Australia's art galleries are currently fascinated by fashion.
In Melbourne Jean Paul Gaultier: From sidewalk to catwalk and expressing romance was born for children, both at NGV; Adelaides fashion icons: Masterpieces from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs can be seen at the Art Gallery in South Australia, and Brisbane's Future Beauty: 30 years Japanese fashion can be seen at GOMA.
The fashion show fashion is not limited to large state galleries. The Bendigo Art Gallery has just closed its doors. 350 years of underwear in vogue, after creating a strong niche in the fashion show in collaboration with the London V & A Museum to show the golden age of couture in 2009: Paris and London 1947-57.
On the west coast, the Western Australian Museum has shown an exhibit designed by the Sydney Museum of Applied Arts and Science, Frock Stars: Inside Australian Fashion Week.
Most of them result from carefully negotiated partnerships with international museums: V & A; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; the Kyoto Costume Institute and fashion houses like Maison Jean Paul Gaultier.
They are part of a worldwide trend for fashion exhibitions in art museums.
Part of it goes back to a long-standing commitment to the collection of fashion and textiles. The critically acclaimed and spectacularly well-attended exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was enriched in 2011 by the museum's well-established collection and research focus.
Likewise, the NGV fashion exhibitions are logically integrated into their collection and research direction. However, fashion show fashion is not limited to art or design museums with significant fashion collections. So what's up?
We all have bodies, we all wear clothes; We all watch others wearing clothes. Whether people recognize an interest in fashion or not, everyone is surrounded by it.
Fashion enthusiasts no longer rely on magazines and image blogs to keep up. Live streaming of couture and ready-to-wear collections provides instant access to what is shown, who the celebrities are, what designers are doing.
Looking at dresses and ornaments can be aesthetic, sensual and visceral. People of all ages and sex experienced and understood differently. Museum fashion exhibitions expand the diversity of visual experiences and provide access to research-based fashion knowledge. They provide a rare insight into the materiality of high-fashion objects. Haute couture clothing and textiles; Volume and folds; Color, texture, surface; and details of the innovative high level craftsmanship.
Visitors to exhibitions such as Jean Paul Gaultier in Melbourne and Fashion Icons in Adelaide, where the garments are displayed without obstructing the glass, can experience the fascination and charisma of these material objects up close.
The museum audience understands how the periodic breaks of fashion - in conception, style, and material - are linked to cultural history, music, street trends, and other manifestations of the zeitgeist. The audience's interest in fashion objects, processes, history, technologies, internal systems, narratives, and mythologies is confirmed by contemporary critical knowledge from the emerging academic field of fashion studies.
The Fashion Scholarship deals with aesthetics, gender, sexuality, class, customs and culture, not to mention economic history, textile technology, film and popular culture and a number of related issues. Why should people not be fascinated by exhibitions that expand the knowledge and enjoyment in this field?
Nothing Works Better Than a Reforbes
New degree programs, scientific journals and almost exponential rates of the scientific and popular publishing house are occurring simultaneously with the growth of fashion exhibitions in museums. The exhibition phenomenon itself is critically contextualized in publications such as Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice (2014) and the exhibition of fashion: before and after 1971 (2014).
All this happens at a time when hierarchies - which is considered worthy or unworthy of museum space, which is considered to be fine or applied art - collapse.
When Jane de Teliga, the curator of New South Wales' art gallery, presented her exhibition Art Clothes in 1980, she told me that "lots of noses got out of hand" as far as the idea of fashion in the gallery was concerned. Some of her colleagues thought it inappropriate to share the museum space with art.
Some are still rolling their eyes, repeating the familiar themes of ignorance, frivolity and superficiality that have accompanied fashion since its introduction in the 19th century. Nonetheless, the Art Gallery of NSW quickly followed the ambitious Fabulous Fashion 1907-67 of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1981) and the Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective (1987).
Anastasia Klose, One Stop Shop 2013, T-shirts, posters, mugs, furniture, lucky cats, dimensions (variable). © Anastasia Klose courtesy of the Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
The one-stop-knock-off-shop installation by contemporary artist Anastasia Klose at NGV Melbourne Now (2013/14) put art and fashion in a rather ambiguous context in which the cultural interface and cash nexus of art and the arts Fashion be exposed playfully.
Today's museum directors must generate exhibition sales, partners, sponsors and above all a positive publicity. They must hold an established audience, attract new audiences and attract the audience of the future through programs for children. They must create a sense of excitement and relevance in their institutions.
All this while preserving the cultural integrity and support of the original research that creates new knowledge.
Whether fashion is art; whether it is all about fashion in the art world now; Whether fashion commercializes the art museum is less interesting than the immediacy, provocation, knowledge and joy that we gain in fashion fashions.
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