Introduction: Fashion & Art in the Museum Space
An excerpt of the Introduction to my dissertation undertaken as a part of my Master of Art Curating.
Introduction
Art and fashion have long looked to one another to find inspiration.[1] At the same time, they have often been categorised as opposites – as high versus low culture.[2] This dissertation will explore the discourse created when art and fashion are displayed together in a museum space. It will look at how the conversations created from curatorial interventions that bring art and fashion into contact with each other enhance an audience’s experience and understanding of visual culture, offering a complete or developed understanding. Three distinct case studies of exhibitions in Australia and around the globe will be discussed, which successfully display fashion and art together to create comprehensive experiences of a period or visual culture. These experiences, and fashion’s unique ability to connect with a general audience, has resulted in the growing in popularity of fashion exhibitions, meaning that this study is timely and relevant within the current world of museums.
The study of the complex relationship between art and fashion is not new. It is continuing to be discussed at an exponential rate as fashion and art increasingly come into contact with one another. As the field continues to grow, scholars are increasingly focused on how the two cultural forms meet. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, editors of the seminal book Fashion and Art, have significantly impacted the field by providing a forum for the comprehensive investigation of the relationship between fashion and art by prominent scholars working in both the fashion and art history disciplines.[3] Scholars such as Mitchell Oakley Smith and Alison Kubler in their work Art/Fashion in the 21st Century explore how the two worlds of contemporary art and fashion are constantly collaborating.[4] Their work investigates how fashion and art challenge the traditional spheres of culture as both designers and artists are continuously looking to one another for inspiration and collaboration.
The Handbook of Fashion Studies, edited by leading fashion theorists, also bestows an important survey of the history, present and the future state of fashion studies. The handbook locates fashion theory and practice to larger cultural concepts, such as identity, space and materiality to demonstrate how fashion interacts with other cultural forms. A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion: In the Modern Age, edited by Alexandra Palmer, investigates how fashion continues to respond to and comment upon changes occurring in society. [5] Additionally, the human body continues to be an integral component within the sphere of fashion studies. Joanne Entwistle’s work The Fashioned Body considers the role of fashion in society and the way in which bodily concepts are actually formed through fashion.[6] Thus, the state of the field is currently oriented towards looking at fashion’s overall impact on society. Few of these studies consider how fashion’s ability to shape cultural discourse is furthered through the space of the museum. This dissertation further contributes to fashion scholarship in that it investigates fashions impact inside the museum and gallery space.
This aim connects with current studies in museology which focus on fashion. Key scholars who have helped to explore fashion’s role in the museum space are Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson in Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice and Annamari Vänskä and Hazel Clark in Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in The Museum and Beyond.[7] Both works consider the approach to displaying clothing thematically rather than chronologically – which was the dominant mode of fashion curating until recently. My study responds to this new outlook in that it too looks at how fashion and art can be displayed in a non-chronological manner to weave together an entire cultural aesthetic or narrative.[8]
Fashion has long been considered a lower form of culture when it is compared to other forms of visual culture that are more traditionally associated with galleries and museums.[9] However, this attitude is changing, and the popularity of fashion exhibitions continues to rise. What happens then when art and fashion converse with one another in the museum space? How can fashion add meaning and develop an expanded understanding to a curatorial theme?
This dissertation explores the complex relationship between art and fashion through three case studies of exhibitions from recent years. It looks at exhibitions in Australia, France and America to understand what is happening in major centres across the world – especially relevant as fashion exhibitions often travel the globe. Chapter One begins in Australia, at the National Gallery of Victoria, where haute couture designs by Chinese designer Guo Pei were showcased as a part of their Triennial in 2017/18. This chapter will explore how the display of garments within the museum space are challenging curatorial traditions. If art and fashion provide similar aesthetic experiences, as the curators at the Triennial seemingly argue, should they be placed in the same categories? The exhibition illustrates that the functionality of clothing immediately changes when it is placed in the museum space and the impact this has on the objects included in the exhibition – both fashion and art.[10]
Chapter Two focuses exclusively on how the display of fashion is enhanced by its interaction with other forms of art and design when incorporated in the museum space. It also explains the benefit provided when art and fashion come together to better understand a historical period – diversifying perspectives and understandings. These ideas are explored through the Christian Dior, Couturier du Rêve (Designer of Dreams) retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2017. In this exhibition, many of Christian Dior’s designs were displayed alongside paintings, furniture, decorative objects and personal items in a chronological and thematic manner. This specific display strategy was chosen to provide context to the life and influences of Christian Dior, who was highly versed in forms of visual culture and spent a vast amount of time in museums.[11] The chapter argues that haute couture has an ever-changing role in the museum space because it can be recontextualised depending on curatorial interventions.[12] Does placing ‘decorative’ and ‘fine art objects’ (as they have traditionally been defined) amongst haute couture designs better locate the practice of haute couture within the high cultural sphere of the fine arts? The display of fashion and art together in this exhibition in a variety of different ways contextualises fashion in the museum space to legitimise its place amongst high culture, and asks how definitions of visual culture may be advanced to understand the various practices encompassed by the term, as facilitated by museums and curators. [13]
Finally, Chapter Three focuses on the use of fashion in the museum to recontextualise the permanent collection of a major institution. This is explored through the exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination at the Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. In this exhibition, fashion was used to reimage the Met’s significant medieval collection. The exhibition did not focus on one fashion designer but drew upon the imagination of designers from across the world who in some way connect with catholic culture. The exhibition successfully portrays an entire catholic aesthetic which is woven together by fashion, art and visual culture. In doing so, it demonstrates that bringing art and fashion together can add meaning to the display of a visual culture in a richer form than if object types remain segregated.
All three chapters aim to explore the complex relationship between art and fashion. They do not seek to do this in a way that draws a line between the two differing forms of cultural expression, but instead look at how various forms of visual and material culture converse and collaborate to add multiple layers of meaning to a curatorial vision. By undertaking these three case studies of recent fashion exhibitions, the dissertation will demonstrate that art and fashion can be experienced as intimately connected forms of culture to inspire awe amongst its viewer. Fashion’s unique ability to transport the viewer into a fabricated world, offering an immersive experience, means that it can be powerful in communicating cultural narratives.
[1] Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas. Fashion and Art (Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 1.
[2] Valerie Steele, “Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,” Fashion Theory 12, no. 1 (March 2008): 8; Sung Bok Kim, “Is Fashion Art?” Fashion Theory 2, no. 1 (February 1, 1998): 51.
[3] Geczy and Karaminas, Fashion and Art.
[4] Mitchell Oakley Smith and Alison Kubler, Art/fashion in the 21st Century (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013).
[5] Alexander Palmer, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion: In the Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
[6] Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015).
[7] Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson, Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014; Annamari Vänskä and Hazel Clark. Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
[8] Llewellyn Negrin, “Aesthetics: Fashion and Aesthetics – A fraught Relationship,” In Fashion and Art, 43.
[9] Oakley Smith and Kubler “Fashion as Art” In Art/fashion in the 21st Century, 28; Negrin, “Aesthetics,” 51.
[10] Anne Hollander, “Dress,” In Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 311.
[11] Florence Müller, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 3.
[12] Steele, “Museum Quality,” 8.
[13] Lourdes Font, "Dior Before Dior." West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 1 (2011): 29.
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