Affect, haptics, and heterotopia in fashion curation

Abstract

Reflecting on the present and future avenues of fashion curating as a discipline, this chapter looks at the kaleidoscopic range of theoretical disciplinary lenses at play in twenty-first-century fashion exhibitions, based on three use cases of exhibitions pairs, in which the author was either closely involved, or which were organized by the institutions she worked for: The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Antwerp Fashion Museum MoMu. Comparing six fashion exhibitions of different scales at different locations, this text looks at these exhibitions using three analytical lenses. Firstly, by looking at the curatorial mode of the practice of fashion exhibition-making in the twenty-first century, authorial or collaborative, and the range of academic disciplines used next to the traditional field of fashion history: sociology, literary and semiotic studies, cultural studies, architecture and design studies, new materialism, gender and queer studies, film studies, art history, psychology, biography, decolonization studies. Apart from this “cultural turn” in fashion curation, broader trends in new museology, such as the concept of the design-as-medium, the museum space as a heterotopia, and affect theory used as analytical lenses. Lastly, the concept of the traveling exhibition and its self-referentiality or meta-curatorial practices will be discussed where applicable.