Visionary design practices: preserving plastics and designers’ intent in collections of modern and contemporary fashion

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to encourage understanding and preservation of twentieth and twenty-first century fashion. It considers the use of plastics by three influential designers of modern and contemporary Western fashion and the challenge of preserving both the plastics and the designers’ intent. Focussing on pieces from The Costume Institute (The Metropolitan Museum, New York) by three influential fashion designers, Elsa Schiaparelli, Beth Levine and Rei Kawakubo, the paper explores the challenges of conserving their work in its design, material and construction. Each designer responded differently to the then newly available plastic polymeric materials used to create their visionary designs. Instrumental analysis, using micro-FTIR, Py-GC/MS and EGA-MS, helped to identify the plastics and to predict longer-term changes. Concerns about ephemerality and temporality are shared by both innovative fashion and conservation. Disconnection between preserving the designs, in the form of museum artefacts, and each designer’s intent, as manifested in the original relationships and processes used to materialise that intent, is examined to understand whether and how ‘designer intent’ can be preserved or represented. The works of Schiaparelli, Levine and Kawakubo provide comparative case studies to explore the challenges of conservation and representation and to inform the development of a theory of ‘fashion conservation’.