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To cite this article: Valerie Steele (2008) Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,
Fashion Theory, 12:1, 7-30
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Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style 7
Museum Quality:
The Rise of the
Valerie Steele Fashion Exhibition
Valerie Steele (Ph.D., Yale Abstract
University) is Director and Chief
Curator of The Museum at the
Fashion Institute of Technology This article surveys the history of museum fashion exhibitions, and
(FIT). She has curated more explores some of the reasons why they have so often been controversial.
than 20 exhibitions in the past
Issues such as corporate sponsorship, curatorial independence, and his-
ten years, and is also the author
of numerous books, including torical accuracy are analyzed in connection with a range of exhibitions.
The Black Dress (HarperCollins, In particular, the article considers the influence of Diana Vreeland’s
2007), Ralph Rucci (Yale
exhibitions at the Costume Institute and the issues that are raised when
University Press, 2006) and The
Corset: A Cultural History (Yale an exhibition is devoted to a single famous designer, such as Armani,
University Press, 2001). Versace, or Vivienne Westwood.
the exhibition would “leave its mark on next fall’s fashions.” But why
should it be a bad thing if fashion designers are inspired by museum
exhibitions?
Despite their manifold faults, Vreeland’s exhibitions succeeded in
abolishing the aura of antiquarianism that had previously surrounded
most costume displays. As Anne Hollander immediately realized,
Vreeland’s presentations were show business, designed “to do away with
any waxwork-museum look of corpses under glass. Wired for sound
. . . these rooms . . . resemble a stage set through which the audience
may freely move” (Dwight 2002: 220). Vreeland was instrumental in
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Figure 1
Installation view from Fashion
and Surrealism. Courtesy of
the Museum at FIT, New York.
Photograph by Irving Solero.
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Koda emphasized that he does not entirely agree with this approach,
he defended it as “one way of getting the public to become enthralled
and relate to a world that was, and that is, at a remove from their own
experience.” This is certainly an important point, and goes to the heart
of Vreeland’s influence in abolishing the aura of antiquarianism that can
so easily surround historical dress. Koda admitted that “the audience
then took what she presented really literally,” and he implied that
some of Vreeland’s misleading exaggerations could, perhaps, have been
compensated for with didactic material; but he also argued passionately
that “she was ahead of her time” in as much as today’s museum visitors,
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2005: 86).
Handsomely installed, the exhibition also featured a wealth of histor-
ical and technical information that contributed to raising it beyond the
banal paradigm of designer-as-artist.
Yet many critics were extremely hostile: “Liz Hurley’s safety-pin
dress under the same roof as Raphael’s cartoons?” thundered one
reviewer (Drinkwater 2002). Stephen Bagley, former director of the
Design Museum, dismissed the Versace show (without having seen it) as
“merely an advertisement,” since “Versace’s designs are presented for
our uncritical admiration.” Ultimately, he argued that “Versace does
not deserve to be in the V&A on the grounds of quality, although it
would fit in the form of a critique of the history of the public relations
industry” (Morrison 2002).
By contrast, the Victoria and Albert Museum received a generally
positive critical response to its big exhibition, Vivienne Westwood,
held in 2004. It is probably relevant that Westwood is a beloved
British institution, described by one journalist as “a national treasure”
(Freeman 2004). The “pioneer of punk fashion” is not known for her
corporate wealth, and she is no longer as influential as she once was,
but she helped put London on the fashion map, and in the process she
“revitalized interest in traditional British fabrics such as Harris tweed”
(Jury 2003). Westwood also had a long history of engaging in research
at the V&A’s historic costume collection, so it may have seemed fitting
that her own work should be placed on display there. Moreover, the
V&A has acquired over the years an important collection of Westwood’s
early work, which is extremely popular with the museum’s visitors.
Nevertheless, some visitors wanted more information, criticizing the
“perfunctory labels” (surprising in light of the excellent catalog by
Claire Wilcox), and suggesting that the exhibition was less like a genuine
retrospective and more of a “greatest hits” that lacked any significant
“historical interpretation” (O’Neill 2006: 383).
Back in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art continued its
policy of prohibiting exhibitions of living designers, but gingerly engaged
with the couture house of Christian Dior to mount an exhibition of the
late designer’s work in 1997. At the opening reception, the famous Party
of the Year, the museum lobby also featured a temporary display of
dresses by Dior’s then-current designer, Jean-Franco Ferré. Subsequently,
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 17
press, in large part because Chanel Inc. funded the exhibition, but also
because the exhibition included many works by Karl Lagerfeld mixed in
with historic pieces by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Questions were once
again raised about undue corporate influence on the content and design
of the show. Critics naturally recalled the “debacle” of the proposed
Chanel exhibition of 1999 that was canceled after Lagerfeld and the
Metropolitan’s director Philippe de Montebello “fell out over how to
link art to Chanel’s fashion” (Menkes 2000).
While I believe that the Chanel exhibition was, in many ways, a
missed opportunity, I also think much of the criticism in the press was
misconceived. After all, one could hardly expect Dior to fund a Chanel
exhibition! Moreover, it is not fair to criticize curators for not doing
what they never intended to do, and Koda has repeatedly said that
he never intended to do a full-scale retrospective of the work of Coco
Chanel. Yet this is what many visitors to the Chanel exhibition expected
to see. After all, Chanel was only the most famous and influential
designer of the twentieth century. Moreover, her style was intimately
intertwined with her life, and since she lied constantly about her life, an
exhibition that explored the mythology and the reality of Chanel would
be fascinating. However, Koda wanted to focus on the key elements of
her style without addressing her biography, per se.
Pamela Golbin’s exhibition on Balenciaga (2006) at the Musée de la
Mode can usefully be compared with Koda’s Chanel (2005) exhibition
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both exhibitions contained work
by the late, great couturiers and their contemporary successors. But
whereas Karl Lagerfeld’s influence on the Chanel exhibition was left
the subject of conjecture, Nicholas Ghesquière was explicitly credited
as co-curator of the Balenciaga exhibition. Ghesquière’s input, however,
seems to have been restricted to the second half of the show, which
was devoted to his ten years at the couture house. The first part of
the exhibition was a straightforward, chronological retrospective of
Cristobal Balenciaga’s work, from the 1930s to his retirement in 1968.
By contrast, the Chanel exhibition mixed together the work of Mlle
Chanel and Lagerfeld in such as way as to highlight his appropriations
of her signature themes. As a result, Chanel’s originals sometimes ended
up looking merely dated.
20 Valerie Steele
Figure 2
Installation view from Hussein
Chalayan, Groninger Museum.
Photograph by Marten de
Leeuw.
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Issues of Interpretation
Figure 3
East façade with Schiaparelli
FASHION banners, Philadelphia
Museum of Art: Kelly and
Massa Photography, 2003.
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Figure 4
Installation view from London
Fashion. Courtesy of the
Museum at FIT, New York.
Photograph by Irving Solero.
24 Valerie Steele
Figure 5
Installation view from China
Chic East Meets West.
Courtesy of the Museum at FIT,
New York. Photograph by Irving
Solero.
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museum visitors could see how this corset gave its working-class wearer
the same silhouette as the fashionable lady. They learned that, contrary
to Thorstein Veblen, corsets were not only worn by ladies of leisure.
After surveying the history of corsetry, the exhibition then showed how
a range of contemporary designers have utilized corsetry in their work
for very different effects—ranging from the romantic historicism of
Christian Lacroix’s couture wedding dress to Thierry Mugler’s leather
dominatrix corset and John Galliano’s African-inspired beaded corset
for Christian Dior couture.
Some of the same objects were featured in Extreme Beauty (2001),
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Koda’s first solo exhibition at the Costume Institute, which also explored
the relationship between body and clothes. In addition to featuring a
range of corset-related material, he expanded his research to incorporate
other parts of the body beyond the waist and torso—such as the neck,
the shoulders, and the feet. I think that it is fair to say that Koda focused
on the visual or aesthetic aspects of his subject, with a strong component
of shock value. By contrast, I emphasized the changing (and contested)
meanings of the corset in society. It seems to me that our exhibitions thus
expressed, respectively, a more traditional formalist approach, albeit
one infused with a very contemporary focus on body modification, and
one that drew much more heavily on methods and ideas associated with
the “new” art and fashion history. A purely formalist approach seems
problematic to me, because similarities in form can mask significant
differences in meaning.
Akiko Fukai, Chief Curator at the Kyoto Costume Institute, explored
related ideas in her exhibition, Fashion, Invisible Corset. Although I
was unable to travel to Japan to see the exhibition, there is an excellent
catalog, which makes it clear that Fukai was interested in themes such
as the silhouette created by fashion, the role of fashion as a second skin,
and the connections between fashion and modern art. The differences
between our various exhibitions indicate how developments within the
disciplines of art history, fashion studies, and museology all have an
impact on the study, interpretation, and display of clothing artifacts
within the museum.
At least some fashion exhibitions have also become more conceptual,
and more daring in terms of exhibition design. Independent curator
Judith Clark has said that her goal is to “highlight the relevance of
historical dress to contemporary projects through themed shows.”
Clark, whose eponymous gallery in London was the site of numerous
small, but fascinating exhibitions, organized a truly extraordinary
exhibition Malign Muses at the Mode Museum in Antwerp. The
exhibition subsequently traveled to the Victoria and Albert Museum,
where it went under the title Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back (Figure
6). In both venues, the exhibition included about eighty garments,
both contemporary and historic, that were juxtaposed to show “how
designers have influenced each other across history.” As the reviewer
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 27
Figure 6
Installation view from Malign
Muses: When Fashion Turns
Back, MoMu, Fashion Museum
Antwerp, 2004. Photograph by
Ronald Stoops.
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for The Independent noted, it was “far removed from the conventional
fashion exhibition, which trades on glamorous celebrity connections.”
Rather, it traced “the development of ideas, and its title refers to the
ghostly shadows that history casts over the present” (Rushton 2005).
Although informed by an explicitly academic set of ideas about
fashion history (Clark drew on ideas that Caroline Evans explored
in her justly acclaimed book Fashion at the Edge), the exhibition was
definitely not “a book on the wall.” An architect by training, Clark
28 Valerie Steele
from the past, ignoring others, the exhibition design utilized a series of
peepholes with magnifying glasses, forcing museum visitors to focus on
particular details in period garments. To show how fashion repeatedly
makes what Benjamin called “a tiger’s leap into the past,” Clark designed
an enormous pair of interlocking cog wheels. As they turned, they
brought together, say, a Victorian dress and a contemporary example
of neo-Victorian fashion, demonstrating how what goes around comes
around.
Clark’s exhibition drew distinctly mixed reviews, some, indeed,
very hostile. Lou Taylor, for example, objected that “ideas and
settings dominated the clothes,” which were thereby “trivialised and
marginalised.” It was, for example, very difficult to identify the dresses
that revolved on the huge wheels. Indeed, even the choice of dresses was
made late in the exhibition process (Taylor 2006: 17). But I thought it
was a paradigm-breaking show of great beauty and power. Important
Figure 7
Installation view from Visions
of the Body, Tokyo, The Kyoto
Costume Institute. Photograph
by Naoya Hatakeyama.
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 29
field.
When Akiko Fukai’s exhibition Colors in Fashion traveled to the
Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the New York organizers aggressively intro-
duced the show with a text panel stating: “This is not your usual
museum fashion exhibition.” To which I would counter—equally
aggressively—“But what is the ‘usual’ fashion exhibition?” Are there
not many different kinds of fashion exhibitions, which may be excellent
in different ways? Exhibitions as different as Malign Muses/Spectres
and Schiaparelli demonstrate how the best fashion exhibitions are no
longer merely displays of “pretty dresses.” They are both beautiful and
intelligent.
References
Kimmelman, Michael. 2005. “Art, Money and Power,” The New York
Times. May 11.
Lee, Albert. 2000. “Art for Armani’s Sake.” Salon.com. October 18.
Mason, Liz. 2005. “Exhibition Review: The Art and Craft of Gianni
Versace.” Fashion Theory 9(1): 85–88.
Menkes, Suzy. 1997. “Fashion through the Ages.” International Herald
Tribune February 11.
Menkes, Suzy. 2000. “Museum Shows Win over the Public but Can
Cause Conflicts.” International Herald Tribune July 12.
Morrison, James. 2002. “Versace, Vomit, and Bare Cheek at the
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