (Murakami) 206 Cubism 221 cultural analysis 4–5, 10–13, 119–20, 131–3, 164, 167 feminist approach 152–3, 160–1 cultural capital 107, 200, 209 cultural context 23, 35, 63, 65, 190 Cultural Dresscode installation (Lunabba, Ämmät) 124, 125 cultural field, fashion 172–4 cultural turn 22 Culture Chanel (2011) 169, 214, 216, 218–19, 221 curation critical curation 1–2, 13, 129–33, 153–4, 209 cultural analysis 119–20, 131–3, 153

INDEX

discourse 10, 13, 124, 129, 132–3, 152–3, 183–6, 190–2, 194 feminist approach 151–6, 158–60 fine art by fashion brands 200–9 knowledge creation 2, 4–5, 87–8, 163–4 selection of exhibits 24, 40–1 teaching 12–13, 130–1 See also exhibitions curatorial 153 curatorial turn 1, 4–5 curators 3–7, 9–12, 87 custodians 3, 24 enablers 131 power of 4–5, 119–20 project managers 119–21 Currelly, Charles Trick 42 Curtin, Tansy 68 Cut my Cote (1973) 43 D&K (Dolci & Kabana) 57, 65–7, 70n.13 Dali, Salvador 7, 128, 219, 221 Dance Umbrella 111 dancers 124–5 Dangin, Pascal 113 Davin, Anna 156–7 Dayton Boots 45 De Chirico, Giorgio 88, 99–100 de Jonge, Jacoba 80 de la Haye, Amy 2–3, 107, 138, 145 de Perthuis, Karen 189 De Petri, Stephen 58 de Tervarent, Guy 96 Debo, Kaat 19, 112 Deleuze, Giles 189 Demeulemeester, Anne 19, 83 department stores 188–90 Selfridges, London 7, 168 Derrida, Jacques 159 Design Museum, Milan 176 design process 19, 60–1, 62, 65–7, 77 designers 8, 12, 18, 75 archives 19, 101–2, 114, 174, 177–8 Australian 18, 59–65 creative networks 77–8 intent 32–3 See also brands; names of individual designers didactic exhibitions 168, 171, 177–80 digital exhibits 78, 79–84, 112–13 digitization 19, 28, 77–9, 144, 146 Diller, Scofidio + Renfro 29 Ding Yi 224

INDEX

Dinnigan, Collette 57, 59–62 Dior 128, 215, 223 Christian Dior Museum and Garden, Granville 18 Esprit Dior (2013) 169, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 225 exhibitions 8, 53 Dior, Christian 146, 219, 221–2, 222, 224 disabilities, fashion for people with 50–3 discourse of fashion curating 13, 124, 152–3, 183–6, 190–2, 194 critical 129, 132–3 spatialized 10, 133 display practices 6–7, 10, 40–1, 60–1, 79–84, 140 construction techniques 53–4 films 52–4, 61 gallery display 45–9 labelling 47–8, 49 multi-sensory 183, 186–90 object based display 119 DIY fashion 155, 156, 159, 162–3 documentation (conservation interventions) 35 Dolce e Gabbana (D&G) 65, 92, 177 Double Espresso 45 Doue, Axelle 191, 192 Douglas, Craig 58 Doukhobor communities 43 dress See garments Dresscode installation (Lunabba, Ämmät) 126, 129 Dresses Undressed (film) 80, 80 Duffy 162 Dufy, Raoul 7 Dysfashional: From Concept to Construction (2007) 168, 187–8, 190, 194 Eliasson, Olafur 167, 200 Elite Elegance: Couture in the Feminine Fifties (2002–3) 48 Ellis, Perry 146 embroidery 155, 156, 163 entanglement theory 22 entertainment 153–4, 180 ephemera 75, 77, 141, 145 Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris 200 Esprit Dior (2013) 169, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 225 ethics (of conservation) 25, 27 ethnographic interviews 125 Europeana Fashion project 78

233

Evans, Caroline 75, 77, 78–9, 87 exhibitions 1–2, 97–102, 161, 183 blockbuster 154 as communication 121–2 as critiques 65–7, 87–9 didactic nature 105–6, 168, 171, 177–80 as entertainment 62–4, 105–6, 153–4, 180 Italy 174–5, 177–81 LGBT styles 137–40 multi-sensory 183, 186–90 narratives 3, 5–6, 40–1, 60–1, 65–7, 110, 122, 153, 215–16 object selection & placement 34, 39–41, 140 site-specific 129, 133 touring exhibitions 7, 18, 57–9, 67–9, 88, 111, 115–16, 129–31 vanity exhibitions (fashion houses) 58, 215–18 See also collections; curation; museums Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids (2014–15) 62–5, 64 Eye Love Monogram design 203–5 Eye See You installation (Eliasson) 200 Fabulous Fashion 1907–67: From the Costume Institute (1981) 58 Factory (Andy Warhol) 128, 202 Faith Fusion: Muslim Women’s Style in Australia (2014) 154 Faking It: Originals, Copies and Counterfeits (2014–15) 29, 31 fashion 1, 125, 163, 183 aesthetics 12, 33 beyond garments 121, 168, 183–4 conceptual design 12 context 1–2, 3, 94, 161 as cultural field 172–4 disabilities, people with 50–3 haute couture 8, 21, 31, 43, 53, 57–8, 114, 175–6 local phenomenon 133, 180 merging with art 6–8, 151 research 167 See also garments Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton (1971) 3 Fashion and Textile Museum, London 172 Fashion Archive 1995–2010 installation (Paris) 168, 185 fashion blogs 78 fashion critique 65–7, 130

234

fashion curation See curation Fashion East 106 fashion films 79–80, 82–4 Fashion Follows Form (2014–15) 50–2, 51 Fashion in Motion events 162, 164n.9, 190–1 fashion industry 44–5, 65–7, 75, 107, 130, 171, 209 collaboration with artists 6–8, 92, 199–209, 214, 224–5 critique by art 65–7 fast fashion 126–8 Finland 120 Italy 171–5, 180 manufacturing 124, 126–8, 156 marketing strategies 8, 75, 123–5, 205–9, 224–5 subculture influence 137 See also brands Fashion Institute of Technology, New York 154 Fashion Interactions (2012) 129 Fashion. Italian Style (2003) 175 fashion magazines 3, 12, 45, 78–9, 184–5 Fashion Museum, Bath 18 fashion museums 2–3, 17–19, 172–7, 183 See also costume museums fashion objects 184–5, 186 death-drive 33–5 meaning 40, 77–9, 125, 153 Fashion Plates exhibition (1971) 184–5 Fashion Space Gallery (UAL ), London 98, 193 fashion studies 22–3, 27–31, 106, 107, 152 role of fashion curation 10–12, 171, 177–81 teaching fashion curation 130–1 fashion system, Italy 173–5, 180 Fashion Theory (magazine) 22 The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier. From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (2013–15) 17, 147, 149n.5 FashionFashion zine 161 Fastes de cour et cérémonies royales—Le costume de cour en Europe 1650–1800 (2009) 48 Fee, Sarah 49–50 Felleshus, Berlin 130 Felt Suit installation (Beuys) 7 female silhouette 82, 115, 193 femininity 160–1, 163, 205 feminism 152–3, 155, 159–61 feminist fashion curation 154–64 feminist style 156

INDEX

Ferragamo Museum, Florence 18, 176 Ferré, Gianfranco 92–3, 174, 177 Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré 177 field theory 199 film displays 52–4, 61, 122, 125, 127–8, 131, 187–8 holographic 82–3 Filmer, Naomi 75 fine art 6, 200–9 Finkelstein, Joanne 162 Finland, fashion industry 120 Finnish Institute in Japan 129 The First Book of Fashion 32 The First Monday in May 2016 (film) 41 First Nations, Canada 43 Fisher, Tom 184 FIT Museum See Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT ), New York Flanders Fashion Institute (FFI ), Antwerp 73–4, 84 Flare (magazine) 45 Florence, Italy 92–4, 176 Flossaut, Charlotte 191 Flying Machine Films 61 Flying Object 195n.8 folklore museums 173 Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris 167, 200 Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, Paris 18 Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré, Milan 177 Fondazione Prada, Milan 177 Fondo René Gruau 178 footfall 17, 106, 110, 111, 132 Foucault, Michel 159 Four Leaf Clover Gown (Charles James) 29–30, 30 Foxton, Simon 79, 112 Franceschini, Dario 172 freelance conservators 25 Freudenthal & Verhagen 186 Frida Kahlo. Appearances can be Deceiving (2012) 99 Frisa, Maria Luisa 98–9, 111, 175 Froment, Jean-Louis 218 Fukiyose installation (matohu, Nagaoka) 129–30, 130 funding issues 127, 129 The Future of Fashion is Now (2014–15) 70n.13 Futurism 128 Galerie Boutique, New York 209 La Galerie. Louis Vuitton (2015) 91, 100–2

INDEX

Galliano, John 53 Game Changers. Reinventing the 20th century silhouette (2016) 82–3 garments 183 attributes 194 display practices 9–10, 119, 140 fashion industry 75, 126–8 historical perspective 2–3, 184 home-made 157, 159, 161, 163 meaning 125, 153 relationship to wearer 29, 33, 107, 140, 156–9, 191–2, 193 social context 3, 131, 161 See also fashion Gaultier, Jean-Paul 8, 17, 146, 147 Maison Jean Paul Gaultier 17 gay styles See LGBT styles Gehry, Frank 167, 200 gender 151, 153–5, 163, 205 Gernreich, Rudi 146 Gervers, Veronika 43 Ghesquière, Nicolas 208 ghost labor (conservators) 22–3, 27 Gilbert, Sir Arthur 110 Gilbert & George 167 Gilbert Collection 110–11 Giorgio Armani retrospective (2000–1) 6, 174–5 Girl Evacuees installation (Tukiainen, Koski) 124, 128, 129, 130 Givenchy 185 The Glamour of Italian Fashion. From 1945–2014 (2014) 175 global collections 42, 44, 49 global culture 106, 123–4, 128, 209, 224–5 See also brands Global Fashion Education Rankings 106 Gluck 145 Goddess. The Classical Mode (2004) 75, 76 The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–1957 (2008–9) 67–8 Golden Hum 81 Goldin, Nan 161 Golding, Francis 146, 149n.4 GQ magazine 80 Grant, Dorothy 45 Greek influences 75 Grey, Richard 99 Groake, Carmody 115 Gruau, René 178 Gualtieri, Alessandro 188

235

Gucci Museum, Florence 18 guest curators 87 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 6, 67, 207 Guggenheim Museum, New York 6, 92, 174 Guinness, Daphne 114 Guy Bourdin: Image Maker (2014–15) 105, 113 Gvasalia, Demna 85n.14 Hadid, Zaha 7, 112 Haida 45 hair stylists 99, 162 hand made fashion 21, 82, 114, 155, 156, 161 See also artisans; ateliers; crafts handbags 7, 207 Hardy, John 138, 140 Hardy, K8 152, 161–3 Harney, Benja 63 Harricana 45 Harris, William 53 Hate Couture installation (Ämmät) 131 Haughton, Hugh 100 haute couture 21, 31, 43, 53, 57–8, 114, 175–6 collaboration with artists 8, 199–209, 214 Healy, Robyn 18, 187 Heath, Shona 113, 115 Heath-Kerr, Brenton 145 Hello Kitty 124, 202 Helsinki 120, 125 Helsinki Art Museum 7 Hepburn, Audrey 110 Hermès 8, 169, 214, 215–16, 220, 224, 225 Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg 110 Hess, Bart 80 Het Nieuw Instituut, Rotterdam 188 Het Totaal Rappel—Bernhard Willhelm (2007) 186 Hetherington, Paul 188 Heyman, Frederik 80–1 hippies 140 Hirst, Damien 220 historic perspective 2–3, 19, 75, 80, 82 brands 215–19 historic techniques, reproduction 32 Hodge, Brooke 111 Hoffmann, Jens 112 Holford, Mary 44 Hood, Adrienne 43 Howell, Margaret 106 Huang Doudou 224 Huidobro, Claudia 191 Human Sanctuary (choreography) 82–3, 82

236

identity 125, 143, 154, 161 Ijäs, Mikko 122, 131 Ilincic, Roksanda 106 I’ll be your Mirror (1997) 161 image making for fashion 78–9, 121–4, 184–5 image wall 83–4 Imagining Chanel. An Interpretation of the V&A Archive performance (2012) 192–3, 193, 194 immersive environments 63–4, 65–7 Immigration Museum, Melbourne 154 impermanence of fashion 33–5, 110 See also conservation Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity (2012) 154 In the Making: Ruskin, Creativity and Craftsmanship (2016) 40 In the Presence of the Dragon Throne (1977) 44 independent curators 3–4, 13, 128 Infinity (2016–17) 7 information accessibility 144, 146 Insect, Paul 209 installations 66–7, 92–3, 178 fashion 121–30, 185–90, 220 intellectual property rights 19, 28, 77, 124 interactive exhibitions 19, 62–7, 83–4, 83, 112–13, 186 International Fashion Showcase (British Council) 111 International Surrealist Exhibition, Paris (1938) 7 interventions (conservation) 27, 33–5 intuition 31–3 Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013) 109, 114–15 Islamic textiles 50 Italy exhibitions 174–5, 177–81 fashion industry 167–8, 171, 178 museums 172–4, 175–7 IZ Adaptive 52–3 Jackson, Linda 63 Jacobs, Marc 8, 102, 199, 201, 208–9, 210n.13, 220 James, Charles 146, 147 Charles James: Beyond Fashion (2014) 28–9 Japan 129, 178, 201–3, 205 Jenss, Heike 115 JF and Sons 161 Jiricna, Eva 111

INDEX

Jones, Amelia 153 Jones, Glynis 59, 60–1 Jones, Stephen 99, 102 Jourdan, Charles 105, 113 The Judgement of Paris (2011) 91, 97, 98 Judith Clark Costume Gallery, London 87 Judith Clark Studio Ltd 98 Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–79, 2002) 153 Jungle. The Animal Imagery in Fashion (2017) 177 Kahlo, Frida 99 Kaikai Kiki 202 Kaliardos, James 162 Kane, Chistopher 106 Kapferer, J.N. 213, 214–15, 218, 220 Kato, Ikuko 129 Katranzou, Mary 106 kawaii culture 202, 205, 206 Kawakubo, Rei 12, 131 Kee, Jenny 63 Keep me Warm One Night (1972) 43 Kelly, Ellsworth 167 Kelly, Grace 67 Kelly, James 83 Kelly, Patrick 142 Kering 106 Khan, Natalie 89 Kidult 210n.13 The Killing of Sister George (film) 139 Kinmoth, Patrick 114 Kirke, Betty 28, 31, 32–3 Knight, Nick 79, 85n.9, 112, 187–8 knowledge creation 2, 87–8, 163, 167–8 Knuts, Hannelore 83 Koda, Harold 6, 28, 47 Koski, Samu-Jussi 124, 129 Krebs, Nico 186 Kusama, Yayoi 7, 168 Kyoto Costume Institute, Japan 18 labelling 47–8, 49, 143 Lady Gaga 124 Lagerfeld, Karl 7, 99, 176, 219 The Land of the Seven Fairy Tales installation (Suhonen, Ijäs) 122, 122, 131 Lang, Helmut 7, 77 Lang, k.d. 45 Latour, Bruno 22 Law, John 22 Lawrence, Liz 33 Leather Forever (2010) 169

INDEX

Leinonen, Jani 124 Les Arts Dècoratif, Paris 191 LGBT styles 45, 79, 89, 137–42 exhibitions 138–40 LGBTQ network 144–5 Li Yu 224 Libeskind, Daniel 45 Libeskind Patricia Harris Gallery See Patricia Harris Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum (ROM ), Toronto Licca 202 life curating 10 light 81–3, 186–8, 195n.7 Liivandi, Anu 46, 48, 49 Lin Tianmiao 222 Lind, Maria 153 Linfante, Vittorio 176 lingerie design 59 Lisbon Mude (Museo do Design e da Moda), Lisbon 172 The Little Black Jacket exhibition (2012) 7 Liu Jianhua 222 Lively, Blake 10 Living Fashion. Women’s Daily Wear 1750–1950 (2012) 80 local fashion 133, 180 London, fashion centre 106–7, 110, 115 London, Barbara 195n.8 London College of Fashion 87, 98, 107, 149n.4 London Design Festival 111 London Fashion Week 88, 106, 111 Long, Timothy 146 Loppa, Linda 73, 74 Louis Vuitton 203 archives 100–2 collaboration with artists 7, 128, 168–9, 199–201, 203–8, 214 Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton 200 Fondation Louis Vuitton 167, 200 Louis Vuitton. Art Fashion and Architecture (book) 199 Louis Vuitton Series 3 (2015) 107 Louis Vuitton-Marc Jacobs (2012) 17 retail activities 200, 207, 209 Voyages in Beijing (2011) 215, 217, 218, 220, 222, 225 LTTR 161 Ludlow, Hall 64 Lululemon 45 Lunabba, Heidi 124 luxury brands See brands

237

LV Monolith art work (Murakami) 206 LVMH 106, 203 MacDonald (later Burnham), Dorothy 42–3 machine made fashion 21, 82 Mackie, Louise 43 Madame Grè 192 Mademoiselle Privé (2015) 107 magazines (fashion) 3, 12, 45, 78–9, 184–5 Maison Jean Paul Gaultier 17 Maison Martin Margiela 82 Making and Knowing project 32 male body 79 Malign Muses. When Fashion Turns Back (2004–05) 75, 76, 87 The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of the Ch’ing Dynasty, 1644–1912 (1980) 98 mannequins 79, 98, 99, 102, 168 See also body Manus x Machina (2016) 3, 4, 21 Many Monkeys 63 Marais, Jean 146 Marchetti, Luca 168, 187–8 Margiela, Martin 12, 77, 82, 112, 162 Maison Martin Margiela 82 Martin Margiela 20 (2010) 112 Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 206, 207 Marie Antoinette 48 Marino Marini Museum, Florence 176 marketing strategies 8, 75, 123–5, 205–9, 214, 220–1, 224–5 Marks, Laura 189 Marras, Antonio 173 M(art) worlds 214 Martial Silk artwork 224 Martin, Kaj 122 Martin, Penny 112 Martin Margiela 20 (2010) 112 mass culture 6, 201–3 material culture 105, 107 material turn 18, 21–3, 32, 35 MaterialByProduct 68 materialist culture 128, 160–1 materiality 21–2, 184–6 Maticevski, Toni 68 Matisse, Henri 221 matohu 129–30 Matsui, Midori 202 Mattirolo, Anna 175 Matusui, Erina 124 Max Mara 180 Maxxi, Rome 176

238

Mazzini Archive 177–8 McConnico, Hilton 220, 224 McQueen, Alexander 8, 17, 146 Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims MA collection (1992) 114 Plato’s Atlantis collection (2010) 113 Savage Beauty (2015) 17, 41, 107, 110 Meckseper, Josephine 161 Men in Skirts (2002) 107 Menkes, Suzy 102 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 94–6 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute, New York 17 collection 28, 31, 58 exhibitions 3, 5–6, 21, 41, 47, 75, 98, 184, 187 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 17, 172 Mexican costume 53–4 Michigan State University Museum 154 Milan, Italy 174, 176, 177 Milan Fashion Week 177 Miles, Gwyn 111 Milk Studios, New York 191 mimetic experience 186–90 Missoni: Art and Color exhibition (2015–16) 174 Miyake, Issey 12, 82 M/M Paris 168, 185–6 models 191–2 Models at Work performance (2012) 168, 191 Models Never Talk performance (2015) 191–2, 192, 194 ModeNatie, Antwerp 73–4, 74, 83–4 Modern Love: Fashion visionaries from the FIDM Museum Los Angeles (2013–14) 67 modernism 154 modernity 115–16 MoMu Antwerp Fashion Museum, Belgium 18, 73–7, 172, 186 digital productions 19, 77–84 MoMuMedia 19, 83–4 touring exhibitions 87, 112 website 78 Mondrian, Piet 221 Mondrian dress (Saint Laurent) 128 Monfreda, Antonio 114 Monica Bolzoni Bianca e Blu installation 180 Monogram Cerises design 205 Monroe, Marilyn 67, 222, 223 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 17 mood rooms 122 Moreau, Jeanne 8

INDEX

Morgan, Sophie 52 Morini, Enrica 175 Morinis, Leona 195n.8 Morrow, Hamish 139 MS Understood (2009) 155 Muller, Florence 219, 221, 225 multi-sensory displays 183, 186–90 Murakami, Takashi 168–9, 199, 201–8, 220 ©Murakami show (2007–9) 207 Superflat Museum: Convience Store Edition 201 musealization 33–4 Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris (Palais Galliera) 17 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris 17 Musée d’Orsay, Paris 154 Museimpresa, Milan 173 Museo del Tessuto, Prato, Florence 174 Museo della moda Firenze 176 Museo di Gallarate, Italy 174 Museo do Design e da Moda (Mude), Lisbon 172 Museo Ferragamo, Florence 173 Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT ), New York 17, 175 conservation 28, 29–31 LGBTQ materials 89, 137, 142, 145–6, 148 Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK ), Frankfurt 168, 185, 207 Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS , formerly Powerhouse Museum), Sydney 19 collection 60, 145 exhibitions 57–62 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA ), Los Angeles 111, 207 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA ), Shanghai 217, 218 Museum of London 145–6 Museum of the City of New York 31 museums 176 and brands 213, 215–18 company 173 costume 42, 173–4, 176 fashion 2–7, 17–19, 172–7, 183 folklore 173 LGBT styles 143–8 museology 27, 152 See also exhibitions; names of individual museums Museums Association 143 Music for Youth 111 Muurimäki, Teemu 123

INDEX

Nagaoka, Kenmei 129–30 narrative in exhibitions 3, 5–6, 40–1, 60–1, 65–7, 122, 153 National Art Museum of China (NAMOC ), Beijing 216, 218 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 19, 58 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 19, 58–9, 62–5, 68, 147, 149n.3 National Museum of China (NMC ), Beijing 217, 218, 220 Neo Pop 202 networks, creative 77–8, 84 New Gen 106 New York 8 Noble, Tim 115 non-western culture 43, 190 Chinese culture 169, 214, 218, 221–2 First Nations, Canada 43 Japanese culture 201–3 non-western fashion 49 Not in Fashion: Fashion Photography in the 90s (2010) 168, 185, 194 Nuoro Museum of Costume, Italy 173 Il nuovo vocabolario della moda italiana (2015–16) 175–6 Nutty Tarts 124 object analysis 178 attributes 94–6 construction techniques 21, 27–8, 32 intuitive approach 31–3 presentation 27, 40–1 research 23, 25, 26–31, 34, 40–2, 43–4 object based display 119 objects, agency 22–3 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 5, 105–6, 131 olfactory room 188–9 OMA (architects) 94 O’Neill, Alistair 5, 88 Onorato, Taiyo 186 Open Fashion online database 78 oral history projects 155, 158, 160 organisation structures 24–5 O’Sullivan, Sue 156 otaku culture 201, 203, 205, 210n.5 Out of the Vaults: Marie Antoinette (2008–9) 48 Palais de Tokyo, Paris 88, 91, 99, 168 Palazzo Fortuny, Venice 99 Palazzo Pitti Galleria del Costume, Florence 174, 176 Pale, Mimosa 131

239

Palmer, Alexandra 18, 184 Pan (god) 94–6 Parikka, Minna 124 Paris 7, 17, 60, 200 Paris, The Judgement of (2011) 91, 97, 98 participation (audience) 62–7, 73, 83–4, 112–13, 161–2, 186, 194 Patricia Harris Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum (ROM ), Toronto 18, 45–9, 47, 50 Patrimoine Chloé 100 peacocks 98–9 Pecorari, Marco 75, 167, 168 Pei Yan-Ming 224 Pel, Martin 145 performance 66, 112–13, 155, 162–3, 190–5 perfume in displays 187–9 Pernet, Diane 80 personal narrative 114–15, 160, 163 Petrov, Julia 151 Philips, Ross 188 photography 78–9, 105, 113, 121–4, 184–6 studio 112 Piaggi, Anna 99 Picasso, Pablo 167, 219, 221 Pitti Costume Museum, Florence 174, 176 Pitti Immagine Discovery 176 Pitti Uomo, Florence 172 place branding 67–9 Plunkett, Anna 62–4 Poiret, Paul 7, 31–2, 82 coat 32 Poiret, King of Fashion (2007) 47 Polhemus, Ted 138 The Politics of Appearance (2009) 152, 155–60, 163 Pollock, Griselda 151–2, 153, 159, 160 popular culture 6, 201–3 portants 185–6 postmodernism 139, 163 Powerhouse Museum, Sydney See Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS, formerly Powerhouse Museum), Sydney Prada 94, 177 Prada Skirt exhibition (2010) 94 Prada, Miuccia 177 Prato Textile Museum, Florence 176 preservation/presentation balance 27–31 prêt-à-porter 21, 59, 174, 178 Pride and Prejudice (1999) 145 Prince, Richard 220 props 6, 87–8, 93–102, 113, 187 punk 139, 155

240

INDEX

Qiu Zhijie 222 A Queer History of Fashion: From the closet to the catwalk (2013) 137, 142, 145, 147, 149n.5, 154 Queer Style (2013) 89 queer theory 143, 147, 152 Quinlan, Karen 68 Quinz, Emanuele 168, 187–8

Royal Ontario Museum (ROM ), Toronto 18, 42–5 exhibitions 44–5, 49–54 Patricia Harris Gallery 18, 45–9, 47, 50 Royal Society of Literature 111 Rublack, Ulinka 32 runway shows 77, 79, 161–3, 191 RuPaul 45

racial stereotyping 123–4 radical fashion 178 ready-to-wear design 21, 59, 174, 178 Romance Was Born 62–4 Reeder, Jan Glier 28 Reekie, Jonathan 111 Reid, Beryl 139 Reinach, Simona Segre 167–8 René, Monica 142 Renzi, Matteo 177 research 39, 214 exhibitions 48, 53–4, 98–9, 114, 126, 128 fashion 58, 65, 107, 167, 177–8, 180 object analysis 23, 25–34, 40–2, 43–4 See also scholarship restlessness 100, 102 restoration 33 retail 9–10, 12, 200 department stores 7, 168, 188–90 within art gallery 207, 209 Réunion des musées nationaux—Grand Palais, Paris 17 The Rhythm of China scarf design 224 Richardson, Terry 124 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 78 Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashion + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries (2011–12) 48–9 Rissanen, Timo 124 RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) 65 Rodriguez, Narciso 142 Rohart, Anne 191 Roitfeld, Carine 7 Romance Was Born 57, 62–4, 63, 68 Rose, Clare 155–6, 160, 163 Rostarr 209 Rotonde 1, Luxemburg 187 Royal Academy of Arts, London 6 Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp 73, 78, 84, 112

Saatchi Gallery, London 7, 107 Saillard, Olivier 41, 168, 191, 192, 225 Saint Laurent, Yves 128, 147 Sala Bianca show (1951) 175 Sales, Luke 62–4 Salin, Salla 124 Salon de couture performance (2005) 191 Samuel, Raphael 156 Sanchez, Violeta 191 Sander, Jil 146 Sanders, Jay 161 Sanders, Joel 146 Sannwald, Daniel 82 Santiago Fashion Museum, Chile 172 Sardinian costume 173 Savage Beauty (2015) 17, 41, 107, 110 Saville, Peter 112 Sayer, Chloe 53 scarves 220, 224 Scaturro, Sarah 18 scent 187–90 Schiaparelli, Elsa 7, 128 Schimmel, Paul 207 Schmedding, Brigitta 44 Schmidt, Elke 176 Schneider, Rebecca 191–2 scholarship 22–3, 27–31, 43–4, 168, 172, 177–8, 180 See also research Schubert, Karsten 116 Sebestyen, Amanda 156 Selfridges, London 7, 168 Seminara, Angela 99 sensorium 183, 186–90 Settembrini, Luigi 92 sexuality of designers 146–7 museum collections 143–7 A Shaded View of Fashion Film (ASVOFF ) festival (2014) 80 Shoe Liberation Army installation (Parikka, Leinonen) 124

INDEX

shoes 105, 113, 124 shokugan products 201 shops 9–10, 12, 200 department stores 7, 168, 188–90 within art gallery 207, 209 SHOW studio 79–80, 85n.9, 112–13, 187–8 SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution (2009) 112 Sicilian costume 92 Siegel, Katy 201–3 silhouette (fashionable female) 82, 115, 193 Silk Tide film (Li Yu) 224 similarity 219–20 Simonetta di Cesarò 99 Simonetta. La Prima Donna della Moda Italiana (2008) 99 Simons, Raf 77 Sishy, Ingrid 92 Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices between Fashion and Architecture (2008) 111–12 skinheads 140, 145 Slamma (DJ ) 138 Smith, Pamela 32 Smith, Paul 106 Smith, Willie 142 Smockshop project (2006) 161 social meaning of objects 23, 163 social media 19, 78 Somerset House, London 88, 110–11 exhibitions programme 105, 111–15 sound 81–3, 186–8, 192, 194, 195n.7, 200 The Sound of Clothes: Anechoic installation (Knight, Hetherington, Philips) 187–8 Souper Dress (Warhol) 7 Sozzani, Franca 92 Spare Rib (magazine) 156 spatialised discourse 10, 133 Spectres. When Fashion Turns Back (2005) 75, 87, 107 speech, in performance 192, 194 Spiral Art Center, Tokyo 129 Spirit of Travel installation 100, 101 sporting fashion 45 Sprouse, Stephen 201, 208, 220 Stanfill, Sonnet 175 Star, Zora 188 Stavros 53 Steele, Valerie 145, 167, 168, 175 Storey, Helen 162

241

storytelling brands 215–19 conservator as storyteller 18 exhibition narratives 3, 5–6, 40–1, 60–1, 65–7, 122, 153 street art 208–9 street styles 45, 126 Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk 1940 to Tomorrow (1994) 89, 137–41, 139, 146–8 strek 45 Stubbing, Justin 138 stylists 9, 18, 41, 99 subcultural styles 137, 138–40, 145, 201, 208–9 Sugoi 45 Suhonen, Paola 122 Superflat Monogram film (Murakami) 206 Superflat movement 202–3, 210n.4 Superworkers. Fashioning the Spirit of the Heroes installation 178 surrealism 7, 128 Surroundings: A Contemporary Score (2013) 195n.8 Sussman, Elisabeth 161 Swinton, Tilda 191 Sylvester 142 symbiosis (fine art/fashion) 203–8 symbols 123–4, 205–7, 220 The Tale of Silk (2008) 169, 214, 216, 220, 224, 225 Taplin, Bee 64 Tate Modern, London 113 Tate Sensorium (2015) 195n.8 Tatehana, Noritaka 124 Taylor, Lou 167 teddy boys 140 Il Tempo e La Moda biennial (1996) 92–4 The Temporary Fashion Museum (2016) 188–90, 189 Terra and Roots 45 Teunissen, José 70n.13, 195n.4 textile art 154–5 textiles historic production centres 173 macro meanings 49 making 53–4 #thathautecouturefeeling (2013) 66 Themelios, Nella 65–7 Thierstein, Rhea 113 Thornton, Peter 3

242

three-dimensional form 29, 33, 53 See also body; construction techniques Tim Walker: Story Teller exhibition (2012) 113 time 96 Tiramani, Jenny 32 Today Art Museum, Beijing 216, 218 tokenism 141–2 Toledo, Ruben 75 Tonchi, Stefano 175 touring exhibitions 7, 18, 57–9, 67–9, 88, 111, 115–16, 129–31 local impact 67–9 Tra Arte e Moda exhibition 176 training, fashion curation 107 transience of fashion objects 33–5, 110 See also conservation Tregloan, Anna 60 triangulation of expertise 107, 112, 115 Triennale Palazzo dell’Arte, Milan 176 Trust Me (2010) 195n.4 Tuazon, Oscar 162 Tucker, Albert 63 Tukiainen, Katja 124, 129 Tulloch, Carol 142 Tully, Peter 145 Twenty-five years of Saint Laurent (1983–84) 6 Uffizi, Museo degli, Florence 172, 176 underwear 59, 67–8, 80 Undressed: 350 years of underwear in fashion (2014) 67–8 un-fit dance piece 124, 129, 131 Uniform project (1994–2011) 161 uniforms 161, 178 University of Bologna 177–8, 180 University of the Arts (UAL ), London 91, 98, 107 Untitled Runway Show (2012) 152, 162–3 Up Cloche: Fashion, Feminism, Modernity (2016) 154 urbanism 105, 110, 115, 116 Vairelli, Amalia 191 Valentino 114, 174 Valentino: Master of Couture (2012) 108, 113–14 van Beirendonck, Walter 19, 77, 79 Van Godtsenhoven, Karen 82 Van Hee, Marie-Josée 73 van Noten, Dries 19 Vanegas, Angela 141

INDEX

Vänskä, Annamari 88, 142, 148 Varcoe, Adele 193, 194 VB56 installation (Beecroft) 200 Verhelst, Bob 112 Versace, Gianni 146, 147, 174–5 Verthime, Shelley 105 Vetements 83, 85n.14 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 40, 42, 172 Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015) 17, 18, 41 collection management 141, 143–5 exhibitions 3, 142, 147, 175 Fashion in Motion events 162, 164n.9, 190–1 LGBTQ materials 143, 144, 146 Spectres. When Fashion Turns Back (2005) 75, 87, 137 Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk 1940 to Tomorrow (1994) 89, 137, 146, 147 touring exhibitions 67–9 Viktor & Rolf 77 Vince Man’s Shop 138, 140 Vionnet, Madeleine 28, 82, 146 Visions of Fashion (2016) 176 visitors See audiences Visitors project (2015) 92 Viti, Peter 146 Viva Glam campaign 45 Viva La Craft performance (2009) 155 ¡Viva México! (2015–16) 53–4 Vogue magazine 3 Vollmer, John 43, 44, 46 von Olfers, Sophie 185 Voyages in Beijing (2011) 214, 217, 220, 222, 225 Vreeland, Diana 5–6, 58, 98–9, 131, 154, 187 Vuitton, Gaston Louis 102, 218 The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined (2016–17) 40 Walker, Andre 142 Walker, Tim 113 Walter’s Wild Knights (film) 79 Wandor, Michelene 156, 158 Warburg, Aby 96 Warhol, Andy 7, 128, 167, 202 Warp and Weft (1980) 43 wastage 126–7, 130 Webster, Sue 115 Wedding Dresses 1775–2014 (2014) 147 Weissman, Polaire 41 Weller, Ray 139

INDEX

Westbeach Snowboard Ltd. 45 western culture 78, 190, 199 western fashion 49, 66 Westwood, Vivienne 106 The White Wedding Dress: 200 Years of Wedding Fashions (2011) 67–8 Whitney Biennial, New York (2012) 152, 161 Wilcox, Claire 190–1 Wilcox, Judith 162 Wilke, Hannah 192 Willhelm, Bernhard 186 Wilson, Chip 45 Wilson, Elizabeth 138, 140, 156 Wilson, Robert 6, 175, 200 Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM ) 155, 156 Women’s Library, London 152, 155–6, 158, 163 archives 159–60 Woodward, Sophie 184

243

workwear 45, 178 The World of Balenciaga (1973) 5 Wright, Timo 125, 131 Yamamoto, Yohji 12, 185 Yan Lei 222 Yan Pei-Ming 222 You are the Measure (2007) 161 Young, Kevin 45 Your Loss of Senses installation (Eliasson) 200 Yves Saint Laurent International 18, 58 Yves Saint Laurent: Retrospective (1987) 58 Zeng Fanzhi 222 Zhan Wang 222 Zhang Huan 221 Zhang Shujian 222 Zittel, Andrea 161

244

245

246

247

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Plate 1 Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology (2016), Upper Level Gallery View: Embroidery Case Study, Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Plate 2 Andy Warhol’s legendary “Souper Dress” (1966/7). Made of paper. Photo: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI /AFP /Getty Images.

Plate 3 “Dot Obsession” (2012). Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Louis Vuitton. Installation view, HAM —Helsinki Art Museum. © Ota Fine Arts and Louis Vuitton. Photo: © HAM /Maija Toivanen.

Plate 4 Conservator Leanne Tonkin performing an anti-static treatment on Iris Van Herpen’s silicone feather “Bird Dress” (2015, Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2015 [2016.14]) in preparation for the Manus x Machina exhibition at the Costume Institute. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Laura Mina.

Plate 5 Conservator Nicole Bloomfield working on the 1917 Poiret coat in preparation for Faking It: Originals, Copies, and Counterfeits exhibition at the Museum at FIT. © The Museum at FIT. Photo: Eileen Costa.

Plate 6 A model wearing a reproduction of Charles James iconic “Four-Leaf Clover” gown at the press preview for the exhibition Charles James: Beyond Fashion. The reproduction was created using research gathered by the conservation team and was used to demonstrate how the body and garment interacted and moved. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Sarah Scaturro.

Plate 7 Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries [January 25–October 2011] “Fashion and Interiors: Late 18th–21st centuries,” display with section overview text on the platform and didactic object labels on glass railing. With the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. © ROM .

Plate 8 Installation of BIG (November 3, 2012–December 2013). An evening dress and cape by Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent, Fall 2004 in the case derives its design from the 18th century Chinese Emperor’s 12-sign semiformal silk dragon robe seen in the far wall case. Two Martin Margiela garments are on the open platform, an 18th century Indian for European market painted and printed palmapore and 1970s photo screened furnishing textile are opposite. With the permission of the Royal Ontario Museum. © ROM .

Plate 9 Installation view of Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids at NGV International October 17, 2014–April 12, 2015. © National Gallery of Victoria.

Plate 10 Walter Van Beirendonck. Dream the World Awake, retrospective exhibition at MoMu, Antwerp, 2011. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Ronald Stoops.

Plate 11 “Walter’s Wild Knights,” installation by SHOW studio and Walter Van Beirendonck, MoMu, Antwerp, 2011. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Ronald Stoops.

Plate 12 Exhibition view of Game Changers. Reinventing the 20th century Silhouette. MoMu, Antwerp, 2016. © MoMu, Antwerp. Photo: Stany Dederen.

Plate 13 Installation view: Banana, Chloé. Attitudes, Palais de Tokyo, 2012. Photo: Judith Clark. © Chloé.

Plate 14 Giorgio de Chirico, The Uncertainty of the Poet, 1913. Tate Modern, London.

Plate 15 Exhibition plinth based on the decorative tiling in Brasserie Lipp in Paris where early Chloé presentations were held. Chloé. Attitudes, Palais de Tokyo, 2012, Photo: Judith Clark © Chloé.

Plate 16 Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan advertising campaign, Autumn 1979 (unpublished). Guy Bourdin Estate.

Plate 17 Minna Parikka and Jani Leinonen, “Shoe Liberation Army.” Installation view, Helsinki, 2012. Photo: Kari Siltala. © Amos Anderson Art Museum.

Plate 18 Detail of Skinhead style worn by John G. Byrne from Streetstyle exhibition. Courtesy of Shaun Cole.

Plate 19 A Queer History of Fashion exhibition at Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York. With permission of Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.

Plate 20 K8 Hardy, “Bra Dress,” Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles (2016). Courtesy of the artist K8 Hardy and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, LA /NY. Photo: Jeff McClane.

Plate 21 “Black and Graphics: New Chromatic and Ornamental Codes.” 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. Rimini. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Simona Segre Reinach). Garments: Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini.

Plate 22 “Versace Iconic Dress.” 80s–90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance. Rimini. Museo della Città di Rimini, 2013 (curated by Simona Segre Reinach). (Gianni Versace end of 1980s–early 1990s). Garments: Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini.

Plate 23 Fashion Archives 1995–2009, 2010 Exhibition view, Not in Fashion: Fashion and Photography in the 90s, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. Original posters, inkjet reprints, fashion publications, miniature mock-ups, CD s. Display includes Infinitable, Portant and Cadre [PM ]. Photo © M/M (Paris).

Plate 24 Zhan Wang, “The Beginning.” Courtesy of Zhan Wang.