2009-03-16
© Anette L’orange
“Fashion is not art”
During the last ten years, the number of fashion exhibitions at museums has “increased more rapidly than the number of uninvited people at a Manolo Blahnik sale”. Madelaine Levy, editor of the magazine Bon, talks about why this leads to heated debate and asks how we are to show fashion in an interesting, creative and relevant manner.
If you happen to be in New York just at the moment and feel like visiting a museum you can naturally go and look at the celebrated Martin Kippenberger retrospective at MoMA. But you can also choose something from the “2009 Year of Fashion” series at the International Center for Photography or “Seduction”, dealing with the seductive force of fashion, at the Fashion Institute of Technology. If you happen, on the other hand, to be in London you can choose not to view Picasso and Contemporary Indian Art and, instead, decide to see the glossy “Hats” exhibition curated by milliner Stephen Jones at the Victoria & Albert Museum; or a much more penetrating retrospective of avant-garde fashion designer Hussein Chalayan at the Design Museum. Even in Stockholm one can see fashion at museums: as I write this, Nordiska museet is running two such exhibitions – “Fashion Images” and “Fair Fashion”.
The exhibition as a guilt-free variety of fashion consumption
Fashion has moved up onto Parnassus with the result that the number of fashion exhibitions at museums has “increased more rapidly than the number of uninvited people at a Manolo Blahnik sale”. For those of us who see fashion as a source of inspiration, a sensual pleasure and a tool for understanding the world around us this is naturally good news. Vastly different from the usual fashion circus with shows in New York, Paris and Milan – with all its snobbery and perverted bodily ideals an exhibition is a guilt-free variety of fashion consumption. An educational, sensual shopping trip that makes no demands either on one’s wallet or the size of one’s hips.
New demographic groups to at the museums
During one of the final days of London Fashion Week I asked Penny Martin, who for many years curated the fashion site SHOWStudio and is currently Professor of Fashion Imagery at the London College of Fashion, why so many art museums have started to exhibit fashion. She answered, as though it was self-evident, that this is because the “visitor statistics fly through the roof”. Oriole Cullen, a curator at the Victoria & Albert, adds that fashion brings in “new demographic groups” to the museums.
Botticelli thrown-in
According to what academics term the “new museology”, a cultural institution’s right to exist depends on its inviting and being able to attract the public as well as appearing relevant to people in general. The numerous fashion exhibitions of the last decade have attracted millions of visitors and generated columns and columns of invaluable publicity. They have also ushered people not used to museums into the permanent collections. People who have come to see Kylie Minogue’s stage outfits or an original Batman suit and who have had a Bernini sculpture or a painting by Botticelli thrown in. This means that fashion, in this new museologial era, is one of the museum’s most effective weapons in the struggle for survival.
Controversial sponsors
Fashion can also be profitable for museums. Admitting successful brands into the galleries can potentially mean huge sums in sponsorship on the part of the owner of the brand. The best-known and most controversial example of this is the “Giorgio Armani” exhibition at the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition followed closely on the heels of a large donation to the museum by Armani senior (rumoured to be 15 million USD) which caused the New York Times, for example, to lash out. But the Guggenheim is not alone in getting into bed with the conglomerates that own the luxury items. Everyone from Chanel to BMW have sponsored large-scale exhibitions about themselves. The same thing happens in the art world. When Charles Saatchi supports an exhibition like “Sensation”, part of which consists of works from his own collection, the art dealer is naturally conscious of the fact that the museum exhibition will increase the value of the works.
Kylie’s knickers worth as much as a Miró?
Is there fashion wear at museums because fashion has become high art? Because Kylie’s knickers can be said to be as “valuable” as a Miró? Yes and no, is the answer I get from curators. Neither in the museum world not in the fashion industry are people prepared to redefine fashion as art. Instead, they refer to the altered demographics behind the scenes: the people making the decisions and curating the exhibitions at the major art institutions today increasingly come from a background of cultural studies. And just as they are interested in other popular culture (hip-hop, red carpet, advertising, comic-strip figures…) so they also have an interest in fashion.
Fashion as entertainment or culture?
The status of fashion has clearly changed. But a museum that exhibits fashion risks criticism from a consumer and from a feminist standpoint. The centuries old notion that there is, on the one hand, entertainment and, on the other hand, culture, still seems to apply and fashion is definitely reckoned among the former. As late as 2007, John Buchanan, who had just become head of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, was fiercely criticized when, to the delight of visitors and the vexation of colleagues and the media, he chose to include fashion – for example a Vivienne Westwood exhibition – on the schedule for the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. And since fashion is still not reckoned as high art, a fashion exhibition is no guarantee for successful fundraising, particularly not in Europe. A dividend in the form of goodwill for the sponsoring corporation is not considered as great as it would be for art or opera or certain types of theatre.
Intense debate
The outdated picture of fashion as something far too vulgar for the cultural drawing room is clearly evaporating but, with the notable increase in the number of fashion exhibitions, new questions arise, giving new reasons for conflicts. The debate about fashion in the museum is, not unexpectedly, intense and often hostile. This is true of the museum sector, the media that review exhibitions, and among people who work with fashion as an academic discipline.
Fashion as a flexible medium
The most serious question is, naturally: how are we to exhibit fashion in an interesting, creative and relevant manner? Valerie Steele has spoken about the risk that fashion museums may become “graveyards for dead clothing” (see Anja Cronberg’s interview and “Exhibitionism”, a highly interesting special issue of Steele’s periodical Fashion Theory). The history of costume is by no means new to the museum world. But the traditional forms of displays – stiff dolls behind protective glass in period costumes can hardly catch all that pertains to fashion as we perceive it today: identity-building, sensual, challenging, glamorous; a flexible medium which is entirely dependent on its context. While the committed museum visitor, motivated by her physical relationship with fashion, wants to look, feel and perhaps even try on the items, the museum conservator knows that historical costumes are highly sensitive items that are best not touched nor subjected to bright lights.
Costume historians versus Vogue’s editor
Diana Vreeland, who was editor of Vogue for many years and, from 1971, curator at the Costume Institute (a department of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art), and who was perhaps the most glamorous woman that ever lived, created fashion exhibitions that were fantastic spectacles. Beautiful, inspiring, alive and creative, she caught both the glamour of a dress and its contemporary surroundings. This was as far from a graveyard for dead costumes as one can get. But her exhibitions were severely criticized by costume historians. They were full of anachronisms and they conveyed faulty historical data or no facts at all.
Catwalk at the Victoria & Albert Museum
A later and less epoch-making, though in a sense more successful example of how fashion can be brought to life in a museum setting is represented by the “Fashion in Motion” events at the Victoria & Albert. These consist of a series of catwalk shows inside the historical museum building that are open to the public and that are complemented during the year by films projected on screens in the museum. Anne Valérie Hash, Gareth Pugh and Christian Lacroix are among the designers who have taken part. The event has brought in large numbers of visitors, often from groups in society who would otherwise never have visited the V & A and who would not have been invited to fashion shows.
Risk of fashion exhibitions turning into advertising campaigns
The influential British Sunday newspaper The Observer slated last year’s grand Viktor & Rolf exhibition at the Barbican in London under the heading “When is an art show not an art show? When it’s just a fashion ad”. The reviewer accused the Barbican of “flogging goods on behalf of two smart businessmen” and felt “caught up in a gigantic advertising campaign”. There is undeniably a risk that a fashion exhibition can be transformed into an advertising hoarding, that the distinction between what is shown at the museum and what is displayed in the shop or advertisement simply becomes too small so that the experience seems like normal Saturday shopping in town. (When Diana Vreeland curated an Yves Saint-Laurent retrospective in 1983, the reviewer wrote that it was “like giving gallery space to General Motors for them to exhibit their Cadillacs”.)
Controversy with Lagerfeld
Often, though not always, such developments take place in connection with solo exhibitions of one fashion brand and outside pressure. In 1999, the Metropolitan Museum felt obliged to cancel a planned exhibition about Coco Chanel and her work. The reason was that Chanel’s design chief, both then and now, Karl Lagerfeld wanted to exhibit Chanel’s clothing together with specially curated works by contemporary artists. This was an idea that did not appeal to the curators at The Met. Similar problems can, of course, arise in connection with solo exhibitions of work by individual artists, though there are obvious differences of degree: successful firms producing luxury goods and multinational conglomerates are generally much more skilled and more concerned about their brand names than individual artists and their gallery owners.
A cross between art and commerce
At the same time we must not forget that fashion is a commercial activity. It operates at the intersection between art and commerce. Forgetting, in an exhibition context, that our love of fashion is motivated by a desire to consume, is laying aside part of its innermost nature, its very essence. This also says something about how sorrowfully low the general level of knowledge about fashion actually is when one of the head people at the Barbican privately apologizes for the Viktor & Rolf exhibition with the explanation “they work almost like artists”. Fashion is not art.
Financially difficult times
With so many and such important questions on the agenda, the debate about
fashion belonging or not belonging in museums is not likely to cool down. The phenomenon can also be seen in a new light now that the financial situation is throwing dark shadows across the fashion houses. Will the worsened economic situation for the luxury goods market and less generosity on the part of the corporations which everyone expects, lead to museums that have, in the past, exhibited individual fashion houses in the hope of attracting them as sponsors now turn their backs on fashion?
From luxury to popular pastime
This remains to be seen. Fashion is a young discipline. As has been noted, fashion did not exist in its modern sense, or as a popular pastime, until the beginning of the 20th century. Prior to this there was only luxury. The questions are still much more numerous than the answers. But questions without a definite answer have always been an excellent condition for inspirational art and pioneering fashion. It is to be hoped that this will apply to fashion exhibitions too.
Madelaine Levy
Editor of Bon magazine
Sonia Rykiel: Exhibition, Musée de la mode et du textile, Paris, 20 november 2008 – 19 april 2009
Parfym, inte bara en doft, Röhsska museet, Göteborg, 9 december – 22 mars
2009 Year of Fashion på ICP, New York, med bland annat This Is Not a Fashion Photograph (сurerad av Vince Aletti), 16 januari – 3 maj och Avedon Fashion: Photographs 1944–2000, 15 maj – 6 september
Hussein Chalayan, Design Museum, London, 22 januari – 17 maj
Modebilder, Nordiska museet, Stockholm, 30 januari – 13 april
Swedish Fashion: Exploring A New Identity, Fashion And Textile Museum, London, 6 februari – 17 maj
Valentina: American Couture and the Cult of Celebrity, Museum of the City of New York, 14 februari – 17 maj
Fair Fashion, Nordiska museet, Stockholm, 18 februari – 23 augusti
Les marins font la mode, Musée national de la Marine, Paris, 25 februari – 26 juli
Marimekko, Textilmuseet, Borås, 29 februari – 31 maj
Nya kläder för kvinnor i fängelse, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, 3 – 30 mars
Smal - en utställning om snygghet, makt, ansvar och lidande, Arbetets museum, Norrköping, 7 mars – 31 maj
Maison Martin Margiela, Haus der Kunst, München, 20 mars – 1 juni
Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 6 maj – 9 oktober
Le Notti italiane - Italienska nätter, Hallwylska museet, Stockholm, 7 maj – 30 augusti
SHOWStudio, Somerset House, London, 18 september – 20 december