The clothes shows
Exhibitions about fashion are all the rage, says Florence Waters, as museums cotton on to the fact that they can be hugely popular
Whether it is Lady Gaga at the Design Museum or 1940s street style at the Imperial War Museum London, museums suddenly seem to be very fashion conscious.
And it’s not just the big London venues: the Bowes Museum in County Durham has a long-standing reputation for its high-quality fashion exhibitions and on 11 July will open Yves Saint Laurent: Style is Eternal (until 20 October), the first UK show to present a comprehensive display of the French designer’s work.
The Watts Gallery in Surrey has an exhibition (until 7 June) about a movement by Victorian artists to reform fashion, while Danson House in Kent opens a show about British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood on 1 April (until 31 October).
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has traditionally been one of the key places to see fashion in museums and it now has a steady stream of exhibitions on the subject.
In March it has shows on wedding dresses (until 15 March) and British fashion designer Alexander McQueen (14 March-2 August). Later this year it will open an exhibition about footwear, Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (13 June-31 January 2016).
The V&A and other museums have held fashion exhibitions for years but the approach to displaying the subject is evolving quickly in an age where it is no longer enough to merely show clothes on mannequins.
And in many ways, the line between fashion shows and fashion exhibitions is becoming blurred. The V&A, for example, hosts Fashion in Motion, a series of live catwalk events at the museum that has featured designers such as Jenny Packham, Issey Miyake, Ozwald Boateng and Christian Lacroix since it was launched in 1999.
Sonnet Stanfill is the curator of the V&A’s McQueen retrospective, Savage Beauty. She says that it does not feel like a traditional exhibition. “We’ve created a world, a set, an immersive experience where the audience will experience the same kind of emotions they would at a McQueen fashion show,” Stanfill says.
When Savage Beauty was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, it became one of the gallery’s 10 best-attended shows, with more than 650,000 people visiting. Four years on, the V&A’s version, which has been designed by the same company, Gainsbury & Whiting, aims to be bigger and better.
Stanfill says new technology is one of the ways in which the V&A can enhance the 2011 experience.
“The Kate Moss hologram was a magnet for people at the New York show because it was so dream-like you almost couldn’t believe it was real,” Stanfill says. “That has been scaled up to lifesize for the V&A show.”
One of the UK’s biggest fashion and clothing museums is the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall in Manchester. The gallery, which is part of Manchester City Galleries, is holding an exhibition about wedding dresses (until 15 March) and a show on British designer Ossie Clark (until 27 July).
Manchester Art Gallery is hosting Cotton Couture (until 14 June), which features 60 outfits donated to the Gallery of Costume by the Cotton Board.
Miles Lambert, the senior curator and keeper at the Gallery of Costume, says that fashion has moved on a lot in the years he has been interested in the subject.
“When the V&A costume gallery opened in 1984 it made me feel that costume and fashion can be as stimulating as any of the arts,” he says. “But the Jean Paul Gaultier show at the Barbican last year bowled me over in a different way. You were remarkably engaged. The mannequins spoke to you.
“Clothes are designed to move and be lived in. They are designed by personalities and for personalities, and now fashion shows can become immersive, experiential affairs to reflect that in ways that have never been possible before.”
The Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall re-opened in 2010 and since then visitor figures have risen steadily to about 250,000 a year. The museum’s exhibitions often encourage designers and artists to respond to its rich collection. Recent examples include The First Cut, in 2013, a show of paper dresses and shoes that related to historical costume displays.
The surge of fashion-related exhibitions in the UK proves that museums are responding to the public’s growing interest in the subject. There is a retrospective of Guy Bourdin at Somerset House (until 15 March) and this month will see the opening of the first fashion-related exhibition at Tate Britain (see p29).
At the National Museum of Scotland, new fashion displays will be among the 10 galleries being developed for 2016 as part of the second phase of the redevelopment of the Edinburgh venue.
And catering to more niche interests, the Museum of London has been displaying fashion photography (15 October 2014-1 March) inspired by its Adventures of Sherlock Holmes exhibition.
Ulster Museum in Belfast has The Age of Liberty (until 19 April), which looks at how the campaign for votes for women challenged their traditional roles in society and brought about a dramatic transformation in fashionable dress.
Fashion, you might say, is à la mode, and the figures prove it. The V&A’s 2013 record-breaking David Bowie Is exhibition sold 311,760 tickets. Though technically not a fashion exhibition, clothes very much became the focus, according to V&A curators. The biggest crowd-puller in the Design Museum’s exhibition history is Hello, My Name Is Paul Smith (15 November 2013-22 June 2014) with 73,192 visitors.
Before that it was 2012’s Christian Louboutin: 20 Years, with 66,222 visitors.
Donna Loveday, the curator of the Design Museum’s Women Fashion Power show, says it is not just exhibitions about key figures in the fashion world that are popular.
“Women Fashion Power has had the same, if not bigger, response than a monographic show on a single designer,” says Loveday. “What I like about this exhibition is that it’s the women who are the heroes, not the designers. And we set the exhibition in a broader historical context – it’s about big changes in society and how fashion has responded to that.”
Attracting crowds isn’t the only reason that many museums are beginning to put fashion higher on their agendas. “Maria Balshaw, the director of the Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries, is keen to get as much fashion as she can into the galleries,” Lambert says. “Yes, she thinks it’s popular, but also that it’s been undervalued and under-represented in the past.”
Manchester Art Gallery is showing an exhibition of dresses by Andrea Zapp (until 22 March). As part of this, the Manchester-based media and textile artist has designed three limited-edition dresses, using photographs of objects from the gallery’s decorative arts collection.
The show is curated by a contemporary art curator, Clare Gannaway, who believes there is increasing openness to the idea that fashion and design do not have to be seen as distinct from visual arts.
“I’m keen to acknowledge the ways in which artists are crossing disciplines,” says Gannaway. “I thought of this show in terms of curating sculpture.”
Platt Hall is among the many regional museums that have important historical fashion collections, which means there are plenty of opportunities for putting interesting artefacts on display.
Loveday says regional museums were an important part of the Women Fashion Power show. “Because of the 10-month time-scale, we missed some national museum loan deadlines,” she says. “I started going to look at regional museum collections and found they had everything we needed for this show.
“I wasn’t aware of the richness of material in some of those collections. The majority of corsets and undergarments on display, for example, come from the Leicestershire Museum and nicely illustrate subtle changes in design evolution.”
Organising a blockbuster show in 10 months may sound like a dream to some fine-art curators, who can be negotiating expensive loans for years. But hosting fashion exhibitions has its challenges. For a start, getting sponsorship isn’t easy,
particularly as fashion brands are understandably reluctant to support exhibitions that include other fashion brands.
Nobody opted to be the main sponsor of the Women Fashion Power show, for example; only mannequins and screens were acquired through sponsorship.
Another problem is that fashion exhibitions are not cheap to organise. “It’s not just a case of getting cheap and cheerful shop mannequins and zipping them in,” Stanfill says.
“Even the most straightforward outfit needs undergarments and underpinning.”
A lot of time is needed to mount an exhibition, she adds, and there are strict rules about conservation, so you need trained staff with a variety of specialisms, from conservation science to couturiers.
“The crinolines and petticoats are the secrets that only the museum staff can appreciate,” Stanfill says. “Think of it like a ballerina – if it’s good, it should look effortless.”
Whether effortless or not, fashion exhibitions look set to continue to be a big draw for visitors, and are helping to attract audiences that may not be traditional museum-goers.
Florence Waters is a freelance journalist
Museums Journal speaks to Simon Baker, Tate Britain’s photography curator, about the gallery’s first major exhibition of fashion-related photography, which will be devoted to the British artist Nick Waplington’s work documenting the creation of Alexander McQueen’s autumn 2009 collection (10 March-17 May).
Is this an art exhibition?
Simon Baker: Yes, this is an art exhibition of Nick Waplington’s photographs. The project juxtaposes images of Alexander McQueen’s final autumn/winter fashion collection with photographs of recycling plants and landfills, and offers a powerful commentary on destruction and renewal.
Will Tate’s show offer something that photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s McQueen show won’t?
This exhibition is designed to complement the V&A show. It will be a major photography show by a leading British photographer. Waplington captured the intense and theatrical working process behind The Horn of Plenty collection, revealing a raw and unpolished side of the fashion world, but also finding inspiration in its radical themes.
How will the show offer more than Waplington’s book of the same photos?
We are working with the artist to design the installation, working with different-sized prints and sequences, for example. The exhibition will culminate in some large prints on the final catwalk show.
Can fashion photography be art? Are attitudes in the art world changing towards fashion photography?
For many years, photographers have done work in different contexts – between art and fashion – such as Man Ray, Guy Bourdin, Horst P Horst and David Bailey, to name a few. The two categories need not be exclusive, and attitudes are continuing to change as people gain a better understanding of the depth and variety of photographic practices.
Is there other fashion photography in Tate’s collection?
The collection does contain images by photographers who have worked in fashion, although the works we have collected are not necessarily “fashion” photography.
What other institutions have been putting on good fashion photography exhibitions?
There was a Horst exhibition at the V&A (6 September 2014-4 January 2015) and a Bourdin exhibition at Somerset House (ends 15 March). Both of these encompass more than fashion photography.
And it’s not just the big London venues: the Bowes Museum in County Durham has a long-standing reputation for its high-quality fashion exhibitions and on 11 July will open Yves Saint Laurent: Style is Eternal (until 20 October), the first UK show to present a comprehensive display of the French designer’s work.
The Watts Gallery in Surrey has an exhibition (until 7 June) about a movement by Victorian artists to reform fashion, while Danson House in Kent opens a show about British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood on 1 April (until 31 October).
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has traditionally been one of the key places to see fashion in museums and it now has a steady stream of exhibitions on the subject.
In March it has shows on wedding dresses (until 15 March) and British fashion designer Alexander McQueen (14 March-2 August). Later this year it will open an exhibition about footwear, Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (13 June-31 January 2016).
The V&A and other museums have held fashion exhibitions for years but the approach to displaying the subject is evolving quickly in an age where it is no longer enough to merely show clothes on mannequins.
And in many ways, the line between fashion shows and fashion exhibitions is becoming blurred. The V&A, for example, hosts Fashion in Motion, a series of live catwalk events at the museum that has featured designers such as Jenny Packham, Issey Miyake, Ozwald Boateng and Christian Lacroix since it was launched in 1999.
Sonnet Stanfill is the curator of the V&A’s McQueen retrospective, Savage Beauty. She says that it does not feel like a traditional exhibition. “We’ve created a world, a set, an immersive experience where the audience will experience the same kind of emotions they would at a McQueen fashion show,” Stanfill says.
When Savage Beauty was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, it became one of the gallery’s 10 best-attended shows, with more than 650,000 people visiting. Four years on, the V&A’s version, which has been designed by the same company, Gainsbury & Whiting, aims to be bigger and better.
Stanfill says new technology is one of the ways in which the V&A can enhance the 2011 experience.
“The Kate Moss hologram was a magnet for people at the New York show because it was so dream-like you almost couldn’t believe it was real,” Stanfill says. “That has been scaled up to lifesize for the V&A show.”
One of the UK’s biggest fashion and clothing museums is the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall in Manchester. The gallery, which is part of Manchester City Galleries, is holding an exhibition about wedding dresses (until 15 March) and a show on British designer Ossie Clark (until 27 July).
Manchester Art Gallery is hosting Cotton Couture (until 14 June), which features 60 outfits donated to the Gallery of Costume by the Cotton Board.
Miles Lambert, the senior curator and keeper at the Gallery of Costume, says that fashion has moved on a lot in the years he has been interested in the subject.
“When the V&A costume gallery opened in 1984 it made me feel that costume and fashion can be as stimulating as any of the arts,” he says. “But the Jean Paul Gaultier show at the Barbican last year bowled me over in a different way. You were remarkably engaged. The mannequins spoke to you.
“Clothes are designed to move and be lived in. They are designed by personalities and for personalities, and now fashion shows can become immersive, experiential affairs to reflect that in ways that have never been possible before.”
The Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall re-opened in 2010 and since then visitor figures have risen steadily to about 250,000 a year. The museum’s exhibitions often encourage designers and artists to respond to its rich collection. Recent examples include The First Cut, in 2013, a show of paper dresses and shoes that related to historical costume displays.
The surge of fashion-related exhibitions in the UK proves that museums are responding to the public’s growing interest in the subject. There is a retrospective of Guy Bourdin at Somerset House (until 15 March) and this month will see the opening of the first fashion-related exhibition at Tate Britain (see p29).
At the National Museum of Scotland, new fashion displays will be among the 10 galleries being developed for 2016 as part of the second phase of the redevelopment of the Edinburgh venue.
And catering to more niche interests, the Museum of London has been displaying fashion photography (15 October 2014-1 March) inspired by its Adventures of Sherlock Holmes exhibition.
Ulster Museum in Belfast has The Age of Liberty (until 19 April), which looks at how the campaign for votes for women challenged their traditional roles in society and brought about a dramatic transformation in fashionable dress.
Fashion, you might say, is à la mode, and the figures prove it. The V&A’s 2013 record-breaking David Bowie Is exhibition sold 311,760 tickets. Though technically not a fashion exhibition, clothes very much became the focus, according to V&A curators. The biggest crowd-puller in the Design Museum’s exhibition history is Hello, My Name Is Paul Smith (15 November 2013-22 June 2014) with 73,192 visitors.
Before that it was 2012’s Christian Louboutin: 20 Years, with 66,222 visitors.
Donna Loveday, the curator of the Design Museum’s Women Fashion Power show, says it is not just exhibitions about key figures in the fashion world that are popular.
“Women Fashion Power has had the same, if not bigger, response than a monographic show on a single designer,” says Loveday. “What I like about this exhibition is that it’s the women who are the heroes, not the designers. And we set the exhibition in a broader historical context – it’s about big changes in society and how fashion has responded to that.”
Attracting crowds isn’t the only reason that many museums are beginning to put fashion higher on their agendas. “Maria Balshaw, the director of the Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries, is keen to get as much fashion as she can into the galleries,” Lambert says. “Yes, she thinks it’s popular, but also that it’s been undervalued and under-represented in the past.”
Manchester Art Gallery is showing an exhibition of dresses by Andrea Zapp (until 22 March). As part of this, the Manchester-based media and textile artist has designed three limited-edition dresses, using photographs of objects from the gallery’s decorative arts collection.
The show is curated by a contemporary art curator, Clare Gannaway, who believes there is increasing openness to the idea that fashion and design do not have to be seen as distinct from visual arts.
“I’m keen to acknowledge the ways in which artists are crossing disciplines,” says Gannaway. “I thought of this show in terms of curating sculpture.”
Platt Hall is among the many regional museums that have important historical fashion collections, which means there are plenty of opportunities for putting interesting artefacts on display.
Loveday says regional museums were an important part of the Women Fashion Power show. “Because of the 10-month time-scale, we missed some national museum loan deadlines,” she says. “I started going to look at regional museum collections and found they had everything we needed for this show.
“I wasn’t aware of the richness of material in some of those collections. The majority of corsets and undergarments on display, for example, come from the Leicestershire Museum and nicely illustrate subtle changes in design evolution.”
Organising a blockbuster show in 10 months may sound like a dream to some fine-art curators, who can be negotiating expensive loans for years. But hosting fashion exhibitions has its challenges. For a start, getting sponsorship isn’t easy,
particularly as fashion brands are understandably reluctant to support exhibitions that include other fashion brands.
Nobody opted to be the main sponsor of the Women Fashion Power show, for example; only mannequins and screens were acquired through sponsorship.
Another problem is that fashion exhibitions are not cheap to organise. “It’s not just a case of getting cheap and cheerful shop mannequins and zipping them in,” Stanfill says.
“Even the most straightforward outfit needs undergarments and underpinning.”
A lot of time is needed to mount an exhibition, she adds, and there are strict rules about conservation, so you need trained staff with a variety of specialisms, from conservation science to couturiers.
“The crinolines and petticoats are the secrets that only the museum staff can appreciate,” Stanfill says. “Think of it like a ballerina – if it’s good, it should look effortless.”
Whether effortless or not, fashion exhibitions look set to continue to be a big draw for visitors, and are helping to attract audiences that may not be traditional museum-goers.
Florence Waters is a freelance journalist
Tate Britain exhibition
Museums Journal speaks to Simon Baker, Tate Britain’s photography curator, about the gallery’s first major exhibition of fashion-related photography, which will be devoted to the British artist Nick Waplington’s work documenting the creation of Alexander McQueen’s autumn 2009 collection (10 March-17 May).
Is this an art exhibition?
Simon Baker: Yes, this is an art exhibition of Nick Waplington’s photographs. The project juxtaposes images of Alexander McQueen’s final autumn/winter fashion collection with photographs of recycling plants and landfills, and offers a powerful commentary on destruction and renewal.
Will Tate’s show offer something that photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s McQueen show won’t?
This exhibition is designed to complement the V&A show. It will be a major photography show by a leading British photographer. Waplington captured the intense and theatrical working process behind The Horn of Plenty collection, revealing a raw and unpolished side of the fashion world, but also finding inspiration in its radical themes.
How will the show offer more than Waplington’s book of the same photos?
We are working with the artist to design the installation, working with different-sized prints and sequences, for example. The exhibition will culminate in some large prints on the final catwalk show.
Can fashion photography be art? Are attitudes in the art world changing towards fashion photography?
For many years, photographers have done work in different contexts – between art and fashion – such as Man Ray, Guy Bourdin, Horst P Horst and David Bailey, to name a few. The two categories need not be exclusive, and attitudes are continuing to change as people gain a better understanding of the depth and variety of photographic practices.
Is there other fashion photography in Tate’s collection?
The collection does contain images by photographers who have worked in fashion, although the works we have collected are not necessarily “fashion” photography.
What other institutions have been putting on good fashion photography exhibitions?
There was a Horst exhibition at the V&A (6 September 2014-4 January 2015) and a Bourdin exhibition at Somerset House (ends 15 March). Both of these encompass more than fashion photography.