| dc.description.abstract | It has become easy to become complacent about fashion exhibitions in
museums. Their sheer number and extravagant scale have drowned out the
skeptics who once questioned the place of fashion in the museum. Yearly, and
even monthly, news media outlets report lists of the must-see fashion exhibitions
worldwide, anticipating the avid interest of their readership. Richly illustrated
reviews of the major retrospectives in global centers appear in academic journals
and the mainstream media alike; catalogs are sold like coffee-table books. With
their associated celebrity spectacle, their designer glamour, and their mystique
of intimate history, it is tempting to take contemporary fashion exhibitions at face
value.
However, the display of historical fashion is not uninformed or insignificant.
It does not merely reflect the technical possibilities, museal conventions, and
aesthetic preferences of any given period; neither is it only a chance product of
the combination of the resources of the museum and the embodiment of the
subjective personal visions of the curatorial and design teams responsible for
the exhibit. Far from being passively formed, it is a result of an active series of
choices that have at their core particular assumptions about the role of historical
dress in culture, then and now; moreover, this has wide-reaching consequences
and significance. It is not only the experience and opinion of museum visitors
that are affected but the practice of other museums changes in a cycle of
emulation and visual echo; fashion history and theory as they written are also
dependent on what the authors have seen. When Elizabeth Wilson, a pioneer
of contemporary fashion theory, wrote about museum displays of dress being
eerie, uncanny, and dead, she was referring to her experiences at the Victoria
and Albert Museum’s (V&A) Costume Court (2010: 2); the contention colors her
book Adorned in Dreams, first published in 1985, and many works on the topic
published since. With its evidently fundamental influence on academic literature, therefore, documenting the actual practices, aims, and outcomes of fashion
curation and, more specifically, of historical fashion curation is important. The
research presented in this book is an overview of the possibilities for exhibitions
of historical fashion as they have been realized over the last century across
national boundaries; furthermore, it highlights the multiple ways in which the
representations of fashion within the museum have also engaged with wider
discourses within popular culture and academic writing on fashion’s role in
society and culture more generally. | |
