How to Set Up a Fashion Museum Exhibition

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• Published: 05 June 2020

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

Fashion and Textiles volume 7, Commodity number:17 (2020) Cite this commodity

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Abstruse

This article departs from the century-long understanding that fashion connects 'life and art', an understanding once advocated by Hans Siemsen in his avantgarde journal Zeit-Echo, to discuss how the museum constitutes an important space, or loonshit, where this connection is taking identify. The museum as we know it is a space dedicated to displaying objects of art—and to some degree, of everyday life objects—and as such it constitutes a space for the linkage between the artful and the profane, between art and life. Nevertheless, as will exist argued, every bit a infinite that has increasingly become dedicated to fashion—equally a cultural, social and not least economic phenomenon—the museum does not embrace its full potential in displaying and problematizing manner'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 offering its audiences spectacular displays of extravagant designer fashion—and instead dare to deal with the urgent quest for and necessity of a reformed fashion industry in which textile and garment workers tin actually lead safe and liveable lives.

Introduction

Since the plow of the last Century, fashion has entered the museum space in if not unanticipated, then clearly astounding, means. The museum, a kind of memory institution that has equally its main purpose to acquire, shop and brandish historical and/or art objects, has become an essential, primal fashion space, attracting thousands of visitors. This article traces the more than recent evolution of manner's access to the museum, either as a kind popular and spectacular affair, or as an engagement with and exploration of handicraft and fashion as cultural artefact, discussing how style, fine art and life for long have been intimately related. While a few exhibitions will be brought forward as examples of what many contemporary fashion exhibitions entail, some of which will be described a bit more in detail, overarching and crucial aspects continued to mode will besides be touched upon. These aspects include mode as office of a wider democratization; as role of an increasingly widespread consumptionism (Strauss 1924); every bit a kind of pluralistic and multifaceted mediatization; and every bit pure commerce. Recurring throughout the article, however, is an emphasis on style's intimate relation to life—both in terms of relying on fashion in lodge to sympathize past lives, understanding fashion and clothes as an important part of diverse cultural histories, and in terms of how damaging and injurious way production has been and still is to many lives.

Final the commodity, this emphasis on fashion'due south relation to life, and on the necessity to make all lives livable, is stressed even further. We are indeed at a critical point in fourth dimension colored past a widespread environmental devastation, and fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries worldwide, constituting i of our most urgent ecology threats. In addition, it is an industry that openly exploits its many under-paid workers—many of whom are left injured, severely ill, or fifty-fifty expressionless. The gap betwixt fashion equally spectacular extravagancy, which has come to dominate how fashion 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, can play a crucial part 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 state of affairs and must have as its aim to involve, engage and brainwash us, the spectators, so that nosotros equally consumers, and equally emphatic and solidarian individuals, tin contribute to changing the status quo. The style industry is not going to change the electric current situation, despite its many recent exclamations and manifestations of going green. Nor are governments going to change the state of affairs. Information technology is upwardly to the consumers, and here, the museum constitute one important arena in which knowledge, data and non least inspiration can be produced, negotiated and transmitted.

Fine art, life, and fashion

In 1915, German journalist, editor and publicist Hans Siemsen stated in his avant-garde and modernist journal Zeit-Repeat that: "[…] information technology seems today like fashion is the one arena within the arts that most intimately connects life itself with art" (Siemsen 1915). More than a 100 years later, his statement is still valid and highly relevant: over the past few years, we have seen how art and fashion take been collaborating and inspiring each other in various forms, as well as in various arenas. Hence, Siemsen's century old statement may exist understood equally even more valid today. Fashion is being aligned with the music industry, with flick, non only with the picture show industry but likewise, through the genre of high budget "fashion films", with diverse kinds of fine art scenes, and with memory institutions, like the museum.

In 1995, some 80 years after Siemsen's argument, Aileen Riberio seems to paraphrase him when she writes in her impressive piece of work The Art of Dress that "way acts equally a link between life and art" (Ribeiro 1995, p. 5). It is however interesting to note, that the fourth dimension bridge of her written report is between 1750 and 1820, that is, more a century before Siemsen made his observation. Departing from the understanding that fashion connects life and art, this article will 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 art, and to some caste, of everyday life objects, the museum constitutes an interesting infinite for the linkage between the aesthetic and the profane, that is, betwixt art and life. And hither, fashion and garments come to play an intriguing role, since they are the prototype of both. In the 20-first Century, their part has however changed: manner and wearing apparel holds quite another meaning today with the garment and fabric industries constituting 2 of the most polluting and exploitative ones. The production of fashion is one that is highly detrimental to our natural environment, and also, it is a production 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 unsafe work places. Hence, fashion today is fifty-fifty more connected not to life—or rather, with life. In fact, fashion is tightly connected to what conceptions that regard which lives are worth caring for, and non.

Siemsen's observation was made at a bespeak in time when mode had become more visible and present in everyday life, and also, more bachelor for a larger segment of the population. Fashion was no longer only 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 plough of the Century. In the new Century, fashion goes from the exclusivity of the rich to availability for almost everyone. It now becomes democratized. This "democratization" was largely due to fashion'southward fast-growing mass-production of ready-to-wear goods within the garment industry, in combination with its increasing improvidence and visual display. Mode takes on both an immaterial and a material identity: it is being promoted as ideal image in fashion magazines and in the new popular medium that picture show will constitute, and its production rate will increase due to the invention of new applied science such as manageable sewing machines and cheap labor. And then, fashion is being promoted visually in various forms of advertisement—that is, it becomes highly mediatized—and shortly after, made available in shops and via mail club catalogues, and always easy to get concur of and affordable for many.

Already in the mid nineteenth century had certain cities around the Western world become known for their big production of gear up-to-wear goods, and these cities come up to foster entire garment districts where garments are produced by 1 dominating social group: young immigrant women and children. Cities such as Paris in France; Manchester in the UK, known as "Cottonopolis" due to its dominance on the cotton market; Chicago, Philadelphia and New York in the U.s.; Berlin in Federal republic of germany; and Norrköping in Sweden, to mention a few, become the hubs for fast material and garment production. And the workers are exploited working 12–14 h a mean solar day for picayune coin, and under very unhealthy and risky conditions. William Leach, in his Land of Desire from 1993, writes "The evolution of the fashion world rested, in fact, on the about exploitive, the nearly backbreaking, and the most sweated industry in all of American business concern" (Leach 1993, p. 94). Here, America could be exchanged with many other nations: every fashion development 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 Conditions of the Working Grade in England, Friedrich Engels writes:

The girls have to bend continually over their work and their nutrient is both poor and difficult to digest. All this, and in particular the long hours of work and the lack of fresh air accept the tragic result as far as wellness of these girls is concerned… There they sit bent over their work and sew from four or five in the morn until midnight. Their health 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. 237–8, p. 239).

It is articulate that the democratization of manner is closely continued to the exploitation of workers: the cheap fashions produced contribute to a more democratic relation to fashion and to commercial appurtenances. Democratization for all, in this example, is dependent on the exploitation of some. And this democratization is of course too aligned to the consumptionism that had evolved since the mid nineteenth century, and which must be understood both as a facilitator and a consequence of capitalism.

In 1924, some ten years afterward Siemsen'southward statement, North American announcer and political philosopher Samuel Strauss argued that this consumptionism would come up to define twentieth century American society (Strauss 1924). It is, he argued, is a philosophy of life that commit homo beings to the product and consumption of more things—"more this year than last year, more next year than this year"—and that stress the "standard of living" above all other values (Strauss 1924, equally cited in Leach 1993, p. 267). Consumptionism, Strauss stated, likewise includes the coercion to purchase what is not wanted, nor needed, a compulsion that he reckoned is forced upon consumers by concern manipulation of public and individual life:

Formerly the chore was to supply the things men wanted, the new necessity is to make men want things … the problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, only how to produce consumers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to apply more and more than things (Strauss 1924, equally cited in Leach 1993, p. 268).

It is piece of cake to see why manner will come up to constitute one of the corner stones in this philosophy of life: fashion non just inspires, but likewise compels, people to purchase, to dispose of, and to buy once again. Here, the tangibility and the non-tangibility of fashion works together in perfect tandem. Way media disperse fashion as desirable image—as allure—while the outcome of fashion's ritualistic seasons, which just increase in number, most of which are available both in stores and on the net—one click away. Together, the style image and the actual fashion object induce people to want what is in fact artificially created shifts in fashion.

Fashion—or rather, the fashion industry—demands and offers constant modify, and hence, what is stylish today, is out of style tomorrow. It is therefore not surprising that Way has come to institute the very "metaphor for constant change", to speak with Nancy Greenish (Green 1997, p. nineteen). Already in 1894, Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen would comment on the artificially created shifts, noting that "zip can be worn which is out of date. A new wasteful trinket or garment must constantly supersede the old 1" (Veblen 1894, as cited in Leach 1993, p. 92). Neomania, then, has been the very pillar of style.

And neomania has been fed past the rapidness and excess of production and the inexpensive prices that take come to characterize fashion and garment product. Fashion stopped to be about indelible artistry and handicraft of appurtenances around the 1900s: it now turned into speedy product of bachelor, exchangeable goods that came in excess and that cost very little. And in the late 2010s, this development seems to have reached its roof: certain fast fashion chains fill their shops and internet outlets with numerous collections per month or fifty-fifty week, and the overproduction of fast manner leads to monstrous mountains of wear waste. This waste consists of discarded clothes, but it may also consist of clothes that have never even been used (BBC News 2018).The over production may also lead to manner companies burning their unsold stock, and hence, contributing over and over to the devastation of the surround (Huffpost 2018). For the consumer, this fast production rate encourages a consumption pattern that is reckless and hasty—and that costs very little. Very little for the consumer, that is: for the underpaid and exploited cloth worker producing the garments, the cost is, every bit we all know, very loftier. And every bit today'south garment and textile workers are even so working under backbreaking conditions, the price for fashion items and garments is just decreasing—which compels consumers to indulge in an unsustainable over-consumptionism. ^{Footnote 1} In 1900, the average US household spent xv% of its income on clothing. In 2010, they spent 2.8%. In 1997, British women on boilerplate bought 19 pieces of clothing per year. In 2007, they bought 34 (The Guardian 2014). The economic equation is a simple one: as clothes become cheaper, we consume more, and we throw away more. We have moved from a wear-and-tear civilisation to a vesture-and-waste culture.

No affair the impossibly inexpensive prices—how tin can a t-shirt fabricated of cotton cost as little as 5 U.s.a. dollars?—there is big money in manner, in low cost and fast fashion every bit well every bit in loftier stop, tedious fashion. Big money for the fashion companies and their stake holders, most of which are situated in the W, and yet, little money for the workers who actually produce it, and who to a large extent are situated in and then called developing countries in S Asia and Africa. Here, Sweden constitutes an interesting instance: in this state with a small population of some 9 million people, the fashion industry is ane of its most of import industries. Since the birth of what has been referred to as the Swedish "fashion wonder" (Falk 2011), this industry has come up to steadily increase its economic gain year by year—not to the lowest degree through the global expansion of the fast fashion visitor 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 1000000 US dollars (Dagens Industri 2018). And while the ownership together with the design and marketing reside in Sweden, the actual production is located elsewhere, in countries where product costs are withal depression—and notwithstanding, highly exploitative and backbreaking. This outsourcing of product is telling for many of the new "way nations" to which Sweden belongs, many of which used to have their ain fabric and garment industries in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early on twentieth centuries.

We can contend from this curt contextualization that way plays a crucial and complicated economic role in our contemporary society—and that its function, which is tainted with enormous ecology and work-related bug and challenges, seems only to be increasing. Its increasing importance has come nigh through the successively expanding presence that fashion takes up in our culture and society which is formed by economic factors, but also, by the increasingly cultural, artistic and possibly also political role that style plays today. Although some strains of fashion may strive to be art, and although some pieces of way may in fact be fine art, fashion every bit a phenomenon is always tied to commerce—and to industrialization. It is likewise tied to the spectacular, and to display. And in contempo decades, the display of manner inside the museological context has turned out to be a successful magnet to attract big crowds of visitors. In what follows side by side, I volition tune in on the relation between fashion and other art forms, and then movement on to fashion and the museum to hash out manner'due south place within the museum context. The museum, every bit a retention institution and a cultural sanctionary created for the display of historical objects and art, has been "transformed" by the admittance of fashion. This transformation has much been indebted to the very commercialization—and the zeitgeist—that fashion unavoidably brings with information technology (Vinken 2004).

Style, life, fine art, and the museum

Mode as an arena for the connection between art and life, as was pinpointed by Siemsen, becomes well-nigh evident when the actual arts are taken into business relationship: non only is fashion central in literature and in painting, information technology also holds a crucial office in theatre, opera and film. In these iii artistic mediums or art forms, fashion, nearly ofttimes in the form of costumes, has flourished within the overall narration and mise-en-scène. Style and costume—equally 2 different, still intimately interdependent and influential forms of dress—depend on each other in their creative and commercial expressions, constantly glancing at each other to get inspiration. The stage has been dependent on fashion—whether gimmicky or historic fashion—in order to create a convincing time-specific scenario and hence, to make believe, and the fashion manufacture has oftentimes been inspired past costumes. From the beginning of the twentieth century, information technology has in particular been cinema costume that has served every bit a source of inspiration for way. In fact, this cross-fertilizing of phase/screen and manner become evident when 1 considers how many manner designers who have crossed over to the stage and to picture and vice versa. As 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 also made costumes for the cinema and other scenic arts. Before them, English manner designer Lucy Christina Duff Gordon, known under the name of Lucile, had already in the early on twentieth century combined her skills as a costume designer for the theatre and every bit a fashion designer. Three notable film costume designers who crossed over to way were Americans Howard Green, Adrian and the legendary Edith Caput. I would besides like to bring up the German–Swedish fashion drawer Max Goldstein, known as Mago, who would go from fashion to costume in the early on 1950s when he was discovered and fabricated into one of the about productive and prolific stage and screen designers in Sweden and away—for decades to come. An Italian example would be Valentino Garavani, who designed costumes for La Traviata, directed by flick managing director Sofia Coppola at Teatro dell'Opera in Rome in May 2016, and a French instance is designer Jean Paul Gaultier who continuously has been creating costumes non just for cinema simply besides for theatre and ballet.

And while costume has entered the museum space to a certain extent, it is fashion that has occupied the museum space in the by couple of decades. Equally this trend has increased, some new fashion museums have been erected, while already existent museums take partly turned into fashion museums. It is especially designers who take influenced the twentieth century that have been at focus, and the work of famous designers such as Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, Valentino Garavani and Jean-Paul Gaultier, among many, have recently had their oeuvre exhibited in the museum context, and some of these exhibitions have been ambulating. Some way 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'due south black couture and which was held in Paris in 2017; or "The Mode World of Jean-Paul Gaultier: from Sidewalk to Catwalk" at De Young Galleries in San Francisco in 2012. The latter exhibition travelled the world: it was later shown at Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2013–2014; in Stockholm at the Modernistic Museum in 2013; and at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul in 2016, and in other cities. And before Gaultier was on display in Seoul in 2016, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza stood equally 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 every bit geniuses of couture. They were constructed and designed so as to make usa, the spectators, admire the beauty, the attraction and the artistry. And while virtually extravagant and genius-focused exhibitions are inviting u.s.a. to expect, desire and admire, there is a clear altitude inscribed in their structure—there is distance between us and the extravagant garments, garments that we will never be able or allowed to article of clothing. Out of our achieve, all the same and then shut to us there in the gallery or in the museum. This is fashion and couture when it is at its nearly glamourous—and when it is as nearly "unavailably bachelor". Yet, these exhibitions communicate and draw u.s. 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 to a specific era than to a specific designer—like "The Gold Age of Haute Couture" that was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2008—or defended to a specific wearer and collector, like "La Fashion 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 not but Marcel Proust equally he created his fictive graphic symbol Duchesse de Guermantes in his À la recherche du temps perdu, and who as well inspired many of her contemporary fashion designers. Some other exhibition that tries to capture an era and the aesthetics of a specific civilization 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 Mode". While about would define campsite as a rather modern miracle stretching from the late nineteenth century to the belatedly twentieth century, with a certain height 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, every bit 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 Castilian painting", on display at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in 2019.

It would, however, be a error to think that the 2 recent decades accept seen way inbound the museum in completely new and unprecedented means. The affluent number of fashion exhibitions in the museum infinite is new, just the display of fashion in the museum is non. Equally has been advocated by Julia Petrov, fashion has for more than a century been an integral part of museum displays, and as a museum-worthy object to protect and preserve for later generations. Garments and mode may say a lot almost previous generations and epochs, in fact, garments and accessories are tactile, embodied objects that maybe better than other objects tin brand the spectator experience an affiliation with the past. In her book Fashion, History, Museums from 2019, Petrov shows how mode for long has been an integral part of the museum discourse and its preserving practices and how in fact historical dress—as a fashion to know and empathise the past—has been "displayed in various ways and venues" since the belatedly eighteenth century (Petrov 2019, p. 13). Investigating the long history of displaying clothes, and the many ways it has been displayed for an audience, Petrov asks: "While there are certainly more fashion exhibitions worldwide than ever before, can they exist said to be innovative?" (Petrov 2019, p. 11).

While one tin can contend from Petrov'due south study that little is really new, it is worth looking into why the number of museums turning to fashion has augmented, and why the number of way exhibitions has increased—worldwide. Many are the museums that never before accept cared for fashion or exhibited style, but who recently have jumped on the band railroad vehicle. It has become articulate that mode attracts big audiences: whether it is manner—new besides equally old—or stage and/or film costume, audiences flock to come across pieces of clothes and garments up close. Fashion exhibitions in the museum context with a focus on manner's cultural, socio-economic, 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 grade.

Whereas a few museums have had costume and material collections every bit role of their collected materials, often hidden away in their athenaeum, just a few museums accept had as their aim to preserve and showroom fashion. Here, museums like MOMU (Mode Museum) in Antwerp, the Kyoto Costume Institute in Nihon, Museo del traje in Madrid, the Palais Galliera in Paris, and the Fashion Museum in Bathroom could exist mentioned as 5 obvious examples. These are all museums that have as their unique goal to preserve, showroom and collect textiles and fashion, and they are often connected to the globe of academic research—generously admitting researchers into their collections, while also employing researchers on short or long-term contracts as part of their staff.

Renown and large institutional museum like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Costume Establish at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, to mention a few, have at times curated manner and textile exhibitions in the past. Recently—during the terminal 10 years—they too, notwithstanding, accept turned into manner museums. If curating and producing large fashion exhibitions at least once yearly in their repertoire, they must be considered "fashion museums". This is and then considering fashion attracts, and in a time when museums have to fight to proceed their visitor numbers in guild to survive, fashion has proved to exist a safer card. Let me requite 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 post-obit year, attracted 312,000 visitors. I chose to include the David Bowie exhibition because although this was not a pure fashion exhibition, it was a hybrid since costumes and fashion surely played an important role in the overall design of the exhibition. These are high numbers, indicating that mode and costume practice attract large audiences. Yet, they are rather sparse when compared to the exhibition "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty": in 2015 it was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where information technology attracted no less than 493,043 visitors. Yet, in the year before, when it was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art in New York, it had attracted a total of 661,500 visitors, which places the exhibition every bit 1 of ten of the nearly popular exhibitions always in the 147-year long history of that museum. ^{Footnote 2} Even in a modest context such as the Swedish i, fashion-related exhibitions are indeed proving to be highly popular among the full general public, while also attracting school classes, academy students, and researchers.

The increasing number of visitors who come to see fashion exhibitions, in tandem with the constantly growing involvement from the media to encompass fashion exhibitions, is a clear indicator of the present and intriguing part that manner has come to play in gimmicky society. The attraction of alluring, exiting, sectional, elegant and/or provocative and avantgarde manner is augmenting, but along this more frivolous interest, is the apparent desire to sympathize and to run into 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 fix-fabricated dress which is offered at some exhibitions also attract a large number of visitors—from across various 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 can tell stories that is part of the past, of our or others' histories, that is, of our unlike withal related cultural, social, and economic histories. As Zillah Halls has pointed out:

it tin can tell us more than than any other type of museum collection about how people looked and felt and lived in a particular time. A garment tin can exist regarded equally the remaining outer trounce of a living person and will reverberate that person'due south taste, position, mode of life, or fifty-fifty a transient mood of gaiety or grief, more faithfully and more directly than other arts (Halls 1968, equally cited in Petrov 2019, p. 25).

Hence, garments exercise have meaning. It is and then not surprising that manner has turned into an object of study—and that it has come to occupy a central place in the overall focus on cultural heritage, which is very much on the calendar in times of globalization. As much equally manner and actual garments can tells us our (his-)stories, they also constitute themselves as a counterpart or a dissimilarity to an increasing fast style production and to the over-consumption that this product rate aid foster—a kind of consumption that has come to structure much of our relation to garments.

As examples of Swedish museums that have included manner 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 have their own rather sizeable fashion and costume collections. Amid the Hallwyl Palace's fashion exhibitions one finds "Huset Elliot"/"The Business firm of Elliot" (1995); "Notti Italiane" (2009); "Vävda modedrömmar"/"Woven Fashion 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 mode" (2017–2018)—all of which attracted large audiences. As for the Nordic Museum, "Mitt 50-tal"/My 1950s" (2017), an exhibition dedicated to Swedish women's manner and their everyday life in the 1950s, needs to exist highlighted. Here, at that place were no Dior, Jacques Fath or Balenciaga dresses included: mostly home-made or gear up-made dresses were included, alongside a few couture pieces created by the more fancy fashion salons Märthaskolan and Leja in Stockholm. Near of the garments on display, no matter whether habitation-made or couture, were inspired past the stylish Parisian looks, simply translated for Swedish weather condition and wearers. The emphasis here was partly on the national translation of the more cosmopolitan Parisian fashions—but also, on the locally homemade and sustainable making of style back in the 1950s. Nigh of the garments on display were donated to the museum past individual persons, ranging from working and centre-class women in both rural and urban contexts, to the social, cultural and economic aristocracy in the capital. While positioning the garments in relation to the originals created past Parisian designers, the exhibition explored the homemade, homemade either by the women who were wearing the garments, or by women who worked as dwelling house seamstresses, that is, women who would visit women their homes to make garments for them—in a point in time when fast fashion and over consumption were still to come. "My 1950s" also made an effort to tell the stories of the women who wore the garments, and so, the exhibition served as an invitation to re-visit a past decade through tactile mode and personal stories of what it was to be a woman in mid twentieth century Sweden.

All of the in a higher place exhibitions held at Hallwyl and the Nordic Museums were large visitor successes, it was the two exhibitions on fashion and television set costume, "The House Elliot" and "Costumes from Downton", that came to draw the largest audiences. The "The House of Elliot" exhibition drew 70,000 visitors, and "Costumes from Downton" came to increment the overall attendance record with 12%. This says something nearly the interest amongst the audition to watch and to learn more than about the significant of costume in fictional settings—and too, about the thrill of seeing handmade couture or garments up-close. In times of over-consumption of ready-made dress and non-lasting fast fashion, the very handicraft of garments, whether costumes of couture, attracts spectators. Hence, the museum space constitutes a crucial infinite where we every bit spectators can be inspired to explore, enjoy and critically think through handicraft and slow style as more sustainable and ethical options in relation to the detrimental product and consumption of fast way, and also, to remember through our own consumption practices. More than recently, in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's nativity, the Hallwyl museum exhibited "Bergman à la mode", an exhibition that was dedicated 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 likewise 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 behind 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. According to the head of the museum, Heli Haapasalo, it has been their biggest success always in terms if visitor numbers. Mode attracts—merely so do ordinary garments, so exercise pic and stage costumes. Non only for their being spectacular, extravagant, exclusive and unavailable, as in the instance of the more designer focused exhibitions mentioned higher up, but for their capacity of being part of our histories, and of our cultural heritage (Fig. 1).

Fig. one

Costumes by Marik Vos for Ingmar Bergman's film Fanny and Alexander from 1983 on brandish in "Bergman à la style". This exhibition was curated past Anna Bergman and Nils Harning and held at the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm in 2018, emphasizing the handicraft and the individual designers behind them. Photograph by the author

Total size image

The museum, then, constitutes a fruitful framing for exhibiting manner and garment every bit function of our cultural heritage—and in its extension, fashion and garments may assist inform us about the making of garments every bit a possible sustainable handicraft that nosotros may in fact return back to. As Karyn Jean Harris pointed out already in 1977: "[…] costumes like other specimens of museum quality are office of our civilization and heritage, and most people have an inner want to learn more almost their ancestry every bit well as to relive some of their own personal memories" (Harris 1977, p. 1). In add-on, the museum can constitute a well-nigh needed platform for engaging with the indeed urgent humanitarian and environmental problems that fashion production and consumption together have generated.

Mediatization and commercialization

The recent increased inclusion or embracing of fashion in the museum context is of class related to the increasing meaning that fashion is given, economically every bit well as culturally. Manner—visualized everywhere—constitutes a discourse in itself, and every bit such, mode is ever and clearly mediatized. This discourse is made possible by and thrives on the media—and hither, I am not but referring to social media and the internet, but also to older forms of media such as printed media, picture and printed media. Amidst all of these new and sometime mediated forms of displaying fashion, the style motion picture stands out equally an interesting example in the fashion it manages to expand the old fashion photography and more traditional motion picture genres. Expanding the possibility of still photography, borrowing heavily from other media and other film genres in a well-nigh intertextual sense, the fashion picture show is characterized by both immediacy and hypermediacy: information technology refashions older media while at the same time being itself refashioned by older media. To this fashion as a discourse, 1 can include diverse cultural and educational sectors, since they uphold, create and feed into this discourse. Universities, way and design schools, theatres, the cinema manufacture and museums are hence instrumental in the very sustaining of fashion equally a discourse in our order.

And fashion and garments do matter. Every bit has been pointed out, clothing and fashion constitute an important role of our past and our cultural heritage. Way items, images, and individual garments can tell a lot about a sure time's zeitgeist; they tell of economic growth and economic pass up; near adroitness and of mass production; of living atmospheric condition and aesthetic ideals; and not least of course and gender differences and transgressions. And costumes for theatre, film, opera, ballet and idiot box are—just similar fashion is—part of this cultural heritage: they are fundamental parts of a larger whole and of various artistic and commercial productions. In improver, they are tactile products created by various artisans, from costume designers, dyers, scenics, to cutters and tailors. Stage costume, like manner, is the production of collaboration, of commonage endeavors by individuals without whose work our visual and material culture would limp. Professor Elizabeth Wilson, author of the at present archetype book Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity from 1985, argues that:

Clothes are amidst the most important aspects of human cultural life. In almost every known society its members accept adorned their bodies, and then that the body itself becomes a cultural object. These bodily coverings have a significance far across their commonsensical function to protect from estrus or cold. They represent the individual; dress, face and hair or head roofing are what we see when encountering a stranger; they convey essential information. They are used to include or exclude, they beguile wealth or poverty. They enhance or muffle sexuality and in some cases gender. Thus, they perform social and psychological functions at both a commonage and private level. In addition to that, apparel play an aesthetic role. Skill and artistry create beautiful costumes made from exquisite textiles that deserve to exist classed as art only as much equally ceramics or jewelry. Therefore, the drove of items from the fashions of the by and present, including folk dress, uniforms and ceremonial dress besides as the changing fashions of successive periods, provides a precious tape (in an email chat with the writer in 2016).

And Kaat Debo, Manager of the Fashion Museum in Antwerp (MoMu), Belgium, instead stresses a more the economical and business-oriented approach when asked well-nigh the importance of creating fashion museums:

Fashion museums combine an art historical arroyo with an active participation in the creative industry that fashion is today. These ii poles of fashion as an applied art make fashion highly-seasoned and relevant for contemporary audiences. A fashion museum not merely helps to document the mode scene of today and to write the fashion history of previous decades, simply it can as well function as an active partner in the dissemination of manner theory/education, sociological analysis or philosophical reflection on style/costume. Fashion museums, through their exhibitions, public programs, community edifice, publications, international communication and research, have an important impact on the construction of a fashion city's identity (in an electronic mail conversation with the writer in 2016).

Debo knows what she is talking about: the instalment of MoMu was fabricated possible with governmental money and in shut collaboration with the city's stiff fashion capital, its way heritage and its fashion industry. MoMu is a prime number instance of the symbiotic relation between the (fashion) museum and the fashion industry and fashion consumption. Considering this is also an aspect that is absolutely crucial to the exhibiting of way, garments and costumes: most manner is commerce, whether the actual object which is produced to be 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 merely its historic, social and symbolic value that increases—so does its economic value.

Fashion, on brandish in the museum context, is nearly often both art and commerce. It is at that place to be studied, enjoyed, and visually consumed for its own sake equally "the remaining outer shell" of people who take lived earlier us, as Halls and so accurately once would put information technology (Halls 1968). But it can likewise be at that place for the pure spectacle of a more contemporary kind of allure, caricature and genial handicraft and dazzler—as in those exhibitions that focus solely on the collections fabricated by one fashion designer, as in the example of, permit say, Valentino, Yves Saint-Laurent or Giorgio Armani. In these instances, the boundary between the museum—as a space designed for displaying and informing practices—and the way industry, which is dedicated to product and consumption, becomes blurry, not to the lowest degree considering the industry is ofttimes being involved financially in lodge to make 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 not for sale. Already in 2003, did Christopher Breward reflect upon how the museum space, "the hallowed spaces of art" had come up to "realise[d] the economic benefits of coming on like exclusive boutiques", and that this should "remind united states that culture and commerce are more than 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 contempo case would be the Gucci museum in Florence, Italy: here, the blurred boundary between art and commerce is no boundary at all. In this museum the promotion of aspirational consumerism becomes obvious, and equally Petrov points out, "In these cases, the ontological difference between museal and commercial fashion is narrowed, and both brandish environments become so closely aligned as to be nearly duplicate" (Petrov 2019, p. 61).

It would be naive to dream nigh fashion exhibitions and fashion museum that are completely discrete 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 practice that dares to engage with the pertinent environmental and man crisis that the mode industry to a large caste is responsible of. Neither would it exist ingenuous to stress that informative and inspirational exhibitions can brand a deviation via inciting spectators to become responsible, and solidarian, consumers.

Hither, the way museum can take inspiration from work life museums that successfully manage to brandish working life and appoint audiences to learn almost and reflect upon the situation of workers in various kinds of productions and industries. Although these museums often embrace a historical perspective on work and life, they tin can serve as of import and inspirational points of reference. This is especially true for museums that focus on previous generations of textile workers and their piece of work and life conditions, such as for instance the Museum of Piece of work (Arbetsmuseet) in Norrköping, Sweden, the Historical Museum in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, or the Museum of Piece of work and Life in Woonsucket, Rhode Isle, U.s.a..

Conclusion

Coming back to where this article started, to Siemsen, 1 can contend fashion is still one of the most important arenas in which life and art are intimately connected. One tin can besides affirm that the museum constitutes a prolific space where this connection gets visualized and embodied: in that specific space we tin learn virtually by times, and most past lives—and we exercise and then through the display and the study of fashion equally a socio-economic, cultural and artful phenomenon and of specific garments. The wearing and tearing, the changes over time, and the very production and consumption of garments, tell of a recent past—simply they can also tell about our own present. Fashion and specific garments can also tell of the lives that have produced them: from the seamstresses working in fashion houses creating slow haute couture, to the textile and factory workers making fast manner for underpaid wages and nether exploitative, and at times life threatening, circumstances. Yesterday—and today. And while, these two examples of production realities have non been at the eye of attending when museums have invested in exhibiting manner, in that location have been a few exhibitions that have focused on engineering science and handicraft, such as the exhibition "Measure for Mensurate" at the Majestic Ontario Museum in Canada in 1989, or the more than contempo exhibition "Manus 10 Machina" held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 2016. ^{Footnote 3} Rather, as I tried to have show hither, it has been the more than specular and the glamourous that has been given middle stage—emphasizing, over and over again, the very allure that fashion, whether vesture or unwearable, holds on us, as spectators—and as consumers.

Yet, couture and fast style production realities constitute two examples that maybe meliorate than others can represent and showroom how style is connected to life. Wearing garments is one thing, producing them is another. If the valuation of deadening and immaculate handicraft—every bit an artform—on the one hand, and the exposure of inhumane exploitation of garment and textile workers in the fast fashion industry on the other, tin can be focused on in future exhibitions to come up, the museum can, without a uncertainty, play a more important and pivotal function than it does today. Visualizing and explaining these ii production realities, informing united states visitors nigh what is sustainable and what is not through the exposing of atrocities that have happened and even so happen to textile and garment workers and to the environment while advocating a more than sustainable and human fashion production, may serve to change the status quo. The museum—through insightful curatorial practices—can inform and persuade spectators about the necessity of going back to a "wearable and tear" civilization, and to make us need that the fashion industry stops beingness 1 of the nearly exploitative, backbreaking and polluting industries worldwide. Because the fashion industry—despite its many efforts to convince its consumers that it is "going green"—is non.

The museum, as a retentiveness institution with a strong pedagogical and informative impetus, tin can—must—play a central and determinative role in educating the public of what the fashion industry actually does to our environment and our swain man beings, and also, to point out what can be done to try and change the condition quo. Like documentary pic and disquisitional, investigatory journalism, the museum can institute a powerful arena for engaging and awakening the public—because, as history has shown, the fashion industry, nor our governments, are non going to do so. If museums were actually to embark on this route, then fashion as a phenomenon will—more than always—exist able to pinpoint how intimately life and art are connected, and also, how a changed, more human and solidarian manner organisation tin can come to make life livable for those who work to produce what we wear.

Availability of data and materials

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Notes

1. According to a contempo survey of 2000 women, participants owned "66 items of clothing" on average, including "at least 10 items of clothing that will never be worn again"; "near wearing apparel are worn just seven times", and most one-tertiary of participants "went off clothes after 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 by Diana Vreeland between 1972 and 1989) has focused on their textile and mode exhibition more before.

3. Every bit Petrov has demonstrated, in earlier periods, fashion or costume exhibitions were more investing in educating and informing about the production and the handicraft behind the objects on display. It was common that new "fashion technologies" were exhibited not just in the museum contexts, but likewise, in various kinds of globe exhibitions serving to promote national industrial innovations. Come across Petrov 2019.

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1. Professor, Dept of Media Studies/Manner, 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 writer read and approved the final manuscript.

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Wallenberg, L. Fine art, life, and the fashion museum: for a more solidarian exhibition practice. Fash Text 7, 17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-019-0201-5

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• Received: 08 Baronial 2019

• Accepted: 24 December 2019

• Published: 05 June 2020

• DOI : https://doi.org/ten.1186/s40691-019-0201-5

Keywords

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

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