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Questioning Integrity of Fashon Exhibitions in Museums - IHT

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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    Questioning Integrity of Fashon Exhibitions in Museums - IHT



    Interesting article and commandable effort by Ms. Menkes. I'm afraid it falls short, I'd like to see more hard examples, but it's an excellent subject. Museums are supposed to be the bastions of culture - it's bad, but conceivable, that magazine editors accept bribes - museums are another story.

    http://iht.com/articles/2007/02/25/news/rmuse26.php


    PARIS: Paul Poiret, the early 20th century designer
    who liberated women from corsets and entertained with Orientalist
    extravagance, will be brought to life Thursday when the Metropolitan
    Museum of Art in New York displays during the French fashion season
    some pristine recreations of garments that will go on exhibit there in
    May.




    With Balenciaga as a sponsor, but not as a fashion participant,
    "Poiret, King of Fashion," from May 9 to Aug. 5, promises to be one of
    those rare fashion exhibitions not perceived as a marketing tool or
    celebrating an anniversary of a living designer.



    There are plenty of those, from the Met show last year for Chanel,
    with Karl Lagerfeld as design partner, to the Giorgio Armani exhibition
    that opened in Milan last week, ending seven years of globe-trotting
    since it took over the famous spiral at the Solomon R. Guggenhiem
    Museum in October 2000. Thomas Krens, the museum's director at the
    time, was accused of selling out to crass commerce.




    Some of these exhibitions are historic, rather than laudatory, like
    the Balenciaga show last year at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in
    Paris. Nicolas Ghesquière, the house's current designer, inspired the
    imaginative presentation and his own designs had some presence, but the
    focus was on the Cristóbal Balenciaga years.




    Jean Paul Gaultier will be next up in Paris, on March 22. But it
    will not be a hagiography of 30 years in fashion, but Gaultier's
    effervescent imagination seen through his costumes in collaboration
    with the dancer Régine Chopinot.




    Yet there is a general feeling that museums across the world are
    buckling under the pressure of hugely rich designers offering clothes,
    cash and marketing expertise.




    And if those pesky museums are too difficult to convince (as
    Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, was when a Chanel
    exhibition was first proposed), designers often find an exhibition
    space to rent and a tame curator to give it a cultural gloss. Then the
    show becomes a vanity production, self-sponsored and self-selected,
    even with "archive" clothes remade.




    The big problem with this approach is that the designer is never put
    in any context that might give publicity, or credit, to his or her
    peers. It is just a dream for fashion to match the fascinating
    juxtapositions found in art shows, like "Matisse Picasso" in London at
    the Tate Modern in 2002 or "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" at
    the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1988. Yet a Giorgio Armani
    exhibition that showed him sparring first with Gianni Versace and then
    with Tom Ford's Gucci would be a fascinating subject.




    Poiret and Chanel were also arch- rivals, with the former, already
    in eclipse, asking Coco in her little black dress: "For whom do you
    mourn, Madame?" To which Chanel replied: "For you, Monsieur."




    The wall separating art and fashion was breached almost 25 years ago
    when the iconic editor Diana Vreeland directed an Yves Saint Laurent
    show at the Met.




    The Costume Institute, where it was shown, is now offering a witty
    and interesting display of the wardrobe of the socialite Nan Kempner,
    which will travel to the Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in
    Paris in May.




    Although the Met has more fashion- themed shows than other museums,
    it takes the moral high road and makes a major effort to retain
    curatorial responsibility. "I think we are as strong as it gets, and we
    have a director who draws a line in the sand," said Harold Koda,
    curator in charge of the Costume Institute. He and Andrew Bolton are
    co-curators of the Poiret show.




    "The problem has been one of perception," Koda said. "Unfortunately,
    institutions are always looking for sponsors and need to find one that
    is one step removed from self-interest. It's always going to be a
    problem, unless you have the ability to fund raise from outside."




    The aim of the new show, with the help of a cache of clothing
    auctioned in 2005, is to prove that Poiret was the true instigator of
    20th-century modernity. Even if half the society crowd at the May gala
    evening will not actually see the exhibit, the Met will keep its
    integrity as a guardian of fashion's history.




    But was it like that with "Chanel," which was criticized, even by a
    bewildered public, for not doing justice to one of fashion's greatest
    figures?




    "Andrew and I cultivated Karl's cooperation because Chanel, for all
    its modernity, would have become an inert exhibition, with technical
    virtuosity but very plain dresses," Koda said. "What happened was that
    in spite of the fact that we curated it, the perception was that it was
    a commercial franchise."




    But the problem was not about the outfits from Lagerfeld, a designer
    who deplores looking back at his own history. It was the lack of
    context to explain why Coco was a revolutionary. And why not a
    reference to her famous spats with her fellow designer Elsa
    Schiaparelli? Surely the point of Chanel, and now Poiret, is where they
    stood in relation to fashion's fussy, fancy restraining past and how
    their powerful statements ultimately configured the future?




    To look at almost any designer exhibition of recent years ? Yohji
    Yamamoto's "Just Clothes" exhibit in Paris in 2005, for example ? no
    one who did not know about the dramatic and enduring influence of the
    Japanese aesthetic on European fashion would ever have sensed that from
    the show, fascinating and visually striking as it was.




    Maybe it is time to go back to the historical approach and dare to
    be didactic, so that museum fashion is less of a designer love fest and
    more of a learning curve.




    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • laika
    moderator
    • Sep 2006
    • 3787

    #2
    Re: Questioning Integrity of Fashon Exhibitions in Museums - IHT



    Her articles drive me crazy--they are so meandering!



    "Maybe it is time to go back to the historical approach and dare to
    be didactic, so that museum fashion is less of a designer love fest and
    more of a learning curve."



    This is an interesting issue though; I wish she had spent more time on it. I think it's really difficult to mount a design exhibition that appeals to the general public. No one wants an exhibit that depends entirely on text, but the Armani/Chanel blockbusters, which simply presented the clothes out of context, are pretty boring for the rest of us. I like the idea of presenting two designers in dialogue--that moment between Chanel and Poiret would be a perfect historical watershed to explore.



    What did you think of the Anglomania exhibit? The diorama approach was pretty creative....

    ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

    Comment

    • Faust
      kitsch killer
      • Sep 2006
      • 37852

      #3
      Re: Questioning Integrity of Fashon Exhibitions in Museums - IHT



      /\ I have yet to go to a met costume exhibit to be honest [:$]



      But, yea, she is not a very good writer....



      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

      Comment

      • Seventh
        Senior Member
        • Dec 2006
        • 270

        #4
        Re: Questioning Integrity of Fashon Exhibitions in Museums - IHT

        Wow... I read it twice and I still don't have a clue to what it was about!

        However, to respond to Faust's title of the thread, I definitely believe that museums have very little to do with being (innocent) bastions of culture. I really believe that they are strongly influenced by money, dealer pressure, putting up a show that "sells." There is no such thing as an innocent art exhibition, museum's know that anything that they show automatically lends that item (artist or designer) an aura of prestige--that translates into $$$. One of the worst senarios was the Sensation show foisted on the world by the dealers Saatchi & Saatchi that got attention only because it was so shocking (*rolling eyes*) and it made them millions. Another example would be a museum that first shows the work of an up-and-coming artist or designer, it both get to claim it broke the designer to a large audience and it also get first dibs and lowest prices of the art to fill their collection. If the artist makes it, those (relatively) cheap works the museum purchased become smart investments. It is not necessarily always corrupt, but the market is ever present in the institution...

        Comment

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