Re-Thinking Luxury in the Museum Fashion Exhibition

Abstract

Despite the ever-growing profit margins of the luxury sector, market saturation and the fashion cycle make it difficult for consumers to determine the value of, and for producers to imbue value in, luxurious fashions. However, there is a space where the individual can appraise the surplus value of rarefied and spectacular fashions without the ‘noise’ of commercial discourse. Under the right curatorial conditions, the museum exhibition shelters luxury fashion from the reification of the mercantile and allows the visitor to engage personally with the garments on display to create an anthropologically enriching experience, in the words of the contemporary German philosopher Lambert Wiesing. By engaging with the curatorial decisions in a number of recent fashion exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, Canada; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, both in New York City; Fashion Space Gallery, in London, England; and the Musée Galliera, in Paris, France, this article proposes to analyse successful and unsuccessful experiences of museum fashion that allow the visitor to rethink luxury at a more personal and personally enriching level.