Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion

Exhibition

Valerie Steele

To cite this article: Valerie Steele (2008) Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,
Fashion Theory, 12:1, 7-30, DOI: 10.2752/175174108X268127

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175174108X268127

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 Vogues New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style 7

Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 730

DOI: 10.2752/175174108X268127
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2008 Berg.

Museum Quality:
The Rise of the
Valerie Steele Fashion Exhibition
Valerie Steele (Ph.D., Yale Abstract
University) is Director and Chief
Curator of The Museum at the
Fashion Institute of Technology This article surveys the history of museum fashion exhibitions, and
(FIT). She has curated more explores some of the reasons why they have so often been controversial.
than 20 exhibitions in the past
Issues such as corporate sponsorship, curatorial independence, and his-
ten years, and is also the author
of numerous books, including torical accuracy are analyzed in connection with a range of exhibitions.
The Black Dress (HarperCollins, In particular, the article considers the inuence of Diana Vreelands
2007), Ralph Rucci (Yale
exhibitions at the Costume Institute and the issues that are raised when
University Press, 2006) and The
Corset: A Cultural History (Yale an exhibition is devoted to a single famous designer, such as Armani,
University Press, 2001). Versace, or Vivienne Westwood.

KEYWORDS: fashion, exhibition, museum, sponsorship

8 Valerie Steele

What current fashion is wildly popular, enduring, international and

pulls in big bucks? According to veteran fashion journalist Suzy Menkes,
It is the museum show (Menkes 2000). Along with the catwalk show
and the retail store, the museum has become an increasingly important
site for fashion. In recent years, fashion exhibitions have been held for
the rst time at venues as different as the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art, to say nothing of more familiar settings, such as the
Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Muse de
la Mode, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Some of these fashion
exhibitions have attracted up to 500,000 visitors and brought in millions
of dollars of sponsorship money, as well as reams of publicity, not all
of it positive. Two fashion exhibitions in New York, for example, were
described, respectively, as an egregious paid advertisement and a
fawning trie that resembles a fancy showroom (Kimmelman 2005).
When and why did fashion exhibitions begin? Why have they become
so popular in recent years? And why are they so often controversial?
Surprisingly little scholarship has been published on this subject with
the exception of Fiona Andersons seminal essay Museums as Fashion
Media (2000) and Lou Taylors book Establishing Dress History
(2004). This article continues the discussion by analyzing some of
the issues that arise out of the display of fashion within the museum
context.
Prejudice, fear and suspicion still surround the status of fashion
within many museums, writes Anderson. This sometimes takes the
form of fashion being tolerated as a form of entertainment which will
pull the crowds, with no acknowledgment of the serious contribution
it also makes to the educational role of the museum (Anderson 2000:
374). To some extent, the hostility towards fashion in the museum,
especially the art museum, replicates the traditionally low status of
fashion within academia, but it is also related to disagreements between
academics and curators, as well as by conicts about the role of the
museum in contemporary society and about fashion as an aspect of
popular culture.
In order to understand the signicance of the museum fashion exhibi-
tion, it is necessary to begin by surveying its history. Clothing has been
collected and exhibited for a long time by a variety of individuals and
institutions, including museums of art, design, history, and ethnography.
In the United States and Great Britain alone, there are literally hundreds
of museums with dress collections. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
for example, received its rst textile (a Flemish tapestry) in 1870, the
year the museum was founded, and its rst example of fashionable
dress (a luxurious mid-eighteenth-century gown from France or Italy)
in 1877. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Britains national museum
of decorative arts, has collected clothing virtually since its founding in
1852. However, for more than a century, dress played only a minor
role. In his obituary of James Laver, Charles Gibb-Smith recalled how
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 9

Museum ofcials . . . regarded some artistic and allied subjects with a

certain suspicion, especially the study of historic costume, which most
of the staff thought of only as a sort of rather unholy byproduct of the
textile industry (Gibbs-Smith, 1976).
Fashion seemed unworthy of entering the museum. Even as an
example of the decorative (or applied) arts, fashionable dress was
apparently inferior to tapestry, furniture, or ceramics. According to
Lou Taylor, In the eyes of male museum staff, fashionable dress still
only evoked notions of vulgar commerciality and valueless, ephemeral,
feminine style (Taylor 1998: 341) To some extent, premodern (or, to be
more precise, pre-industrial) dress escaped these strictures. In 1913, for
example, an exhibition of eighteenth-century dress was mounted at the
Victoria and Albert Museum. Elite clothing from non-Western cultures,
such as Chinese Imperial dragon robes and European folk costume,
were also collected and exhibited, as were items of clothing associated
with famous individuals from history. Madame Tussaud, for example,
made a point of acquiring garments worn by her subjects.
The rst popular fashion history exhibition was held at the Inter-
national Exhibition in Paris in 1900. Housed in the Palais du Costume,
it consisted of thirty tableaux containing waxwork gures arranged in
both historical and contemporary scenes, ranging from Gallic Women
at the Time of the Roman Invasion (with reproduction costumes) to
Getting Ready for the Opera (featuring the latest couture creations).
Perhaps inspired by this exhibition, a group of (male) artists, designers,
and collectors founded the Socit de lHistoire du Costume in 1907.
Although they wanted to organize a museum of fashion, it was only in
1977 that the Muse de la Mode et du Costume was established at the
Palais Galliera, to be followed in 1997 by the Muse des Arts de la Mode
in a wing of the Louvre Museum (Taylor 2004: 15667). Confusingly,
the latter also tends to be known as the Muse de la Mode.
Specialized fashion museums were also established in other countries,
often by individuals with private collections, such as Doris Langley
Moore, founder of the Museum of Costume at Bath. More typically,
however, such collections were incorporated into costume departments
within established museums. The Costume Institute, for example,
became a branch department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
1944, having originated as a collection organized by Irene Lewisohn,
Aline Bernstein, and Polaire Weissman. The Museum at the Fashion
Institute of Technology (FIT) developed out of the Edward C. Blum
Design Laboratory, which was originally founded at the Brooklyn
Museum in 1915 as a teaching collection and a source of inspiration
for American designers. Eventually, this evolved into two separate
collections, one belonging to the Brooklyn Museum, an encyclopedic
art museum, the other forming the basis for a specialized museum of
fashion at FIT.
10 Valerie Steele

Until fairly recently, most museum exhibitions of clothing tended

to be antiquarian in their approach and chronological in their organi-
zation. Typically, these exhibitions consisted of a display of upper-
class womens fashions, organized to show the temporal succession of
styles. A classic example is She Walks in Splendor: Grand Costumes
15501950, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1963.
Attempts were often made to create realistic mannequins, placed within
historically evocative sets. Fashionably dressed mannequins were also
sometimes situated within period rooms.
Although few people remember, the Costume Institute displayed
eighteenth-century dresses in the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metro-
politan Museum of Art as early as the 1960slong before Dangerous
Liaisons. But whereas Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda conceived of
Dangerous Liaisons as a sexy, theatrical tour de forcewith towering
wigs and one mannequin memorably sprawled on the oorits pre-
decessor was a staid display reminiscent of costume displays in historic
houses. Such exhibitions of historic fashion were reasonably popular
with museum audiences, but they received little attention in the press.

Diana Vreeland: For and Against

Diana Vreelands famous exhibitions at the Costume Institute broke the

mold, becoming among the most inuential examples of an emergent
genre. Or, as Suzy Menkes put it in another article, AH Vreeland!
The style guru, a former editor of Vogue, casts a long shadow over
fashion exhibitions, for she set a standard of theatre and drama and
anticipated the popularization of museum culture (Menkes 1997). As
Special Consultant to the Costume Institute, Vreeland organized more
than a dozen extraordinary exhibitions, which many of us remember
quite vividly.
Although undeniably glamorous, Mrs Vreelands shows were subject
to criticism, both at the time and later, on the grounds of commercialism
and historical inaccuracy. Indeed, the art historian Deborah Silverman
wrote an entire book, Selling Culture: Bloomingdales, Diana Vreeland
and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagans America (1986),
denouncing Mrs Vreelands exhibitions. According to Silverman, While
Mrs. Vreelands practice of being what she calls terrible on facts,
of always exaggerating, shaped her years of success as a bold and
imaginative fashion magazine editor, her exercise of opulent fantasies
as art museum historical exhibits is distressing and inappropriate
(Silverman 1986: xi). Exhibitions like The 18th-Century Woman and
The Belle Epoch, perpetrated myths that historians had long since
dismissed. Silverman contrasted Vreelands mistreatment of history . . .
for commercial fashion advertising with other exhibitions, such as the
Los Angeles County Museums 1983 fashion exhibition, The Eighteenth
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 11

Century: An Elegant Art, which she described as a model of historical

interpretation, public education, and technical perfection (Silverman
1986: xiv).
Certainly, Vreelands exhibitions were studded with anachronisms and
her insistence that everything must look Now often compromised
historical accuracy. To criticism, Vreeland replied, The public isnt
interested in accuracythey want spectacle (Dwight 2002: 210). Unable
to nd certain key Hollywood costumes for her exhibition Romantic
and Glamorous Hollywood Design, for example, she simply had them
copied. With regard to the entertainment versus education dichotomy,
Mrs Vreeland came down solidly on the side of entertainment in the
museum. I dont want to be educated, she deantly announced, I
want to be drowned in beauty! (Newhouse 2006: 190).
Silverman and others made many valid criticisms of Vreelands exhibi-
tions, especially with respect to historical inaccuracy. For example, The
Manchu Dragon: Costumes of China featured magnicent garments,
but their symbolic meaning was completely ignored, while the clothes
themselves were mixed and matched, creating outts more
reminiscent of the 1980 layered look than actual Qing dynasty court
dress. Worst of all, visitors to the exhibition were overwhelmed by the
smell of Yves Saint Laurents new perfume, Opium, which Vreeland
described as capturing the essence of China. Considering how hard
the Chinese government tried to keep opium out of China, and how
the British fought two wars to force them to import it, Vreelands neo-
colonialist celebration of the exotic Orient seemed like a cruel joke.
Yet was Bloomingdales support for the exhibition, in and of itself,
really such a problem? Silvermans ideological hostility to consumerism
not withstanding, curators know that nding commercial sponsors for
museum exhibitions is a nancial necessity.
The problem really comes when the sponsor interferes with the content
of the exhibition, and there is no evidence that Bloomingdales attempted
in any way to inuence The Manchu Dragon. Certainly, the department
store beneted nancially from its association with a prestigious museum
exhibition, but that is hardly a crime. (Bloomingdales was already in
the forefront of the re-emerging trade with China, and, in any case,
few sponsors act from purely philanthropic motivations.) Silverman
also complained that, in return for a donation of US$350,000, Ralph
Lauren was granted the right for his corporate logo to appear on
all promotional material for the exhibition Man and the Horse. But
this also seems unsurprising, at least from todays perspective. More
problematic is the way the exhibition itself resembled nothing so much
as one of Laurens pseudo-aristocratic Polo advertisements. But even
this was probably unavoidable under the circumstances, and pales into
insignicance in comparison with Vreelands intuitive awareness that the
clothing of the past was never costume, but rather was the fashion
of its day. According to Silverman, The New York Times predicted that
12 Valerie Steele

the exhibition would leave its mark on next falls fashions. But why
should it be a bad thing if fashion designers are inspired by museum
exhibitions?
Despite their manifold faults, Vreelands exhibitions succeeded in
abolishing the aura of antiquarianism that had previously surrounded
most costume displays. As Anne Hollander immediately realized,
Vreelands presentations were show business, designed to do away with
any waxwork-museum look of corpses under glass. Wired for sound
. . . these rooms . . . resemble a stage set through which the audience
may freely move (Dwight 2002: 220). Vreeland was instrumental in
introducing valuable innovations, such as stylized mannequins, and she
attracted a much wider audience. Nor was she acting in a vacuum: The
Victoria and Albert Museum also entered a new era in 1971 with Cecil
Beatons glamorous exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology, for which he
aggressively solicited donations of recent couture dresses from his wide
circle of fashionable friends.
The real crisis came in 1983, when Mrs Vreelands retrospective of
Yves Saint Laurent became the rst major museum show devoted to
a living designer. It caused tremendous controversy, because it was so
closely tied to the economic interests of that particular designer. As a
critic for Art in America put it, Fusing the Yin and Yang of vanity
and cupidty, the Yves Saint Laurent show was the equivalent of turning
gallery space over to General Motors for a display of Cadillacs (Storr
1987: 19). Shortly thereafter, the Metropolitan Museum of Art ceased
to mount exhibitions devoted to a single living designer. But many
other museumsand other designersnoticed and imitated the new
paradigm.
By giving Saint Laurent the rst museum show of a living designer,
[Vreeland] raised the aspirations of fellow couturiers, who now often
stage self-curated (and self-vaunting) shows, observed Suzy Menkes,
adding: It is hard for museums to keep up custodial standards while
competing with the entertainment business (Menkes 1997). While this
is certainly true, an outright moratorium on all exhibitions devoted to
a single living designer would seem to be a draconian solution. The
commercialization of designer fashion exhibitions and the resulting
public criticism are problems that need to be addressednot avoided.
Nor should Vreelands emphasis on fashionable spectacle simply
be dismissed, for it potentially plays a crucial role in conveying the
experience of fashion.
As Mrs Vreeland wound down her tenure at the Costume Institute,
Richard Martin and Harold Koda began organizing exhibitions at what
was then the Design Laboratory of the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Even more than Mrs Vreeland, they focused on modern fashion, as
opposed to the traditional curatorial interest in historic dress. Probably
their most famous exhibition was Fashion and Surrealism (1987; Figure
1); other important exhibitions included retrospectives of Versace and
 Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 13

Figure 1
Installation view from Fashion
and Surrealism. Courtesy of
the Museum at FIT, New York.
Photograph by Irving Solero.

Halston, and my own personal favorite, Three Women, which compared

the work of Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo
of Comme des Garons. After a decade at FIT, Martin and Koda moved
uptown to the Costume Institute. (Martin died tragically early, and
Koda is today curator-in-charge at the Costume Institute, where he
works with Andrew Bolton.)
Highly articulate and entertaining as a speaker, Richard Martin was
not a scholar in any conventional sense (he never used footnotes, for
example), although he was clearly brilliant. People still often use the
word genius to describe him. Perhaps because of his background in
art criticism, Martins writing sometimes devolved into obscurity and
pretentiousness, but then he would suddenly launch into an original
and productive line of thought that opened up new possibilities for
analyzing fashion. Certainly, he played a major role in getting people to
take fashion seriously as an art form. He was also an inspiring mentor,
who encouraged many future scholars and curators, myself included.
Meanwhile, Harold Koda collaborated very closely with Martin, and
much of the success of their exhibitions must be credited to his input.
Koda also worked as an assistant to Diana Vreeland on several exhibi-
tions both before and while he was at FIT, and her approach strongly
inuenced him.
In a fascinating interview with journalist Melissa Drier, Koda
analyzed the ways in which Vreeland took liberties with fashion
history. What Mrs. Vreeland always did, her way of connecting the
public to the past, was . . . to say material culture is only interesting
because of the personalities that informed it. She made clothes come
aliveby their association with these powerful personalities. While
14 Valerie Steele

Koda emphasized that he does not entirely agree with this approach,
he defended it as one way of getting the public to become enthralled
and relate to a world that was, and that is, at a remove from their own
experience. This is certainly an important point, and goes to the heart
of Vreelands inuence in abolishing the aura of antiquarianism that can
so easily surround historical dress. Koda admitted that the audience
then took what she presented really literally, and he implied that
some of Vreelands misleading exaggerations could, perhaps, have been
compensated for with didactic material; but he also argued passionately
that she was ahead of her time in as much as todays museum visitors,
he believes, need much less explication.
Describing certain fanciful aspects of Andrew Boltons exhibition
Anglomania, for example, Koda said,

Theres no relationship historically . . . but I think the public is

ready to say, Oh, theyve been styled. The dress has been dressed
accurately but its being presented in a way that pulls it out of its
time. If the critics agree with this strategy is another question,
but I think weve already presented 18th-century clothing enough
in a historical way that we can now play with it in different ways
. . . I think the public has evolved far more than the academics and
some of the art critics (Drier 2006: 109).

Mrs. Vreeland wasnt about a reverence for the historical object,

Koda observed. Hers was to infuse it with a kind of contemporary
relevance. She perhaps went further than I would go, but Ive always
felt that as a curator, you have to engage the eye before you can instruct
or communicate. You have to get people to focus on something to
understand what it is (Drier 2006: 112). I certainly agree with Kodas
main point. People need to be seduced into really seeing and identifying
with fashion before they can begin to learn about it. Museum visitors are
also becoming ever more visually sophisticated, and exhibition design
is increasingly important. At the same time, I believe that a signicant
percentage of museum visitors really want to learn something when they
see an exhibition.
There is no reason why exhibitions cannot be both beautiful and
intelligent, entertaining and educational. The Muse de la Mode et du
Costume at the Palais Galliera, for example, has produced a number of
highly intelligent exhibitions, such as Madeleine Delpierres La mode et
ses mtiers du XVIIIe sicle nos jours (1981), Guillaume Garniers
Paris Couture: Les Annes Trentes (1987), and Valrie Guillaumes
Jacques Fath (1993). These exhibitions were well researched, historically
accurate, and based on an extraordinary wealth of carefully chosen
objects. This approach seems much more compelling than the kind
of shallow clichs that Mrs Vreeland espoused in exhibitions like The
18th-Century Woman and The Belle Epoque.
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 15

My own exhibition, Femme Fatale: Fashion and Visual Culture in

Fin-de-Sicle Paris, was, in many ways, a response to Vreeland, who
saw The Belle Epoch as innocent and naughty. Her acoustaguide
stressed that it was a time devoted to the pursuit of the best of
everything. Piped-in music played Ta-ra-ra-boom-tee-ay. But the
period was much more complicatedand much more interestingthan
this banal fantasy, which was very much a nostalgic postwar creation.
With Femme Fatale, I wanted to go beyond the empty nostalgia and bad
history of her exhibition to explore the sexual politics of the era, when
actresses and courtesans were trendsetters, and fashion blurred the line
between monde and demi-monde, housewife and harlot. It may be true,
as Koda suggests, that the average museum visitor in France is better
educated and possessed of greater cultural capital than her American
counterpart (Drier 2006: 114); yet the solution is not to dumb down
exhibitions in American museums, but rather to make them accessible
on a variety of levels.

Art, Money, and Power: The Designer as Superstar

Probably the most immediately accessible and popular type of fashion

exhibition is one devoted to a famous designer. In 1992 Richard Martin
and Harold Koda curated the rst of what would eventually be many
exhibitions devoted to the work of Gianni Versace. Although the
exhibition had the full participation and generous support of the Versace
family, there seems to have been no negative criticism in the press,
perhaps because journalists regarded the Design Laboratory at FIT as
an intriguing adjunct to the fashion industry. Not an art museum, it was
permitted to function more freely as a lively source of information and
inspiration. Visually, the Versace exhibition was absolutely stunning,
and many people regard it as the best show ever held at FIT. After Gianni
Versaces murder in 1997, Richard Martin organized a second, post-
humous retrospective of the designers work at the Costume Institute.
This time, the press response was mixed, and much of it focused on
Versaces particular, highly sexual style (Muschamp 1997). Although
the Costume Institute galleries had been considerably reduced in size
since Vreelands day, the Gianni Versace exhibition looked handsome, if
not as spectacular as its predecessor at FIT.
The third Versace retrospective, The Art and Craft of Gianni Versace,
curated by Claire Wilcox, was presented at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 2002. The largest exhibition the V&A had ever devoted to a
single designer, it included 130 looks, which were organized thematically.
The Art section, for example, showed Versaces references to the
work of artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, while
Theatre featured his costumes for opera and ballet productions. The
last section of the show was devoted to the work of Giannis sister and
16 Valerie Steele

successor, Donatella Versace. Not surprisingly, the exhibition had a very

high celebrity quotient, and included many dresses worn by clients such
as Princess Diana, Madonna, and J-Lo. The notorious safety-pin dress
worn by Elizabeth Hurley was prominently displayed. There was also a
small Study section in which visitors were encouraged to touch and
examine the garments on display. These were not, of course, dresses
from the V&As permanent collection, but rather, like most of the
clothing on display, from the Versace archive. One reviewer praised this
as an exciting and unusual addition to an exhibition [that] enriched
our empirical knowledge of the clothes and engaged the public (Mason
2005: 86).
Handsomely installed, the exhibition also featured a wealth of histor-
ical and technical information that contributed to raising it beyond the
banal paradigm of designer-as-artist.
Yet many critics were extremely hostile: Liz Hurleys safety-pin
dress under the same roof as Raphaels cartoons? thundered one
reviewer (Drinkwater 2002). Stephen Bagley, former director of the
Design Museum, dismissed the Versace show (without having seen it) as
merely an advertisement, since Versaces designs are presented for
our uncritical admiration. Ultimately, he argued that Versace does
not deserve to be in the V&A on the grounds of quality, although it
would t in the form of a critique of the history of the public relations
industry (Morrison 2002).
By contrast, the Victoria and Albert Museum received a generally
positive critical response to its big exhibition, Vivienne Westwood,
held in 2004. It is probably relevant that Westwood is a beloved
British institution, described by one journalist as a national treasure
(Freeman 2004). The pioneer of punk fashion is not known for her
corporate wealth, and she is no longer as inuential as she once was,
but she helped put London on the fashion map, and in the process she
revitalized interest in traditional British fabrics such as Harris tweed
(Jury 2003). Westwood also had a long history of engaging in research
at the V&As historic costume collection, so it may have seemed tting
that her own work should be placed on display there. Moreover, the
V&A has acquired over the years an important collection of Westwoods
early work, which is extremely popular with the museums visitors.
Nevertheless, some visitors wanted more information, criticizing the
perfunctory labels (surprising in light of the excellent catalog by
Claire Wilcox), and suggesting that the exhibition was less like a genuine
retrospective and more of a greatest hits that lacked any signicant
historical interpretation (ONeill 2006: 383).
Back in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art continued its
policy of prohibiting exhibitions of living designers, but gingerly engaged
with the couture house of Christian Dior to mount an exhibition of the
late designers work in 1997. At the opening reception, the famous Party
of the Year, the museum lobby also featured a temporary display of
dresses by Diors then-current designer, Jean-Franco Ferr. Subsequently,
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 17

the museum scheduled an exhibition on Gabrielle Coco Chanel.

Meanwhile, Harold Koda left the Costume Institute to study landscape
architecture at Harvard. He would later return, but in the interim,
Richard Martin died of melanoma. After much Sturm und Drang,
the director of the Metropolitan Museum canceled or indenitely
postponed its scheduled 1999 Chanel exhibition, apparently because
of Karl Lagerfelds persistent curatorial interference. Ofcially, the
museum announced that Martins death made it impossible to organize
the exhibition in time for its scheduled opening. Chanel then promptly
canceled its planned US$1.5 million donation.
A notoriously strong-willed personality, Lagerfeld had dismissed
the idea of a traditional Chanel retrospective: Im not interested in
a display thats just old dresses. He wanted, instead, to combine
examples of Chanels designs with contemporary art by designers such
as Jenny Holzer and Claus Oldenburg, a concept that the museums
administrators rejected. The debate became increasingly public when
Womens Wear Daily published an interview with Lagerfeld in which
he complained that the museum was interested only in an exhibit
of a bunch of old clothes. According to The New York Times, the
Metropolitans director, Philippe de Montebello, found this sadly
ironic in light of Lagerfelds role in creating fashion for Chanel. The
issue, de Montebello stressed, was one of curatorial integrity (Horyn
2000). They certainly werent afraid of being commercial, Lagerfeld
told Talk magazine. They were afraid I was taking over too much, and
they wanted the check rather than me: Give us the money and shut
up! (quoted in Lee 2000). For the moment, that was the end of the
Chanel exhibition, but an equally controversial Armani exhibition was
just on the horizon.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum came in for criticism in 2000
when it was revealed that the Giorgio Armani exhibition followed on
the heels of a US$15 million donation to the Guggenheim coffers. All
of the parties involved emphasized that the museum had approached
Armani rather than the other way around, that the exhibition itself was
sponsored by InStyle Magazine, and that the US$15 million dollar gift
was for the Guggenheims capital campaign. Nevertheless, as Robert
Muschamp, the critic for The New York Times, reported, it has been
speculated that this show was contingent on the designers nancial
support, which raises serious questions of institutional ethics.
Muschamp insisted that he respected fashion, respected Armanis
artistry, and thought it was grand to display fashion in an art museum.
But showing fashion in a museum is one thing. Importing fashion-world
values into a museums decision-making process is another. By fashion-
world values, he apparently meant historical amnesia, intellectual
pretension, cronyism, promotion, and greasing the wheels of fashion
designers, their investors, the fashion press, celebrity clients, and retail
advertisers (Muschamp 2000).
18 Valerie Steele

It is undeniable that the motivations of designers to co-operate

with curators in having their work displayed in museums are largely
about prestige, self-promotion, and prot, writes Fiona Anderson.
This, allied with the fact that fashion designers are undeniably ercely
protective of their all-important brand image, present curators with
persistent and sometimes delicate realities to negotiate. However, despite
the complexities of this scenario, scholarly curatorial work must embrace
an acknowledgment of the commercial character of the fashion industry.
Attempts to avoid or eliminate this aspect will only lead backwards
to approaches that decontextualize objects (Anderson 2000: 375).
A necessary rst step must be to explore whether the current levels
of commercial sponsorship are compromising scholarly independence
within exhibition research, interpretation, and publication (Taylor
2004: 288). If so, how? And what can be done about it?
The problem with individual designer exhibitions is not simply one
of nancing and nancial benets, but also of curatorial integrity and
conservation standards. Who is in charge of choosing the clothes to
be displayed? Who is in charge of the organizational structure of the
exhibition? Exhibitions need not be chronological, but who decides on
the thematic groups, such as a gallery of celebrity dresses? It would
certainly be naive to think that Armani did not have a signicant
inuence on the content and design of the exhibition, which included
large numbers of evening dresses and relatively few of the suits for
which the designer is best known. Although the exhibition design for
Giorgio Armani was striking, it left the clothing unprotected by either
glass or platforms, with the result that many museums refused to lend
objects. Muschamp was not alone in thinking that the gallery devoted
to Armanis Spring/Summer 2000 collection, in particular, looked too
much like a boutique. Yet it usually goes without saying that many
museum art exhibitions resemble gallery shows, and living artists (or
their gallerists) often have a powerful say in which works are presented
in a museum.
It is perhaps signicant that Muschamps article for The New York
Times featured a caption reading: Memo to Art Museums: Dont give
up on art. Although the author was probably not responsible for this
editorial intervention, it would seem that the very presence of fashion
or, at least, modern fashionin the institutional spaces sacred to art
remains problematic.
These are very cynical museological decisions, determined to
break down the distinctions between art and commerce, thundered
Hilton Kramer, art critic for the New York Observer. It is creating the
impressionand I think theres a lot of reality to the impressionthat
the museum is for sale. For good measure, he added that Armanis
clothes were not works of art. The New Republics Jed Perl also attacked
the trend for fashion exhibitions, calling it just another clever muddle
of Dadaism, populism, philistinism, and commercialism. When
asked about the role of money, glamour, and politics in the fashion
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 19

world, Harold Koda (co-curator with Germano Celant of the Armani

exhibition) replied, What, as opposed to the art world? (Lee 2000).
After nine years working at the Guggenheim Museum, Paul Werner
came to a similar conclusion in his witty polemic, Museum, Inc: Inside
the Global Art World (Werner 2005), although he ignored the Armani
show in favor of analyzing other exhibitions, such as The Art of the
Motorcycle.
If the Guggenheim seems to be inherently controversial, the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, by contrast, is the gold standard of museums.
Yet the Mets 2005 exhibition Chanel was heavily criticized in the
press, in large part because Chanel Inc. funded the exhibition, but also
because the exhibition included many works by Karl Lagerfeld mixed in
with historic pieces by Gabrielle Coco Chanel. Questions were once
again raised about undue corporate inuence on the content and design
of the show. Critics naturally recalled the debacle of the proposed
Chanel exhibition of 1999 that was canceled after Lagerfeld and the
Metropolitans director Philippe de Montebello fell out over how to
link art to Chanels fashion (Menkes 2000).
While I believe that the Chanel exhibition was, in many ways, a
missed opportunity, I also think much of the criticism in the press was
misconceived. After all, one could hardly expect Dior to fund a Chanel
exhibition! Moreover, it is not fair to criticize curators for not doing
what they never intended to do, and Koda has repeatedly said that
he never intended to do a full-scale retrospective of the work of Coco
Chanel. Yet this is what many visitors to the Chanel exhibition expected
to see. After all, Chanel was only the most famous and inuential
designer of the twentieth century. Moreover, her style was intimately
intertwined with her life, and since she lied constantly about her life, an
exhibition that explored the mythology and the reality of Chanel would
be fascinating. However, Koda wanted to focus on the key elements of
her style without addressing her biography, per se.
Pamela Golbins exhibition on Balenciaga (2006) at the Muse de la
Mode can usefully be compared with Kodas Chanel (2005) exhibition
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both exhibitions contained work
by the late, great couturiers and their contemporary successors. But
whereas Karl Lagerfelds inuence on the Chanel exhibition was left
the subject of conjecture, Nicholas Ghesquire was explicitly credited
as co-curator of the Balenciaga exhibition. Ghesquires input, however,
seems to have been restricted to the second half of the show, which
was devoted to his ten years at the couture house. The rst part of
the exhibition was a straightforward, chronological retrospective of
Cristobal Balenciagas work, from the 1930s to his retirement in 1968.
By contrast, the Chanel exhibition mixed together the work of Mlle
Chanel and Lagerfeld in such as way as to highlight his appropriations
of her signature themes. As a result, Chanels originals sometimes ended
up looking merely dated.
20 Valerie Steele

Although it is possible to disagree with some of Golbins choices (such

as her downplaying of Balenciagas Spanish heritage and its inuence on
his work), the exhibition as a whole was intelligent and illuminating.
Unfortunately, the exhibition design and lighting were disappointing,
and there was only one real Wow! moment, when Balenciagas
radical modernism was brilliantly highlighted. In this respect, Mrs
Vreelands long-ago Balenciaga exhibition in the old, expansive galleries
of the Costume Institute was far more visually compelling. So was the
Chanel exhibition, which was liberated from the now sadly cramped
framework of todays Costume Institute to inhabit a set of white
modernist cubes installed in an upstairs gallery. The dresses held up
well in this environment, although the accessory presentation (as is so
often the case) had a tendency to resemble a retail display.
Designer exhibitions can obviously be self-serving, but it should
also be emphasized that these exhibitions can play an important role
in assessing the contributions of particular individuals. In addition
to the blockbuster shows on superstar designers, there have been
numerous exhibitions on a wide range of less famous designers. Some
of the most interesting of these exhibitions have focused on avant-garde
designers, such as Hussein Chalayan (Figure 2) and Yohji Yamamoto.
Most designer exhibitions have a great deal of input from the designers
themselves. Although some designers have considerable insight into their
own work and their sources of inspiration, others are conspicuously
self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. Many designers seem completely
unable to edit their work, and will try to cram in as many dresses as
is physically possible. At their worst, designers can behave like prima
donnas, treating curators like servants and museums like department
stores. At their best, however, designers can collaborate with curators to
create exhibitions that neither could have conceived alone. Of the many
individual designer exhibitions mounted at the Museum at FIT, I look
back most fondly on Toledo/Toledo: The Marriage of Art and Fashion,
because I learned so much from our collaboration with Isabel Toledo
and her husband, the artist, Ruben Toledo.
Perhaps the best of the recent designer exhibitions was Dilys Blums
magnicent Schiaparelli retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art in 2004 (Figure 3). The product of years of deep research and
an impressive array of international loans, it brought us a new under-
standing of Elsa Schiaparellis contributions to fashion. When the
exhibition traveled to the Muse de la Mode, it was installed differently,
with an emphasis on themes and mtiers, rather than chronology, but
it was equally effective. Of course, Schiaparelli is not a living designer,
and there is no powerful corporation that owns her brand, so many
of the problems that arise in other individual designer exhibitions did
not apply in this instance. The Brooklyn Museum of Art, for example,
had to wait until Charles James had died before the organizers were
able to mount their extraordinary 1980 exhibition on that great, but
impossibly difcult, designer.
 Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 21

Figure 2
Installation view from Hussein
Chalayan, Groninger Museum.
Photograph by Marten de
Leeuw.

Issues of Interpretation

All the criticism of commercialism and corporate sponsorship of fashion

exhibitions has drawn attention away from what is, perhaps, an even
more important issue: How accurate are museum fashion shows? This
is not a nit-picking question. While no exhibition (or book) can tell
the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it can lead you towards
or away from a deeper understanding of a particular phenomenon. This
is true of all exhibitionsfrom designer retrospectives to thematic or
22 Valerie Steele

Figure 3
East faade with Schiaparelli
FASHION banners, Philadelphia
Museum of Art: Kelly and
Massa Photography, 2003.

conceptual shows. While every exhibition is an interpretation, it can

be more or less sophisticated and nuanced, and supported by evidence
that is more or less convincing. This includes not only documentary
evidence, but evidence contained within the objects themselves. Ideally,
an exhibition will be good for thinking.
One exhibition that has been extremely inuential was Streetstyle:
From Side Walk to Catwalk at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1994.
Streetstyle featured a wide range of subcultural stylesassociated with
beatniks, mods, Teddy boys, B-boys, zooties, hipsters, surfers, rockers,
skinheads, hippies, punks, and goths, among otherstogether with
the high fashions that they inspired. Perhaps inevitably, since it was so
innovative, Streetstyle was heavily criticized. Some people complained
that it was too academic, others that it failed to link the various
clothing styles to other aspects of subculture, such as music, drugs, and
politics.
Indeed, there were disagreements even among the curators and
specialist advisors responsible for the exhibition. Two separate books
were published, and curator Amy de la Haye subsequently returned
to the subject with a scholarly article that analyzed some of the issues
involved in creating the exhibition, including the difculty acquiring
what was essentially a new collection of authentic clothing, often
from real people associated with particular subcultures. (The last two
sets of quotation marks are de la Hayes.) When it was not possible
to source certain clothes, such as zoot suits, reproductions were made.
However, de la Haye and her colleagues made it a point to involve
visitors in thinking about how the clothing was obtained, and each
outt had a label that identied the subculture, date and place it was
worn, and by whom, as well as information about the fabric and
 Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 23

manufacturer. Perhaps inevitably, some visitors were disappointed that

the clothes shown did not reinforce their own memories, or objected to
exhibiting subcultural styles within an Establishment context like the
museum (de la Haye 1996: 149).
Yet Streetstyle marked an important step forward in exploring new
frontiers in the denition and exhibition of fashion. Moreover, despite
criticism, its signicance was acknowledged even at the time (Savage
1995). Streetstyle was the rst exhibition to draw on the theories
presented in Dick Hebdidges groundbreaking book Subculture: The
Meaning of Style. Its inuence continues to reverberatein Andrew
Boltons Anglomania at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which
included a room full of mannequins dressed as punks, Myra Walkers
Rock Style also at The Met, London Fashion at the Museum at FIT
(Figure 4), and the V&As Black Style, among many other shows.
Another important theme in fashion studies is the signicance of non-
Western dress.
Akiko Fukais wonderful Japonisme exhibition showed how Western
designers have been inuenced by the clothing of Japan. This exhibition
went through various incarnations as it traveled from Kyoto to Paris and,
eventually, to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. My own exhibition, China
Chic: East Meets West (Figure 5), was directly inspired by Fukais work,
and sought to show how designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and John
Galliano have been inuenced by various, sometimes fantasy, images
of China, including Imperial China, 1930s Shanghai, and the Peoples
Republic of China under Mao. By including early works of art, such as
Sui and Tang dynasty tomb sculptures, the exhibition also attempted to
show that fashion is not just a modern, Western phenomenon.

Figure 4
Installation view from London
Fashion. Courtesy of the
Museum at FIT, New York.
Photograph by Irving Solero.
24 Valerie Steele

Figure 5
Installation view from China
Chic East Meets West.
Courtesy of the Museum at FIT,
New York. Photograph by Irving
Solero.

The Museum of African Art in New York City is currently working on

an exhibition about African style, which also draws on this paradigm.
Another proliferating genre is the exhibition on art and fashion, but I
will reserve discussion of this subject for another article.
Although it may be obvious, it is worth pointing out that there are
many different kinds of museums that display clothing. History and
anthropology museums tend to contextualize objects as cultural artifacts,
while art museums tend to present objects in isolation to be viewed
primarily through the lens of connoisseurship. There are pros and cons
to both approaches, both in theory and practice, but art museums tend
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 25

to be more prestigious, and fashion as an applied art is increasingly

likely to be showcased in art museums and galleries. Even within the
eld of art history, however, there is a difference in emphasis between
university-based art historians and curators in art museums. Traditional
art historical practice associated with the museum emphasizes close
description and connoisseurship, while the so-called new art history
as practiced in the university draws on alternative approaches and
methodologies derived from cultural studies.
The new art history, in turn, helped give birth to what might be
called the new fashion history, which also places greater emphasis
on analyzing the meanings of cultural objects and practices. Although
the new fashion history is only beginning to inuence the exhibition
of fashion within the museum context, debates within the eld of art
history are already inuencing the discourse on fashion exhibitions.
Many museum professionals . . . believe that university-based art
history . . . neglects the aesthetic dimension of the art object, observes
Charles Haxthausen. Conversely, many academics perceive museums
[as] a branch of the entertainment industry, with the unrelenting quest
for money and audiences making the museum an increasingly unlikely
source of innovative scholarship. (Haxthausen 2003: xx). We have seen
how the funding of fashion exhibitions is complicated by contradictory
cultural attitudes toward fashion as a problematic aspect of popular
culture. But art is also embedded in commercial networks, and the
education versus entertainment dichotomy applies to many types
of blockbuster exhibitions such as the innumerable exhibitions on
Impressionist paintings, which have been aptly described as the cash
cows of the museum world.
Although some see the museums mission as primarily aesthetic,
offering pleasure to passive consumers (Haxthausen 2003: xx), I have
always believed that visitors should bewant to beactively engaged
in thinking about what they see. I also believe that the museum fashion
exhibition can be a site of innovative scholarship, that it canand
shouldmake a serious contribution to our understanding of fashion.
And it does not need to be frumpy to do so. Quite the reverse.
Consider the corset. I wish that I had a dollar for every time I
have heard museum visitors exclaim, Look how small that corset
is! Remember Scarlett OHara! That woman must have had her ribs
removed! One of my goals with the exhibition The Corset: Fashioning
the Body (2000) was for museum visitors to become aware of the
complexities of the corset controversy. One of the simplest ways to
do this was to make sure that the exhibition labels included the waist
measurement of each corset on display (together with the hip and bust
measurements). It was also crucial to acquire objects such as the Pretty
Housemaids Corset, which was advertised in England in the 1880s as
the cheapest and strongest corset made. Although mass manufactured
of cheap material with metal stays, in place of expensive whalebone,
26 Valerie Steele

museum visitors could see how this corset gave its working-class wearer
the same silhouette as the fashionable lady. They learned that, contrary
to Thorstein Veblen, corsets were not only worn by ladies of leisure.
After surveying the history of corsetry, the exhibition then showed how
a range of contemporary designers have utilized corsetry in their work
for very different effectsranging from the romantic historicism of
Christian Lacroixs couture wedding dress to Thierry Muglers leather
dominatrix corset and John Gallianos African-inspired beaded corset
for Christian Dior couture.
Some of the same objects were featured in Extreme Beauty (2001),
Kodas rst solo exhibition at the Costume Institute, which also explored
the relationship between body and clothes. In addition to featuring a
range of corset-related material, he expanded his research to incorporate
other parts of the body beyond the waist and torsosuch as the neck,
the shoulders, and the feet. I think that it is fair to say that Koda focused
on the visual or aesthetic aspects of his subject, with a strong component
of shock value. By contrast, I emphasized the changing (and contested)
meanings of the corset in society. It seems to me that our exhibitions thus
expressed, respectively, a more traditional formalist approach, albeit
one infused with a very contemporary focus on body modication, and
one that drew much more heavily on methods and ideas associated with
the new art and fashion history. A purely formalist approach seems
problematic to me, because similarities in form can mask signicant
differences in meaning.
Akiko Fukai, Chief Curator at the Kyoto Costume Institute, explored
related ideas in her exhibition, Fashion, Invisible Corset. Although I
was unable to travel to Japan to see the exhibition, there is an excellent
catalog, which makes it clear that Fukai was interested in themes such
as the silhouette created by fashion, the role of fashion as a second skin,
and the connections between fashion and modern art. The differences
between our various exhibitions indicate how developments within the
disciplines of art history, fashion studies, and museology all have an
impact on the study, interpretation, and display of clothing artifacts
within the museum.
At least some fashion exhibitions have also become more conceptual,
and more daring in terms of exhibition design. Independent curator
Judith Clark has said that her goal is to highlight the relevance of
historical dress to contemporary projects through themed shows.
Clark, whose eponymous gallery in London was the site of numerous
small, but fascinating exhibitions, organized a truly extraordinary
exhibition Malign Muses at the Mode Museum in Antwerp. The
exhibition subsequently traveled to the Victoria and Albert Museum,
where it went under the title Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back (Figure
6). In both venues, the exhibition included about eighty garments,
both contemporary and historic, that were juxtaposed to show how
designers have inuenced each other across history. As the reviewer
 Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 27

Figure 6
Installation view from Malign
Muses: When Fashion Turns
Back, MoMu, Fashion Museum
Antwerp, 2004. Photograph by
Ronald Stoops.

for The Independent noted, it was far removed from the conventional
fashion exhibition, which trades on glamorous celebrity connections.
Rather, it traced the development of ideas, and its title refers to the
ghostly shadows that history casts over the present (Rushton 2005).
Although informed by an explicitly academic set of ideas about
fashion history (Clark drew on ideas that Caroline Evans explored
in her justly acclaimed book Fashion at the Edge), the exhibition was
denitely not a book on the wall. An architect by training, Clark
28 Valerie Steele

recognized that an exhibition installation may be as important as the

exhibition content. Or, rather, the two can not be separated, because
as Alan Wallach puts it, exhibitions tell complex stories spatially
through a carefully orchestrated deployment of objects, images, and
texts that gives viewers the opportunity to look, reect, and work out
meanings (Wallach, quoted in Haxthausen 2003: xvii).
Clark worked together with the artist Ruben Toledo and other
collaborators to create an exhibition design that was as strange and
delightful as a spooky fairground or a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.
For example, to show how designers myopically focus on one detail
from the past, ignoring others, the exhibition design utilized a series of
peepholes with magnifying glasses, forcing museum visitors to focus on
particular details in period garments. To show how fashion repeatedly
makes what Benjamin called a tigers leap into the past, Clark designed
an enormous pair of interlocking cog wheels. As they turned, they
brought together, say, a Victorian dress and a contemporary example
of neo-Victorian fashion, demonstrating how what goes around comes
around.
Clarks exhibition drew distinctly mixed reviews, some, indeed,
very hostile. Lou Taylor, for example, objected that ideas and
settings dominated the clothes, which were thereby trivialised and
marginalised. It was, for example, very difcult to identify the dresses
that revolved on the huge wheels. Indeed, even the choice of dresses was
made late in the exhibition process (Taylor 2006: 17). But I thought it
was a paradigm-breaking show of great beauty and power. Important

Figure 7
Installation view from Visions
of the Body, Tokyo, The Kyoto
Costume Institute. Photograph
by Naoya Hatakeyama.
Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition 29

as labels, wall texts and catalogs are, ultimately museum exhibitions

rely on showing rather than writing. As a medium of intellectual
communication, certain exhibitions may be less like sustained intel-
lectual arguments than like essays, serious in intent but quite loose in
form . . . not scholarly according to German academic standards, but
merely stimulating, letting ideas be guessed at rather than expressing
them directly (Haxthausen 2003: xix). Some exhibitions may even be
like poems or lms, evocative and inspiring even when they are not
entirely understood. After all, one of the core constituencies for fashion
exhibitions embraces those individuals for whom fashion is a creative
eld.
When Akiko Fukais exhibition Colors in Fashion traveled to the
Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the New York organizers aggressively intro-
duced the show with a text panel stating: This is not your usual
museum fashion exhibition. To which I would counterequally
aggressivelyBut what is the usual fashion exhibition? Are there
not many different kinds of fashion exhibitions, which may be excellent
in different ways? Exhibitions as different as Malign Muses/Spectres
and Schiaparelli demonstrate how the best fashion exhibitions are no
longer merely displays of pretty dresses. They are both beautiful and
intelligent.

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