Fashion May Be Art, but Does It Belong in a Museum?

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• Published: 05 June 2020

Fine art, life, and the style museum: for a more solidarian exhibition practice

Fashion and Textiles volume vii, Article number:17 (2020) Cite this article

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Abstruse

This article departs from the century-long understanding that fashion connects 'life and fine art', an understanding once advocated by Hans Siemsen in his avantgarde journal Zeit-Repeat, to talk over how the museum constitutes an important space, or arena, where this connection is taking place. The museum every bit we know it is a infinite defended to displaying objects of art—and to some degree, of everyday life objects—and equally such it constitutes a space for the linkage between the aesthetic and the profane, between fine art and life. However, equally will be argued, as a space that has increasingly get dedicated to way—as a cultural, social and not to the lowest degree economic miracle—the museum does not encompass its total potential in displaying and problematizing fashion's close and real relation to actual life, and especially, the very lives that produce it. The museum and its curatorial practices, it will be argued, ought to strive less to offer its audiences spectacular displays of extravagant designer style—and instead dare to bargain with the urgent quest for and necessity of a reformed fashion industry in which textile and garment workers can actually lead condom and liveable lives.

Introduction

Since the turn of the final Century, fashion has entered the museum space in if not unanticipated, then conspicuously phenomenal, ways. The museum, a kind of memory establishment that has as its primary purpose to larn, store and display historical and/or fine art objects, has get an essential, cardinal fashion infinite, attracting thousands of visitors. This article traces the more recent development of manner'southward admission to the museum, either as a kind popular and spectacular affair, or every bit an appointment with and exploration of handicraft and fashion as cultural artefact, discussing how way, art and life for long have been intimately related. While a few exhibitions will exist brought forward equally examples of what many gimmicky fashion exhibitions entail, some of which volition be described a bit more in item, overarching and crucial aspects connected to fashion will also be touched upon. These aspects include fashion as part of a wider democratization; equally part of an increasingly widespread consumptionism (Strauss 1924); every bit a kind of pluralistic and multifaceted mediatization; and as pure commerce. Recurring throughout the article, nevertheless, is an accent on manner'south intimate relation to life—both in terms of relying on style in order to understand by lives, agreement fashion and apparel as an important part of various cultural histories, and in terms of how damaging and injurious way production has been and still is to many lives.

Concluding the article, this accent on fashion'due south relation to life, and on the necessity to brand all lives livable, is stressed even further. We are indeed at a disquisitional signal in time colored by a widespread environmental devastation, and fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries worldwide, constituting one of our well-nigh urgent ecology threats. In add-on, information technology is an industry that openly exploits its many under-paid workers—many of whom are left injured, severely ill, or even dead. The gap between style equally spectacular extravagancy, which has come to boss how way is being displayed in the museum, and the horrendous, life-threatening realties of fashion's many exploited workers is prohibitive, preposterous, and this gap needs to be dismantled.

Together with other institutions and movements, the museum, and its many museological practices, tin can play a crucial function in initiating and taking sturdy grip on the serious urgency that we are facing. Displaying fashion in the museum, in the 20-first century, I will debate, must engage with the bodily situation and must have as its aim to involve, appoint and educate us, the spectators, and so that we as consumers, and as emphatic and solidarian individuals, tin can contribute to changing the status quo. The fashion industry is not going to change the current situation, despite its many recent exclamations and manifestations of going greenish. Nor are governments going to change the state of affairs. It is upwards to the consumers, and here, the museum constitute one of import loonshit in which knowledge, information and non least inspiration can be produced, negotiated and transmitted.

Art, life, and fashion

In 1915, German journalist, editor and publicist Hans Siemsen stated in his avant-garde and modernist periodical Zeit-Echo that: "[…] it seems today like fashion is the ane arena within the arts that nearly intimately connects life itself with art" (Siemsen 1915). More than a 100 years later, his argument is still valid and highly relevant: over the by few years, we take seen how art and fashion take been collaborating and inspiring each other in various forms, equally well every bit in various arenas. Hence, Siemsen'south century old argument may be understood equally fifty-fifty more valid today. Mode is beingness aligned with the music industry, with flick, not just with the pic industry but likewise, through the genre of high budget "manner films", with various kinds of art scenes, and with memory institutions, like the museum.

In 1995, some fourscore years after Siemsen'due south argument, Aileen Riberio seems to paraphrase him when she writes in her impressive work The Art of Dress that "fashion acts as a link between life and art" (Ribeiro 1995, p. five). It is however interesting to annotation, that the fourth dimension span of her study is between 1750 and 1820, that is, more than than a century before Siemsen made his ascertainment. Departing from the understanding that fashion connects life and fine art, this commodity volition look the fashion exhibition, and at its very space, or arena—the space where this connection is taking place, that is, the museum. As a infinite dedicated to displaying objects of fine art, and to some degree, of everyday life objects, the museum constitutes an interesting infinite for the linkage between the aesthetic and the profane, that is, between art and life. And hither, fashion and garments come up to play an intriguing role, since they are the paradigm of both. In the twenty-outset Century, their role has however changed: manner and apparel holds quite some other meaning today with the garment and textile industries constituting two of the most polluting and exploitative ones. The production of fashion is i that is highly detrimental to our natural environs, and likewise, it is a product that is inflicting and destroying people's life and health, leaving many injured and ill from treatment lethal and poisonous substances and/or working in dangerous work places. Hence, way today is even more continued not to life—or rather, with life. In fact, fashion is tightly continued to what conceptions that regard which lives are worth caring for, and not.

Siemsen'southward ascertainment was made at a point in time when fashion had get more visible and present in everyday life, and also, more bachelor for a larger segment of the population. Mode was no longer but the privilege of the rich only, which had been the case in the decades preceding the turn of the century. In fact, this turn saw an important shift in mode and its new accessibility may well be said to coincide with the turn of the Century. In the new Century, fashion goes from the exclusivity of the rich to availability for almost everyone. It at present becomes democratized. This "democratization" was largely due to fashion's fast-growing mass-production of set up-to-habiliment goods within the garment industry, in combination with its increasing improvidence and visual brandish. Way takes on both an immaterial and a material identity: it is existence promoted as ideal epitome in style magazines and in the new popular medium that film will constitute, and its production rate will increase due to the invention of new technology such every bit manageable sewing machines and cheap labor. And so, fashion is beingness promoted visually in various forms of advertising—that is, it becomes highly mediatized—and shortly after, made available in shops and via post lodge catalogues, and ever easy to go agree of and affordable for many.

Already in the mid nineteenth century had certain cities around the Western world become known for their large production of gear up-to-wear goods, and these cities come to foster entire garment districts where garments are produced by one dominating social group: immature immigrant women and children. Cities such as Paris in France; Manchester in the U.k., known equally "Cottonopolis" due to its dominance on the cotton market; Chicago, Philadelphia and New York in the US; Berlin in Federal republic of germany; and Norrköping in Sweden, to mention a few, go the hubs for fast cloth and garment production. And the workers are exploited working 12–14 h a mean solar day for little money, and nether very unhealthy and risky conditions. William Leach, in his State of Want from 1993, writes "The evolution of the manner world rested, in fact, on the virtually exploitive, the most backbreaking, and the most sweated industry in all of American business" (Leach 1993, p. 94). Hither, America could exist exchanged with many other nations: every manner evolution rested on these parameters, and the exploited were very much the same: poor, working class women and children, forced into living a life that was unlivable. In 1845, in his The Working Weather of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels writes:

The girls take to bend continually over their work and their nutrient is both poor and difficult to assimilate. All this, and in particular the long hours of piece of work and the lack of fresh air have the tragic result as far every bit health of these girls is concerned… At that place they sit bent over their piece of work and run up from iv or v in the morning until midnight. Their wellness is ruined in a few years and they sink into an early grave, without having been able to earn the barest necessities of life (Engels 1845/1958, pp. 237–viii, p. 239).

It is clear that the democratization of fashion is closely connected to the exploitation of workers: the cheap fashions produced contribute to a more than autonomous relation to mode and to commercial appurtenances. Democratization for all, in this example, is dependent on the exploitation of some. And this democratization is of course likewise aligned to the consumptionism that had evolved since the mid nineteenth century, and which must be understood both as a facilitator and a upshot of commercialism.

In 1924, some 10 years after Siemsen's statement, Northward American journalist and political philosopher Samuel Strauss argued that this consumptionism would come to define twentieth century American society (Strauss 1924). It is, he argued, is a philosophy of life that commit man beings to the product and consumption of more things—"more this year than final twelvemonth, more next twelvemonth than this yr"—and that stress the "standard of living" above all other values (Strauss 1924, every bit cited in Leach 1993, p. 267). Consumptionism, Strauss stated, also includes the coercion to purchase what is not wanted, nor needed, a coercion that he reckoned is forced upon consumers by business manipulation of public and private life:

Formerly the task was to supply the things men wanted, the new necessity is to make men want things … the problem earlier usa today is non how to produce the goods, but how to produce consumers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to use more and more things (Strauss 1924, every bit cited in Leach 1993, p. 268).

Information technology is easy to see why fashion will come to constitute i of the corner stones in this philosophy of life: way not but inspires, just also compels, people to purchase, to dispose of, and to purchase once more. Hither, the tangibility and the non-tangibility of fashion works together in perfect tandem. Fashion media disperse mode equally desirable epitome—as attraction—while the outcome of manner'due south ritualistic seasons, which simply increase in number, most of which are bachelor both in stores and on the internet—one click away. Together, the mode paradigm and the actual way object induce people to want what is in fact artificially created shifts in manner.

Fashion—or rather, the fashion manufacture—demands and offers constant change, and hence, what is fashionable today, is out of mode tomorrow. It is therefore non surprising that Mode has come up to constitute the very "metaphor for constant change", to speak with Nancy Green (Green 1997, p. 19). Already in 1894, Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen would annotate on the artificially created shifts, noting that "nothing tin can be worn which is out of appointment. A new wasteful trinket or garment must constantly supersede the old ane" (Veblen 1894, as cited in Leach 1993, p. 92). Neomania, then, has been the very pillar of fashion.

And neomania has been fed by the rapidness and excess of production and the cheap prices that have come up to characterize way and garment production. Mode stopped to exist well-nigh enduring artistry and handicraft of goods around the 1900s: it now turned into speedy product of available, exchangeable goods that came in backlog and that cost very little. And in the late 2010s, this development seems to take reached its roof: certain fast fashion chains make full their shops and net outlets with numerous collections per month or even week, and the overproduction of fast fashion leads to monstrous mountains of clothing waste. This waste consists of discarded apparel, but it may also consist of dress that have never even been used (BBC News 2018).The over product may also atomic number 82 to style companies burning their unsold stock, and hence, contributing over and over to the devastation of the surroundings (Huffpost 2018). For the consumer, this fast production rate encourages a consumption blueprint that is reckless and hasty—and that costs very little. Very little for the consumer, that is: for the underpaid and exploited textile worker producing the garments, the cost is, every bit we all know, very high. And as today's garment and textile workers are notwithstanding working under backbreaking conditions, the price for mode items and garments is simply decreasing—which compels consumers to indulge in an unsustainable over-consumptionism. ^{Footnote ane} In 1900, the average US household spent 15% of its income on vesture. In 2010, they spent 2.viii%. In 1997, British women on average bought xix pieces of article of clothing per yr. In 2007, they bought 34 (The Guardian 2014). The economical equation is a simple one: as clothes become cheaper, nosotros consume more than, and we throw away more. We take moved from a vesture-and-tear culture to a wear-and-waste civilisation.

No thing the impossibly cheap prices—how can a t-shirt fabricated of cotton wool cost equally little as 5 The states dollars?—there is big money in fashion, in low cost and fast fashion as well as in high end, slow manner. Big coin for the fashion companies and their stake holders, virtually of which are situated in the West, and yet, little money for the workers who actually produce it, and who to a big extent are situated in so chosen developing countries in Due south Asia and Africa. Here, Sweden constitutes an interesting example: in this state with a pocket-size population of some nine million people, the way industry is one of its most of import industries. Since the nativity of what has been referred to as the Swedish "way wonder" (Falk 2011), this industry has come to steadily increase its economic gain yr past year—non least through the global expansion of the fast way company H&M. Since 2011, Sweden has doubled its fashion consign, and in 2017, the industry had a turnover of 326 million Swedish crowns which is approximately 28 million U.s.a. dollars (Dagens Industri 2018). And while the ownership together with the blueprint and marketing reside in Sweden, the bodily product is located elsewhere, in countries where product costs are still low—and still, highly exploitative and backbreaking. This outsourcing of production is telling for many of the new "way nations" to which Sweden belongs, many of which used to have their ain material and garment industries in the tardily eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

We can contend from this brusque contextualization that style plays a crucial and complicated economical function in our contemporary lodge—and that its role, which is tainted with enormous ecology and piece of work-related problems and challenges, seems only to exist increasing. Its increasing importance has come up nearly through the successively expanding presence that fashion takes upward in our civilization and social club which is formed by economical factors, but too, by the increasingly cultural, artistic and possibly too political role that style plays today. Although some strains of fashion may strive to be fine art, and although some pieces of fashion may in fact exist art, manner as a phenomenon is always tied to commerce—and to industrialization. Information technology is likewise tied to the spectacular, and to display. And in recent decades, the display of mode inside the museological context has turned out to exist a successful magnet to attract large crowds of visitors. In what follows next, I volition tune in on the relation between fashion and other art forms, and then move on to way and the museum to discuss manner's identify within the museum context. The museum, as a memory institution and a cultural sanctionary created for the display of historical objects and art, has been "transformed" by the admittance of manner. This transformation has much been indebted to the very commercialization—and the zeitgeist—that fashion unavoidably brings with it (Vinken 2004).

Manner, life, fine art, and the museum

Fashion as an arena for the connection between art and life, every bit was pinpointed by Siemsen, becomes virtually evident when the actual arts are taken into account: not simply is fashion cardinal in literature and in painting, it as well holds a crucial part in theatre, opera and film. In these three creative mediums or fine art forms, fashion, most often in the class of costumes, has flourished within the overall narration and mise-en-scène. Fashion and costume—as two different, yet intimately interdependent and influential forms of apparel—depend on each other in their artistic and commercial expressions, constantly glancing at each other to get inspiration. The stage has been dependent on fashion—whether gimmicky or historic way—in order to create a convincing time-specific scenario and hence, to brand believe, and the mode industry has ofttimes been inspired by costumes. From the beginning of the twentieth century, it has in detail been movie house costume that has served every bit a source of inspiration for fashion. In fact, this cross-fertilizing of stage/screen and fashion become axiomatic when one considers how many way designers who take crossed over to the stage and to film and vice versa. Every bit examples, one could mention French fashion designers Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Christian Lacroix—all of whom resided in Paris, the cradle of haute couture—and all of whom besides made costumes for the cinema and other scenic arts. Before them, English language way designer Lucy Christina Duff Gordon, known under the name of Lucile, had already in the early twentieth century combined her skills equally a costume designer for the theatre and every bit a manner designer. 3 notable film costume designers who crossed over to fashion were Americans Howard Dark-green, Adrian and the legendary Edith Head. I would also like to bring up the German language–Swedish fashion drawer Max Goldstein, known as Mago, who would go from mode to costume in the early 1950s when he was discovered and fabricated into one of the most productive and prolific phase and screen designers in Sweden and away—for decades to come. An Italian instance would be Valentino Garavani, who designed costumes for La Traviata, directed by film director Sofia Coppola at Teatro dell'Opera in Rome in May 2016, and a French example is designer Jean Paul Gaultier who continuously has been creating costumes not just for cinema only also for theatre and ballet.

And while costume has entered the museum space to a sure extent, it is way that has occupied the museum space in the by couple of decades. As this trend has increased, some new fashion museums have been erected, while already existent museums have partly turned into fashion museums. It is specially designers who have influenced the twentieth century that take been at focus, and the work of famous designers such as Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, Valentino Garavani and Jean-Paul Gaultier, amid many, accept recently had their oeuvre exhibited in the museum context, and some of these exhibitions take been ambulating. Some fashion exhibitions have been solely dedicated to the "maestro" and his or her piece of work—as in "Valentino: Master of Couture" at Somerset House in London in 2012–2013; in "Esprit Dior" held in Seoul in 2015; in "Christian Dior—Designer of Dreams" at the Albert and Victoria Museum in London 2019; in "Balenciaga, l'oeuvre au noir", which focused solely on Balenciaga's black couture and which was held in Paris in 2017; or "The Fashion Earth of Jean-Paul Gaultier: from Sidewalk to Catwalk" at De Young Galleries in San Francisco in 2012. The latter exhibition travelled the earth: information technology was afterwards shown at Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2013–2014; in Stockholm at the Mod Museum in 2013; and at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul in 2016, and in other cities. And before Gaultier was on brandish in Seoul in 2016, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza stood as host for an exhibition on Coco Chanel—"Culture Chanel: The Sense of Places"—in 2014. These were all extravagant and spectacular exhibitions, positioning haute couture and their creators as geniuses of couture. They were synthetic and designed and so as to make us, the spectators, admire the beauty, the allure and the artistry. And while nearly improvident and genius-focused exhibitions are inviting us to look, desire and adore, in that location is a clear altitude inscribed in their construction—at that place is distance between united states and the extravagant garments, garments that nosotros volition never exist able or allowed to wear. Out of our attain, however and so shut to us at that place in the gallery or in the museum. This is fashion and couture when it is at its most glamourous—and when it is equally most "unavailably bachelor". Yet, these exhibitions communicate and depict the states into their universe through a direct dialogue with our senses, a dialogue that is characterized by the spectacular and the visual.

Other exhibitions are dedicated more than to a specific era than to a specific designer—like "The Aureate Historic period of Haute Couture" that was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2008—or dedicated to a specific wearer and collector, similar "La Manner Retrouvée" shown at Palais Galliera in Paris in 2015–2016. This latter exhibition focused on the wardrobe of la Comtesse Greffhule, the woman who inspired non only Marcel Proust every bit he created his fictive character Duchesse de Guermantes in his À la recherche du temps perdu, and who besides inspired many of her gimmicky fashion designers. Another exhibition that tries to capture an era and the aesthetics of a specific culture through the use of fashion, is the latest exhibition held at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York entitled "Camp: Notes on Fashion". While nearly would define camp as a rather mod phenomenon stretching from the tardily nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, with a certain elevation in the 1950s and 1960s, that is, before the Stonewall riots in 1969, this exhibition starts off in the late seventeenth century. Others again position fashion or a specific fashion designer in relation to other arts, as in "L'Impressionism et la mode/"Impressionism and Fashion" held in Musée d'Orsay in Paris in 2012 or "Balenciaga y la pintura Española"/"Balenciaga and Spanish painting", on display at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in 2019.

It would, nevertheless, be a fault to think that the 2 recent decades take seen fashion entering the museum in completely new and unprecedented ways. The affluent number of way exhibitions in the museum space is new, but the brandish of fashion in the museum is not. Equally has been advocated by Julia Petrov, fashion has for more a century been an integral part of museum displays, and equally a museum-worthy object to protect and preserve for later on generations. Garments and fashion may say a lot about previous generations and epochs, in fact, garments and accessories are tactile, embodied objects that perhaps better than other objects can make the spectator feel an amalgamation with the past. In her book Way, History, Museums from 2019, Petrov shows how fashion for long has been an integral part of the museum discourse and its preserving practices and how in fact historical dress—as a style to know and understand the past—has been "displayed in various ways and venues" since the tardily eighteenth century (Petrov 2019, p. 13). Investigating the long history of displaying dress, and the many means it has been displayed for an audience, Petrov asks: "While at that place are certainly more than fashion exhibitions worldwide than e'er earlier, can they be said to be innovative?" (Petrov 2019, p. 11).

While i can argue from Petrov'due south study that little is actually new, information technology is worth looking into why the number of museums turning to fashion has augmented, and why the number of fashion exhibitions has increased—worldwide. Many are the museums that never before accept cared for mode or exhibited way, simply who recently accept jumped on the ring carriage. It has become clear that fashion attracts large audiences: whether information technology is fashion—new as well as old—or stage and/or picture costume, audiences flock to see pieces of clothes and garments up shut. Manner exhibitions in the museum context with a focus on way's cultural, socio-economical, artistic and political meanings in both a historical and contemporary perspective attract large groups of audiences—audiences that indeed are mixed in terms of gender, historic period and social course.

Whereas a few museums have had costume and fabric collections every bit part of their collected materials, ofttimes hidden away in their archives, just a few museums take had as their aim to preserve and exhibit way. Here, museums similar MOMU (Mode Museum) in Antwerp, the Kyoto Costume Establish in Japan, Museo del traje in Madrid, the Palais Galliera in Paris, and the Fashion Museum in Bath could be mentioned as five obvious examples. These are all museums that have equally their unique goal to preserve, exhibit and collect textiles and fashion, and they are often connected to the world of academic research—generously admitting researchers into their collections, while too employing researchers on short or long-term contracts every bit role of their staff.

Renown and large institutional museum like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, to mention a few, have at times curated mode and textile exhibitions in the past. Recently—during the last 10 years—they besides, however, have turned into fashion museums. If curating and producing large mode exhibitions at to the lowest degree once yearly in their repertoire, they must be considered "fashion museums". This is so because manner attracts, and in a time when museums have to fight to go along their company numbers in lodge to survive, style has proved to be a safer card. Let me give you some statistics: in 2012, the "Hollywood Costume" exhibition held at Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by renown costume designer Deborah Landis from Hollywood, attracted 251,738 visitors. The exhibition "David Bowie Is", also at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and held in the following year, attracted 312,000 visitors. I chose to include the David Bowie exhibition because although this was not a pure mode exhibition, it was a hybrid since costumes and way surely played an important function in the overall design of the exhibition. These are high numbers, indicating that fashion and costume practise concenter big audiences. Withal, they are rather sparse when compared to the exhibition "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty": in 2015 information technology was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where information technology attracted no less than 493,043 visitors. Nonetheless, in the year before, when it was on brandish at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it had attracted a full of 661,500 visitors, which places the exhibition equally ane of 10 of the well-nigh pop exhibitions ever in the 147-twelvemonth long history of that museum. ^{Footnote 2} Even in a small context such every bit the Swedish one, fashion-related exhibitions are indeed proving to be highly popular amongst the general public, while also attracting school classes, academy students, and researchers.

The increasing number of visitors who come up to see fashion exhibitions, in tandem with the constantly growing interest from the media to cover mode exhibitions, is a clear indicator of the present and intriguing role that fashion has come up to play in gimmicky club. The attraction of attracting, exiting, exclusive, elegant and/or provocative and avantgarde fashion is augmenting, but along this more frivolous interest, is the apparent want to understand and to see displays of other kinds of fashion. Or garments, really. Garments are part of our cultural history and hence, of our cultural heritage, and the possibility to encounter and larn almost earlier kinds of handmade or gear up-made wearing apparel which is offered at some exhibitions also concenter a large number of visitors—from across diverse social, economic and generational categories or groups. Garments that tell a story—its wearer's story, in a specific time and place. Hence, tactile, worn garments are always situational. They tin can tell stories that is part of the past, of our or others' histories, that is, of our different even so related cultural, social, and economical histories. Equally Zillah Halls has pointed out:

it can tell us more than any other type of museum collection nigh how people looked and felt and lived in a item time. A garment can be regarded as the remaining outer shell of a living person and volition reverberate that person's taste, position, way of life, or even a transient mood of gaiety or grief, more faithfully and more than straight than other arts (Halls 1968, as cited in Petrov 2019, p. 25).

Hence, garments do accept meaning. Information technology is then not surprising that fashion has turned into an object of written report—and that it has come to occupy a primal identify in the overall focus on cultural heritage, which is very much on the agenda in times of globalization. As much every bit fashion and actual garments can tells usa our (his-)stories, they also establish themselves as a counterpart or a contrast to an increasing fast fashion production and to the over-consumption that this production rate help foster—a kind of consumption that has come up to structure much of our relation to garments.

As examples of Swedish museums that have included fashion exhibitions in recent years, I would like to mention the Hallwyl Palace and the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, along with the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, all of which take their own rather sizeable fashion and costume collections. Amongst the Hallwyl Palace'south fashion exhibitions one finds "Huset Elliot"/"The Firm of Elliot" (1995); "Notti Italiane" (2009); "Vävda modedrömmar"/"Woven Style Dreams" (2011); "Dräkter från Downton"/"Costumes from Downton" (2012); "Under ytan"/"Under the surface" (2013); "Hatten av!"/"Hats off!" (2014); and "Mariano Fortuny" (2015); and "Bergman på modet"/"Bergman à la manner" (2017–2018)—all of which attracted big audiences. Equally for the Nordic Museum, "Mitt 50-tal"/My 1950s" (2017), an exhibition defended to Swedish women'southward mode and their everyday life in the 1950s, needs to exist highlighted. Here, there were no Dior, Jacques Fath or Balenciaga dresses included: mostly abode-made or prepare-made dresses were included, alongside a few couture pieces created past the more than fancy mode salons Märthaskolan and Leja in Stockholm. Most of the garments on display, no matter whether home-made or couture, were inspired by the fashionable Parisian looks, but translated for Swedish conditions and wearers. The emphasis here was partly on the national translation of the more cosmopolitan Parisian fashions—merely also, on the locally homemade and sustainable making of fashion dorsum in the 1950s. Nearly of the garments on display were donated to the museum past private persons, ranging from working and centre-form women in both rural and urban contexts, to the social, cultural and economic aristocracy in the upper-case letter. While positioning the garments in relation to the originals created past Parisian designers, the exhibition explored the bootleg, homemade either by the women who were wearing the garments, or by women who worked as habitation seamstresses, that is, women who would visit women their homes to brand garments for them—in a signal in time when fast fashion and over consumption were still to come. "My 1950s" likewise made an try to tell the stories of the women who wore the garments, and and then, the exhibition served as an invitation to re-visit a by decade through tactile manner and personal stories of what it was to be a woman in mid twentieth century Sweden.

All of the above exhibitions held at Hallwyl and the Nordic Museums were large visitor successes, it was the two exhibitions on fashion and television costume, "The House Elliot" and "Costumes from Downton", that came to describe the largest audiences. The "The House of Elliot" exhibition drew lxx,000 visitors, and "Costumes from Downton" came to increase the overall attendance record with 12%. This says something about the interest amongst the audience to picket and to learn more nearly the meaning of costume in fictional settings—and also, about the thrill of seeing handmade couture or garments up-close. In times of over-consumption of ready-fabricated clothes and non-lasting fast fashion, the very handicraft of garments, whether costumes of couture, attracts spectators. Hence, the museum space constitutes a crucial space where nosotros as spectators can exist inspired to explore, bask and critically think through handicraft and slow style as more sustainable and ethical options in relation to the detrimental product and consumption of fast fashion, and also, to recollect through our own consumption practices. More than recently, in conjunction with the 100th ceremony of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's birth, the Hallwyl museum exhibited "Bergman à la manner", an exhibition that was defended to the film costumes made for Bergman's turn of the century films, including Fanny and Alexander (Bergman 1983); Cries and Whispers (Bergman 1973); and Wild Strawberries (Bergman 1957). It was too dedicated to the costume designers who had worked on the films, and accompanying the exhibition was a rich catalogue that to a big extent was based on interviews with the designers or with people who had worked with them (Bergman and Harning 2018). Here, the work backside the costumes was emphasized and the métier of costume designing was being fleshed out, pointing at the very handicraft that is entailed in costume making. Co-ordinate to the head of the museum, Heli Haapasalo, it has been their biggest success e'er in terms if visitor numbers. Fashion attracts—merely so do ordinary garments, then practise film and stage costumes. Not only for their beingness spectacular, extravagant, exclusive and unavailable, as in the case of the more designer focused exhibitions mentioned above, but for their chapters of being role of our histories, and of our cultural heritage (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Costumes by Marik Vos for Ingmar Bergman's movie Fanny and Alexander from 1983 on display in "Bergman à la mode". This exhibition was curated by Anna Bergman and Nils Harning and held at the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm in 2018, emphasizing the handicraft and the private designers backside them. Photograph by the writer

Full size image

The museum, then, constitutes a fruitful framing for exhibiting manner and garment as function of our cultural heritage—and in its extension, style and garments may help inform us near the making of garments as a possible sustainable handicraft that we may in fact render back to. As Karyn Jean Harris pointed out already in 1977: "[…] costumes like other specimens of museum quality are part of our civilization and heritage, and most people have an inner desire to learn more than about their ancestry as well every bit to relive some of their ain personal memories" (Harris 1977, p. i). In addition, the museum can constitute a virtually needed platform for engaging with the indeed urgent humanitarian and environmental issues that fashion production and consumption together accept generated.

Mediatization and commercialization

The contempo increased inclusion or embracing of way in the museum context is of course related to the increasing significant that fashion is given, economically too equally culturally. Manner—visualized everywhere—constitutes a discourse in itself, and as such, way is always and conspicuously mediatized. This soapbox is fabricated possible by and thrives on the media—and here, I am not only referring to social media and the net, just also to older forms of media such every bit printed media, picture show and printed media. Among all of these new and old mediated forms of displaying mode, the fashion film stands out equally an interesting example in the way it manages to expand the old fashion photography and more than traditional picture show genres. Expanding the possibility of nonetheless photography, borrowing heavily from other media and other film genres in a most intertextual sense, the way film is characterized by both immediacy and hypermediacy: it refashions older media while at the aforementioned fourth dimension being itself refashioned by older media. To this fashion as a discourse, ane tin include various cultural and educational sectors, since they uphold, create and feed into this discourse. Universities, style and design schools, theatres, the cinema industry and museums are hence instrumental in the very sustaining of manner as a discourse in our society.

And fashion and garments practice matter. Every bit has been pointed out, wear and fashion plant an important part of our by and our cultural heritage. Style items, images, and private garments tin tell a lot nigh a sure time'south zeitgeist; they tell of economic growth and economic decline; about adroitness and of mass production; of living weather and aesthetic ideals; and not to the lowest degree of class and gender differences and transgressions. And costumes for theatre, film, opera, ballet and idiot box are—just like fashion is—part of this cultural heritage: they are fundamental parts of a larger whole and of various artistic and commercial productions. In addition, they are tactile products created by various artisans, from costume designers, dyers, scenics, to cutters and tailors. Stage costume, similar style, is the product of collaboration, of collective endeavors past individuals without whose work our visual and fabric culture would limp. Professor Elizabeth Wilson, author of the at present classic book Adorned in Dreams: Mode and Modernity from 1985, argues that:

Apparel are among the nearly important aspects of man cultural life. In about every known guild its members take adorned their bodies, and then that the body itself becomes a cultural object. These bodily coverings have a significance far beyond their utilitarian part to protect from oestrus or cold. They correspond the individual; clothes, face and hair or head covering are what we see when encountering a stranger; they convey essential information. They are used to include or exclude, they betray wealth or poverty. They enhance or conceal sexuality and in some cases gender. Thus, they perform social and psychological functions at both a collective and individual level. In improver to that, dress play an aesthetic role. Skill and artistry create beautiful costumes made from exquisite textiles that deserve to be classed equally art only every bit much equally ceramics or jewelry. Therefore, the collection of items from the fashions of the by and nowadays, including folk dress, uniforms and ceremonial clothes as well as the changing fashions of successive periods, provides a precious tape (in an email conversation with the author in 2016).

And Kaat Debo, Managing director of the Manner Museum in Antwerp (MoMu), Kingdom of belgium, instead stresses a more the economic and business organisation-oriented approach when asked about the importance of creating fashion museums:

Fashion museums combine an art historical approach with an active participation in the artistic industry that way is today. These two poles of manner as an applied fine art make manner appealing and relevant for gimmicky audiences. A style museum not but helps to document the fashion scene of today and to write the way history of previous decades, but it tin likewise function equally an active partner in the dissemination of mode theory/instruction, sociological analysis or philosophical reflection on fashion/costume. Manner museums, through their exhibitions, public programs, community building, publications, international communication and research, accept an of import touch on the construction of a mode city's identity (in an email conversation with the writer in 2016).

Debo knows what she is talking near: the instalment of MoMu was made possible with governmental money and in close collaboration with the city's strong fashion capital, its manner heritage and its style manufacture. MoMu is a prime example of the symbiotic relation between the (manner) museum and the manner industry and fashion consumption. Considering this is as well an attribute that is absolutely crucial to the exhibiting of fashion, garments and costumes: nearly fashion is commerce, whether the actual object which is produced to exist sold or the representation, that is, fashion in its medialized form, and once the actual garment gets selected and saved in a museum collection, and displayed for an audience, information technology is non just its historic, social and symbolic value that increases—so does its economic value.

Style, on display in the museum context, is most frequently both fine art and commerce. It is in that location to be studied, enjoyed, and visually consumed for its own sake as "the remaining outer crush" of people who have lived before us, every bit Halls so accurately once would put it (Halls 1968). Just it can likewise exist in that location for the pure spectacle of a more than contemporary kind of allure, extravaganza and genial handicraft and beauty—as in those exhibitions that focus solely on the collections made past i fashion designer, as in the case of, allow say, Valentino, Yves Saint-Laurent or Giorgio Armani. In these instances, the purlieus between the museum—equally a infinite designed for displaying and informing practices—and the manner industry, which is dedicated to production and consumption, becomes blurry, not to the lowest degree because the industry is often being involved financially in society to brand fashion exhibitions possible. In many fashion exhibitions devoted to allure and the spectacular, the museum space risks turning into a commercial space—although the objects on display are non for sale. Already in 2003, did Christopher Breward reflect upon how the museum space, "the hallowed spaces of fine art" had come to "realise[d] the economic benefits of coming on similar exclusive boutiques", and that this should "remind us that civilisation and commerce are more closely related than some critics would like" (Breward 2003, my italics). And in the instance of designers creating their own museums (and/or exhibitions), a recent example would be the Gucci museum in Florence, Italy: here, the blurred boundary between fine art and commerce is no boundary at all. In this museum the promotion of aspirational consumerism becomes obvious, and as Petrov points out, "In these cases, the ontological difference betwixt museal and commercial fashion is narrowed, and both display environments become so closely aligned equally to be almost indistinguishable" (Petrov 2019, p. 61).

It would be naive to dream about fashion exhibitions and fashion museum that are completely detached and disconnected from the commercial aspects that are intimately tied up with fashion and fashionable garments. Yet, it is non credulous to argue for a museum exercise that dares to appoint with the pertinent environmental and human crisis that the manner industry to a large degree is responsible of. Neither would it be ingenuous to stress that informative and inspirational exhibitions can brand a divergence via inciting spectators to become responsible, and solidarian, consumers.

Hither, the style museum can take inspiration from piece of work life museums that successfully manage to display working life and engage audiences to larn near and reflect upon the situation of workers in various kinds of productions and industries. Although these museums often encompass a historical perspective on work and life, they can serve equally important and inspirational points of reference. This is peculiarly truthful for museums that focus on previous generations of cloth workers and their piece of work and life conditions, such as for example the Museum of Work (Arbetsmuseet) in Norrköping, Sweden, the Historical Museum in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, or the Museum of Work and Life in Woonsucket, Rhode Island, USA.

Conclusion

Coming back to where this article started, to Siemsen, i can fence fashion is still one of the most of import arenas in which life and art are intimately connected. 1 can also affirm that the museum constitutes a prolific space where this connection gets visualized and embodied: in that specific infinite we can learn about past times, and about past lives—and we do so through the display and the study of style every bit a socio-economic, cultural and aesthetic phenomenon and of specific garments. The wearing and violent, the changes over fourth dimension, and the very production and consumption of garments, tell of a recent past—but they tin can besides tell about our own nowadays. Style and specific garments tin besides tell of the lives that have produced them: from the seamstresses working in fashion houses creating slow haute couture, to the textile and manufacturing plant workers making fast fashion for underpaid wages and under exploitative, and at times life threatening, circumstances. Yesterday—and today. And while, these two examples of production realities have not been at the center of attention when museums take invested in exhibiting fashion, there have been a few exhibitions that have focused on technology and handicraft, such every bit the exhibition "Mensurate for Measure out" at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1989, or the more recent exhibition "Manus X Machina" held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 2016. ^{Footnote 3} Rather, as I tried to have show hither, information technology has been the more specular and the glamourous that has been given center stage—emphasizing, over and over once again, the very allure that fashion, whether habiliment or unwearable, holds on u.s., as spectators—and equally consumers.

Nevertheless, couture and fast way production realities constitute two examples that mayhap better than others tin can represent and exhibit how way is continued to life. Wearing garments is 1 thing, producing them is another. If the valuation of slow and immaculate handicraft—as an artform—on the 1 hand, and the exposure of inhumane exploitation of garment and textile workers in the fast way industry on the other, can be focused on in future exhibitions to come, the museum can, without a doubt, play a more important and pivotal role than information technology does today. Visualizing and explaining these two production realities, informing us visitors about what is sustainable and what is not through the exposing of atrocities that have happened and notwithstanding happen to textile and garment workers and to the environment while advocating a more sustainable and human mode production, may serve to change the condition quo. The museum—through insightful curatorial practices—tin can inform and persuade spectators near the necessity of going back to a "wear and tear" culture, and to make us demand that the fashion industry stops being i of the virtually exploitative, arduous and polluting industries worldwide. Because the fashion manufacture—despite its many efforts to convince its consumers that it is "going green"—is non.

The museum, every bit a memory institution with a strong pedagogical and informative impetus, can—must—play a primal and formative role in educating the public of what the style industry really does to our environment and our beau homo beings, and also, to point out what can be done to try and alter the status quo. Like documentary moving picture and critical, investigatory journalism, the museum can establish a powerful arena for engaging and awakening the public—because, equally history has shown, the fashion industry, nor our governments, are not going to practise so. If museums were really to embark on this route, then fashion as a phenomenon will—more than than ever—be able to pinpoint how intimately life and art are connected, and also, how a changed, more human being and solidarian fashion system can come to make life livable for those who work to produce what we vesture.

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Notes

1. According to a recent survey of 2000 women, participants endemic "66 items of clothing" on boilerplate, including "at least 10 items of habiliment that volition never exist worn again"; "well-nigh clothes are worn just 7 times", and about one-tertiary of participants "went off apparel subsequently wearing them a couple of times". See Morgan (2015).

2. After acquiring the fashion- and costume collection from Brooklyn Museum in 2010, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which was installed at the museum in 1946 and headed past Diana Vreeland between 1972 and 1989) has focused on their textile and fashion exhibition more than than before.

3. As Petrov has demonstrated, in earlier periods, fashion or costume exhibitions were more than investing in educating and informing about the production and the handicraft behind the objects on brandish. It was common that new "way technologies" were exhibited not only in the museum contexts, simply as well, in various kinds of world exhibitions serving to promote national industrial innovations. See Petrov 2019.

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1. Professor, Dept of Media Studies/Fashion, Stockholm Academy, Stockholm, Sweden

   Louise Wallenberg

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LW finalized the manuscript based on a keynote presentation given at the ICCT Conference held at Yonsei University, Seoul, in 2018. The author read and canonical the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Louise Wallenberg.

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Wallenberg, L. Art, life, and the fashion museum: for a more solidarian exhibition practice. Fash Text seven, 17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-019-0201-5

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• Received: 08 August 2019

• Accustomed: 24 Dec 2019

• Published: 05 June 2020

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-019-0201-five

Keywords

• Fashion exhibitions
• Museum practices
• Democratization
• Consumptionism
• Mediatization
• Commercialization
• Environmental and human solidarity

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