The glossy seductiveness of haute couture was the theme of two recent New York exhibitions - Glamour: Fashion, Film, Fantasy at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology; and Glamour, New York Style at the Museum of the City of New York. Theatricality, stardom and a particular slant on femininity were the order of the day.
By contrast, Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), is not about catwalk shows or lifestyle, says its curator, Judith Clark. It looks at the way contemporary fashion responds to history, and arranges the clothes in a way that self-consciously reveals the process of curating - editing, juxtaposing and displaying.
But what these three seemingly different exhibitions have in common is an emphasis on intellectual engagement with fashion curation, a subject that's cropping up more and more.
A symposium took place in New York in February to accompany the two fashion exhibitions. Glamour: Theory and Practice, which involved scholars, curators and authors, explored definitions of glamour, a concept that's perhaps been somewhat taken for granted. (Interestingly, several speakers said how delighted they were to be given the chance to discuss previously private passions in public).
In the same month, curators and historians participated in the joint V&A/London College of Fashion symposium Fashion on Display. Held to coincide with the opening of Spectres, the meeting addressed key debates on the curation of fashion.
Fashion, curation and academia have traditionally been seen as somewhat unrelated. Lou Taylor, the professor of dress and textile history at the University of Brighton, has written extensively on exhibiting clothing in museums.
She identifies a 'great divide' between the way curators and academics approach the issue. And in an interview on the V&A website about her curation of Spectres, Clark acknowledges that 'fashion and academia have been uneasy bedfellows'.
Clark believes that fashion displays should not simply be a matter of glamourising the subject, but that the curator has a duty to explain and demonstrate the development of ideas. This is what she does in Spectres, where the exhibition and the clothes are presented as 'a work in progress'.
Spectres was originally shown in the white spaces of Antwerp's Mode Museum (MoMu), an experimental fashion gallery space that claims to act as 'a laboratory'.
Central to the project were abstract ideas from Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, a book by fashion historian Caroline Evans. These inspired the 'fairground attraction' setting, which is as much the subject matter of the exhibition as the garments.
Whether 2005 represents a decisive point in the shifting relationship between fashion curation and academia is anyone's guess. But the launch of an MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion could be seen as adding to the mix.
Alistair O'Neill, the course director, says it aims to combine theory with practice - an approach that was also used in a 2004 project called Fashion and Modernity, a collaboration between the London College of Fashion and the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
As part of this, O'Neill curated an exhibition of Wolf Suschitzky's photographs from the 1930s with public installations and interventions in the college, the street, and retail outlets on Charing Cross Road opposite. The project led to several books, seminars and exhibitions.
This sort of display owes much to the form of the biennale, which is itself modelled on the international art or trade show. In 1996, the first Florence Biennale, curated by Germano Celant, Ingrid Sischy and Luigi Settembrini, was entirely devoted to fashion.
More recently there has been Mode 2001 Landed-Geland, curated by Walter Van Beirendonck in Antwerp, a multimedia event with fashion-related installations spread throughout the city.
In 2004, Fashion at Belsay, Northumberland, offered designers the chance to express their creativity through different media in the setting of a historic house.
This opening up of new sites for fashion exhibitions in retail and public spaces has provided more job opportunities for curators and the need for a specialist fashion curation course. The London department store Selfridges has organised an exhibition of Liberace's costumes as part of its Vegas Supernova promotion.
The clothes are on loan from the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, and dress historian, curator and creative consultant Amy de la Haye has been hired by the retailer for her expertise in loan procedures, garment care and label writing.
The collaboration between retailers and museums has a long history, as the decision by Harrods to donate more than 150 costumes to the V&A in 1913 shows.
There are many examples of the blurring of boundaries between museums and commerce, such as the links involving New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bloomingdale's during the Reagan era, outlined by Deborah Silverman in her book Selling Culture.
In 2004 Pamela Golbin curated an exhibition about the Italian-born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris as well as a related show in a Parisian department store.
In the latter, visitors were predictably informed that Schiaparelli's 'legacy lives on through the contemporary fashion designers represented in the Galeries Lafayette'.
So should this erosion of the boundaries between museums and commerce be a cause for concern? For de la Haye, the curator is a professional whose role is influenced by the context and the brief.
She suggests that the questions asked within a retail and museum space will be very different. But if so, is it legitimate to refer to those retailers who have hybrid stores that also incorporate galleries and spaces for cultural events as curators?
In 2001, i-D magazine promoted the idea of the 'buyer-cum-curator'. Today it appears to be common practice for retailers such as Liberty to refer to an arts and crafts furniture buyer as the 'curator of a sale'.
The title, and indeed the role, of the curator could be at risk of devaluation as it becomes increasingly interchangeable with that of fashion designer, buyer, visual merchandiser and even fashion editor.
The cultural currency of fashion has risen dramatically in the past decade as more international museums and art galleries have begun hosting exhibitions on the subject. At the same time, academics have begun to treat it as a significant cultural force, allowing a 'new' history of fashion to evolve.
The growing interest of museums in the field may be because of the extra visitors and media attention that it attracts, or the sponsorship opportunities.
Whatever the reason, the range of venues available for the display of fashion has grown, along with the opportunities to curate different types of exhibitions. Fashion exhibitions continue to include blockbusters such as Chanel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
But there is also a place for a more intimate view of dress and its social biography, such as Fashion and Fancy Dress: The Messel Family Dress Collection 1865-2005, which will be shown at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in October.
Thematic exhibitions can also explore broad-ranging social and political issues - post-colonialism is addressed in Beyond Desire: Desire, Attitude and Styling in African and Western cultures at MoMu in Antwerp.
What speakers at the Fashion on Display symposium agreed on was that ideas could spring from the object or the concept, and appeal to different audiences.
As well as attracting new visitors to museums, fashion exhibitions can even make headlines. The opening of Corsets Uncovered at the Museum of Costume, Bath, happily coincided with media fuss over pop singer Kylie's supposed 16-inch waist. But in some cases, as de la Haye points out, populist appeal conceals a lack of investment and clear strategy.
In the Fashion on Display symposium, Claire Wilcox, a curator in the V&A's department of textiles and dress, outlined the wide-ranging responsibilities of the curator, many of which tend to be overshadowed by large exhibitions.
These include conserving and caring for items, documentation, improving public access to collections and object-based scholarship and research.
Fashion's future in museums depends on more than just the fickle interest of the crowd. It requires consistent investment in maintaining collections to make sure that fashion curation, now so modish, does not become old hat.
Nicky Ryan is a senior lecturer in visual culture and theory at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London
By contrast, Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), is not about catwalk shows or lifestyle, says its curator, Judith Clark. It looks at the way contemporary fashion responds to history, and arranges the clothes in a way that self-consciously reveals the process of curating - editing, juxtaposing and displaying.
But what these three seemingly different exhibitions have in common is an emphasis on intellectual engagement with fashion curation, a subject that's cropping up more and more.
A symposium took place in New York in February to accompany the two fashion exhibitions. Glamour: Theory and Practice, which involved scholars, curators and authors, explored definitions of glamour, a concept that's perhaps been somewhat taken for granted. (Interestingly, several speakers said how delighted they were to be given the chance to discuss previously private passions in public).
In the same month, curators and historians participated in the joint V&A/London College of Fashion symposium Fashion on Display. Held to coincide with the opening of Spectres, the meeting addressed key debates on the curation of fashion.
Fashion, curation and academia have traditionally been seen as somewhat unrelated. Lou Taylor, the professor of dress and textile history at the University of Brighton, has written extensively on exhibiting clothing in museums.
She identifies a 'great divide' between the way curators and academics approach the issue. And in an interview on the V&A website about her curation of Spectres, Clark acknowledges that 'fashion and academia have been uneasy bedfellows'.
Clark believes that fashion displays should not simply be a matter of glamourising the subject, but that the curator has a duty to explain and demonstrate the development of ideas. This is what she does in Spectres, where the exhibition and the clothes are presented as 'a work in progress'.
Spectres was originally shown in the white spaces of Antwerp's Mode Museum (MoMu), an experimental fashion gallery space that claims to act as 'a laboratory'.
Central to the project were abstract ideas from Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, a book by fashion historian Caroline Evans. These inspired the 'fairground attraction' setting, which is as much the subject matter of the exhibition as the garments.
Whether 2005 represents a decisive point in the shifting relationship between fashion curation and academia is anyone's guess. But the launch of an MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion could be seen as adding to the mix.
Alistair O'Neill, the course director, says it aims to combine theory with practice - an approach that was also used in a 2004 project called Fashion and Modernity, a collaboration between the London College of Fashion and the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
As part of this, O'Neill curated an exhibition of Wolf Suschitzky's photographs from the 1930s with public installations and interventions in the college, the street, and retail outlets on Charing Cross Road opposite. The project led to several books, seminars and exhibitions.
This sort of display owes much to the form of the biennale, which is itself modelled on the international art or trade show. In 1996, the first Florence Biennale, curated by Germano Celant, Ingrid Sischy and Luigi Settembrini, was entirely devoted to fashion.
More recently there has been Mode 2001 Landed-Geland, curated by Walter Van Beirendonck in Antwerp, a multimedia event with fashion-related installations spread throughout the city.
In 2004, Fashion at Belsay, Northumberland, offered designers the chance to express their creativity through different media in the setting of a historic house.
This opening up of new sites for fashion exhibitions in retail and public spaces has provided more job opportunities for curators and the need for a specialist fashion curation course. The London department store Selfridges has organised an exhibition of Liberace's costumes as part of its Vegas Supernova promotion.
The clothes are on loan from the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, and dress historian, curator and creative consultant Amy de la Haye has been hired by the retailer for her expertise in loan procedures, garment care and label writing.
The collaboration between retailers and museums has a long history, as the decision by Harrods to donate more than 150 costumes to the V&A in 1913 shows.
There are many examples of the blurring of boundaries between museums and commerce, such as the links involving New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bloomingdale's during the Reagan era, outlined by Deborah Silverman in her book Selling Culture.
In 2004 Pamela Golbin curated an exhibition about the Italian-born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris as well as a related show in a Parisian department store.
In the latter, visitors were predictably informed that Schiaparelli's 'legacy lives on through the contemporary fashion designers represented in the Galeries Lafayette'.
So should this erosion of the boundaries between museums and commerce be a cause for concern? For de la Haye, the curator is a professional whose role is influenced by the context and the brief.
She suggests that the questions asked within a retail and museum space will be very different. But if so, is it legitimate to refer to those retailers who have hybrid stores that also incorporate galleries and spaces for cultural events as curators?
In 2001, i-D magazine promoted the idea of the 'buyer-cum-curator'. Today it appears to be common practice for retailers such as Liberty to refer to an arts and crafts furniture buyer as the 'curator of a sale'.
The title, and indeed the role, of the curator could be at risk of devaluation as it becomes increasingly interchangeable with that of fashion designer, buyer, visual merchandiser and even fashion editor.
The cultural currency of fashion has risen dramatically in the past decade as more international museums and art galleries have begun hosting exhibitions on the subject. At the same time, academics have begun to treat it as a significant cultural force, allowing a 'new' history of fashion to evolve.
The growing interest of museums in the field may be because of the extra visitors and media attention that it attracts, or the sponsorship opportunities.
Whatever the reason, the range of venues available for the display of fashion has grown, along with the opportunities to curate different types of exhibitions. Fashion exhibitions continue to include blockbusters such as Chanel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
But there is also a place for a more intimate view of dress and its social biography, such as Fashion and Fancy Dress: The Messel Family Dress Collection 1865-2005, which will be shown at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in October.
Thematic exhibitions can also explore broad-ranging social and political issues - post-colonialism is addressed in Beyond Desire: Desire, Attitude and Styling in African and Western cultures at MoMu in Antwerp.
What speakers at the Fashion on Display symposium agreed on was that ideas could spring from the object or the concept, and appeal to different audiences.
As well as attracting new visitors to museums, fashion exhibitions can even make headlines. The opening of Corsets Uncovered at the Museum of Costume, Bath, happily coincided with media fuss over pop singer Kylie's supposed 16-inch waist. But in some cases, as de la Haye points out, populist appeal conceals a lack of investment and clear strategy.
In the Fashion on Display symposium, Claire Wilcox, a curator in the V&A's department of textiles and dress, outlined the wide-ranging responsibilities of the curator, many of which tend to be overshadowed by large exhibitions.
These include conserving and caring for items, documentation, improving public access to collections and object-based scholarship and research.
Fashion's future in museums depends on more than just the fickle interest of the crowd. It requires consistent investment in maintaining collections to make sure that fashion curation, now so modish, does not become old hat.
Nicky Ryan is a senior lecturer in visual culture and theory at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London
