Fashion Exhibitions Research Articles

Undergraduate curators: Production of a justice-oriented fashion museum exhibition

Undergraduate curators: Production of a justice-oriented fashion museum exhibition

Multi-sensory methods: Toward a crip methodology in fashion studies

Cripistemologies are ways of knowing that emerge from the embodied experiences of disabled bodyminds, while multi-sensory methods value knowledge produced through haptic, visual, auditory and other sensory forms. Drawing on these approaches, this article proposes a crip methodology for fashion studies by exploring the value of combining research methods to honour the knowledge of disabled people and their sensory engagement in the world. We reflect on the four phases of our project, ‘Cripping Masculinity’, and its entangled methodologies and methods. The project engaged 50 disabled, D/deaf and neurodivergent men and masculine people – who we refer to as collaborators – to examine how they produced masculinity and disability through their engagement with fashion and dress. Collaborators took part in wardrobe studies where they shared their experiences with their clothing; fashion hacking where they worked with design students to deconstruct and remake one of their existing garments to better support their bodyminds, and a fashion exhibition and fashion show where they co-produced events to disseminate their dress experiences and hacked clothing. Our analysis demonstrates that combining multi-sensory methods in one project recognizes the different ways that people inhabit the world as sources for generating and disseminating knowledge about the relationship between disability and fashion. While a crip methodology poses challenges for producing research in legible scholarly forms, it also urges fashion studies scholars to intervene into academic ableism through inclusive and expansive research methodologies and methods.

Development of Fashion Museums and Fashion Exhibitions

The preservation of cultural and artistic heritage, raising awareness of cultural values, elevating aesthetic and artistic values, expressing historical styles, reflecting social, cultural, and economic facets of daily life, and serving as information hubs with research opportunities are all reasons why fashion exhibitions and museums are so important. While clothing exhibitions originally took the form of ethnographic exhibitions featuring historical garments, they have now evolved into creative and dynamic exhibitions featuring the creations of modern fashion designers, installations, and sensory-appealing display spaces. In this context, the goal is to discuss the history of fashion museums, categorize and define fashion exhibitions, look at current fashion museums, and emphasize the significance of these institutions. This descriptive study reviewed clothing-fashion shows from the 2000s to the present; fashion exhibitions that incorporate on-site observations and conclusions to enrich and diversify them stylistically, contextually, and spatially are classified. By combining interesting exhibition themes, new museology, new technologies, and innovative space design, fashion exhibitions give visitors one-of-a-kind experiences.

Exhibiting fashion on the heritage site: the interrelation between body, heritage space, and fashionable clothing

The article examines a fashion exhibition at a heritage museum on a historic site in terms of fashion museology. Fashion museology, which has emerged from the growing phenomenon of exhibiting fashion in museums, advocates the visual representation and holistic atmosphere of the curatorial space that determines the on-site audience experience. This article focuses on how the interrelation between fashionable clothing, the bodies of the audience, and the heritage space constructs a hybrid space in which bodily movement articulates the displayed clothing. We consider the heritage space to be a performative event and explore how heritage museums can harness and make practical use of the affective interrelationship within the designed museum space in terms of the quality of the fashion exhibition experience. Museum audiences are situated in and moved around by the curated spatial environment, which is a space with cultural residuals and historical inheritance, where the bodily encounter with the displayed clothing occurs. The investigation of this interaction via case studies sheds light on the overlooked haptic experience and spatial storytelling in fashion exhibitions. The site-specific interaction at the heritage space mediates the body in multiple ways. Such curated bodily movement acts as a narration that imbues the clothing on display with meanings.

Trans YouTubers and DIY undergarments: ‘Queer-and-trans-world-making-and-sharing’ within the fashion system’s informal economies

In our research we explore how do-it-yourself (DIY) gender-affirming undergarments worn on the lower torso are made and distributed and the broader context of these objects in relation to influencer identity, trans experiences, activism and personal storytelling on YouTube in the twenty-first century. To engage in action-oriented research as part of our approach, we also developed a corresponding mounted fashion exhibition that we co-curated with three of the YouTubers featured in the research. To achieve our purpose, we drew upon multiple qualitative methods. We analysed YouTube videos using a comparative method, conducted oral histories with the YouTube content creators and engaged in a curatorial process to produce a co-curated fashion exhibition with the oral history interviewees. The trans YouTubers in our research engaged in what we refer to as queer-and-trans-world-making-and-sharing. That is, there was an overarching emphasis on making DIY tutorial videos via YouTube and the actual garments for themselves, but then also creating and sharing this knowledge with others so they, too, could experience and access happiness and joy in how they fashion their identity through dress.

Grażyna Hase: The legend of socialist-era branding in Poland

This review essay discusses the exhibition Grażyna Hase: Always in Vogue on display at the Warsaw Museum in Poland from 28 April to 11 September 2022. The curator of the exhibition was Agnieszka Dąbrowska, art historian and curator of the museum’s fashion collection. The review outlines the main focus and elements of the exhibition as well as the achievements of one of the most important fashion designers in socialist Poland (1947–90): Grażyna Hase. I discuss the designer’s ambition to create her own fashion under the auspices of a state institution from the 1950s to the 1980s. In communist Poland, fashion design and production were connected to the political system. The fashion exhibition highlights that fashion design in those days was a field of struggle and frustration on many levels: design, production and consumption. Yet, in spite of this, Hase’s designs were very successful.

FASHION WEEK REMAJA DI KOTA BATAM

Fashion week is a week-long fashion exhibition event held in the city of Batam, in which the community, especially teenagers, are involved in a fashion exhibition and compete with each other's styles by using each other's clothes. The above social phenomenon, the Nagoya Thamrin Fashion Week event, has actually become an arena for quirky style contests, show-offs, and prestige through being fashionable for teenagers in Batam city. Of course, this is a trigger for the emergence of consumptive behavior that affects the lifestyle of teenagers in Batam city, who incidentally still have a status as students. In this study, the goal is to find out the phenomenon of youth fashion week in Batam City by looking at it from a social aspect regarding adolescent lifestyles that influence consumptive behavior so as to trigger a culture of consumerism towards adolescents in Batam City. This study uses a qualitative descriptive research method by providing an explanation and description of the object of the research phenomenon according to the incident at the location or in the field. This study used purposive sampling to select 10 informants. The purposeful sampling technique is a sampling technique with certain considerations. The results of the study found that in the lives of adolescents who tend to express self-pleasure through their interest in popular fashion trends, fashion has become their need to increase their self-confidence to appear in public. In addition, modernization changes the lifestyle of adolescents in Batam City, who tend to choose a more consumptive lifestyle that tends to prioritize pleasure through the development of fashion trends that are believed to be able to support appearance needs. With changes in modern lifestyle, Batam teenagers think that a person's status can be marked by changes in appearance through everything they use, for example in the form of branded clothes, branded pants, shoes, and others.

University Students’ Experience of a Digital Fashion Exhibition: Engagement, Embodiment, and Object-Based Learning

The purpose of this research was to understand students’ experiences viewing a digital narrated video tour of a physical fashion exhibition and evaluate its effectiveness using the constructivist learning perspective as it applies to museum learning. Formally written responses to an open-ended qualitative survey from 62 students were analyzed using a transcendental phenomenological approach. The digital tour offered an effective online object-based learning experience that enhanced students’ understanding of the impact of cultural influences on fashion changes and helped them identify changes in fashion design. The digital tour was also engaging and allowed students to construct their own knowledge and take something meaningful from the exhibition, which contributed to its effectiveness. Best practices for designing digital tours of physical fashion exhibitions were developed and included fostering multisensory engagement, providing viewers’ time for observation and reflection, and including multiple views and close-ups of garments.

“Penitential and Self-Mortifying”: Mourning Crape in Fashion

Abstract: In 2014, while preparing for the fashion exhibition “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” organized by the Costume Institute (CI) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the author, who was then the CI’s head conservator, encountered a question. Was the material being displayed toxic? This question arose upon discovering that nineteenth-century periodicals cautioned against wearing mourning crape, which is a crispy, crinkled, and dull black silk fabric worn in the first stages of Victorian mourning. According to these sources, mourning crape was poisonous. Seeking answers, the author would soon find out that, indeed, there was something to those warnings after all. In fact, an investigation into Victorian mourning crape reveals the incongruous story of a wretched and dangerous fabric that rose to the height of luxurious fashion. This article recounts this tale by exploring the history and materiality of English mourning crape to provide insight into both the macabre meaning of the fabric and the dreadful experience of wearing it.

Re-thinking Gender and Fashion Exhibitions in Contemporary Museums

This article explores gender in contemporary museum exhibitions, with a focus on fashion exhibitions. It reveals how the concepts of gender and fashion are embodied through an analysis of museum fashion exhibitions, aiming to discuss issues pertinent to fashion and gender in contemporary museum exhibitions and explore the implications for museum development. To achieve the study purpose, it begins with an introduction to the relationship between fashion and gender and further discusses its representation in museums. The role that museums play in interpreting fashion, feminism and gender is therefore exemplified by exploring the functions and meanings of museums. Furthermore, using the V&A Museum as a case study, the paper examines how fashion and gender are interpreted through museum exhibitions and applied to exhibiting practices. Finally, by analyzing the impact of fashion and gender on museums, insights are gained into the role of museums in performing educational functions and developing collaborations on cross-border and innovative performance forms, which have implications for the development of museums.

Fashion Exhibitions: The Power of Communication

Fashion Exhibitions: The Power of Communication

Virtual Exhibitions for Final Capstone Fashion Design Project : A Case of Chinhoyi University of Technology Final Year Students

Virtual fashion is becoming the latest trend being adopted by most fashion designers and apparel manufactures. The purpose of this study was to explore methods that can be adopted by fashion design students to have digital or virtual fashion exhibitions instead of having physical exhibitions that would imply physical attendance in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this study in- depth interviews and questionnaires were used for gathering data from the purposively sampled participants. Lecturing staff in the faculty offering the fashion design degree programme were interviewed and students were given an online questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions. The study revealed that virtual fashion exhibitions can be successfully integrated into the fashion design degree programme as students exhibit a high level of digital literacy and competency. The study highlights the need for more support in terms of ICT infrastructure at institution level so that students can develop their digital literacy skills. The findings reveal that virtual or digital exhibitions are feasible, though there are cost implications as there are prerequisites in software and hardware requirements. The study recommends institutions offering fashion design degree programme to embrace and invest in the new fashion technologies.

Curating a fashion exhibition centred on Black women: Combatting individual and systemic oppression at land-grant university fashion museums

In 2020, we curated and mounted an exhibition at the Iowa State University Textiles and Clothing Museum that centred Black women college students’ fashion. We explored how our participants negotiated their Black and activist identities through dress while on a predominately white campus and surrounding community in the Midwestern United States. In this article, we critically analyse how we, as curators, confronted and rejected white supremacy and were compelled to provide additional labour while curating due to systemic racism. Throughout the curation and installation processes, we challenged numerous forms of oppression, for example: a lack of collected objects representing Black women’s dress practices; assumptions that Black women engage in illegal activities; a dearth of dress forms coordinating with black and brown skin tones. The supplementary work, which included additional time, financial resources, intellectual and emotional labour, is one way that compulsory whiteness is upheld in fashion museums. Curators who engage in social justice initiatives are disadvantaged by ongoing institutional racism, which is prevalent in a plethora of universities in the United States; the focus of this article is predominately white, land-grant institutions. We acknowledge that structural inequities museum curators contend with when claiming space for marginalized identities are prevalent, but can be overcome, despite the hegemony of the silencing and oppression of Black people. We call for a radical shift in fashion museums and curricula.

Curating costumes from many lands: Addressing the colonial gaze in two university dress collections through digital curation

In this article we reflect on our engagement with a broad spectrum of dress- and textile-related artefacts housed within the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and Department of Anthropology Collections at Cornell University. In recent years, fashion critics and scholars have begun to address the biases and prejudices that continue to inform the collection and display of fashion within museums and academic institutions. In addition to museums of art, design, anthropology and history, universities have contributed to and influenced the public’s perceptions of fashion as an embodied material practice and a social phenomenon through the development and circulation of fashion- and dress-related teaching collections. Drawing upon our experiences co-curating a digital fashion exhibition about the development of two ethnological dress collections on Cornell’s campus, we discuss the opportunities and challenges that we faced working with these objects in a university setting. Our objective is to contextualize the formation of these collections and raise questions and critiques about the ways in which university dress collections have perpetuated – and continue to perpetuate – forms of discrimination like sexism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, classism, ageism and racism amidst an ongoing colonial context. We suggest possible steps for decentring the colonial gaze through digital curation.

Curating the circus: Collaboration and responsibilities in digital costume exhibitions

Flights of Fancy: Fashion and Function in Circus Performance is a digital exhibition of circus costumes that examines the complexities, histories and representations of circus through representations of material artefacts, ephemera, print media, photographs and other primary sources. Through curated features of the exhibit, we investigate circus costumes’ sociocultural influence on fashion through aesthetics and functional design. The purpose of this article is to explore how digital fashion exhibitions may be developed to create educational resources and how their curation process may be interpreted through theory. To do this, we examine the curation of Flights of Fancy through an exploration of its use of symbolism as an organizational device. We use multiple theoretical lenses, including Erving Goffman’s concepts of the front and back stage presentations of self, along with Anneke Smelik and Susan Kaiser’s updated view that interprets Goffman in the digital/social media sphere, Paul O’Neill’s composition of exhibitions through background/middle ground/foreground and Susan Kaiser’s time, space and place. Flights of Fancy: Fashion and Function in Circus Performance, digital exhibition (February 2021 – present; Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, Cornell University Library): https://exhibits.library.cornell.edu/flights-of-fancy.

Clothing displayed in museums: from conservation to innovative design representations

The presentation in museum exhibitions of samples of historical clothing, fashionable costumes from different periods and conceptual costumes of our time has acquired particular relevance. The development of exhibition design has attracted the attention of gallery owners, curators and representatives of the scientific community. The general cultural significance of the practices of preserving the heritage of material and artistic cultures and their representations synthesises traditional and innovative approaches to reconstruction, conservation and perception of costume, while remaining poorly studied. The strategies of contemporary curatorial practices form alternative approaches to fashion exhibitions and their organisation. In the information society, fashion exhibitions have become self-sufficient art projects that require careful scientific consideration.

Fashion City or Museum of Fashion? Exploring the Mutually Beneficial Relationship between London’s Fashion Industry and Fashion Exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum

As the commodity chains supporting the fashion industry have become ever more global and complex, so the work of constructing and maintaining the reputations of fashion cities such as London has also needed to evolve. Museums have played a key role in this process through their dissemination of discursive narratives about the places, spaces, and people that constitute London’s symbolic fashion capital. Taking the Victoria and Albert Museum as a primary case study, this paper explores how changes to the networks and processes of the fashion city in the decades following the Second World War were connected to the growth of fashion within the museum. Looking at two key exhibitions: Britain Can Make It (1946) and Fashion: An Anthology (1971), it traces how the museum responded to processes of deindustrialization and cultural change by bringing the city’s commercial fashion cultures into the museum space, resulting in the museum becoming an important site for the fashion city. Finally, it asks whether the legacy of this process has resulted in increasingly narrow and homogenous fashion exhibitions that have the potential to harm London’s fashionable reputation by excluding many of the diverse networks and places that make the city’s fashion culture unique.

Zurich, 1970. The Exhibition Balenciaga: Ein Meister der Haute Couture

This article takes a new look at Balenciaga: Ein Meister der Haute Couture, the exhibition held at the Museum Bellerive in Zurich from May 31 to August 16, 1970. By exploring the materials preserved in the museum’s archives (now at the Zurich University of the Arts), the study sets out to reconstruct this retrospective dedicated to Cristóbal Balenciaga and to consider its relevance to the museology of the Spanish creator. Examining these archival materials provides an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the history of fashion exhibitions, on the genealogy of these three-dimensional artifacts and on the practice and discipline of fashion curating. How do we decide whom and what to show? How do we construct a museum collection that represents fashion? To address these questions, this article analyzes not only the exhibition project, but also and above all the decision-making processes that preceded and shaped this exhibition in particular. Balenciaga: Ein Meister der Haute Couture was an exhibition produced in an institutional dimension which saw a close connection between the museum and the school of applied arts. At the root of this project lay the intentions of a school of fashion design: this allows us to think about the relationship between the design of fashion and the languages used in exhibitions of and for fashion.

Exhibiting Transformative Fashion: Digital Interventions to Enhance Display and Interpretation

While the issues of displaying fashion in motion in museum exhibitions have been addressed with various interventions to animate displays, the challenge of successfully presenting transformative fashion in exhibitions has received less attention. With more contemporary designers creating conceptual fashion that is transformative and technological in nature, this article discusses a research project that proposes a series of digital interventions to best display these garments. With the use of digital technology in fashion exhibitions becoming commonplace, this article aims to explore this application and the ways in which it can be used to greater effect to enhance the performance of transformation in the presentation of fashion. The use of digital technology to improve and advance opportunities for inclusivity and accessibility in reading fashion in exhibitions will also be demonstrated.

DIGITALISED AND DIGITISED FASHION EXHIBITIONS AND BIG EVENTS: ¨CHINA: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS” CASE STUDY

This research was conducted to explore how fashion exhibitions, in this case with a historical and cultural foundation, and big events can be an impactful channel of marketing communications with digitalization and social media. Exhibitions and events are featured as meaningful communications channels to diffuse the culture and businesses sectors.