I wanted to share my conversation with Kaat Debo, the director of the fashion museum in Antwerp. I thought it was insightful.
During my visit to Antwerp I got to sit down with Kaat Debo, the director of Antwerp’s fashion museum, MoMu, to talk about her work. Below is an excerpt from our conversation.
Eugene Rabkin: How do you go about picking exhibits in today’s fashion milieu?
Kaat Debo: When it comes to our exhibitions we always try to make a mix of thematic and solo exhibitions. Of course there is a big focus on Belgian fashion design because we have that same focus within our collection policy. It doesn’t mean we only do our exhibitions on Belgian designers; I think it’s important to open up to the rest of the world, and to also place our designers within an international context. For example, when we decided to do a Stephen Jones exhibition, there was a very important link to our collection because there is an Antwerp private collector with a huge Stephen Jones collection who gave that collection on long-term loan to the museum. For me, that was a valid reason to organize a Stephen Jones retrospective.
Sometimes people come to you and propose topics, or now and then we take over an exhibition from another museum when it’s a collection or an exhibition that really inspired me, or a theme that inspired me. When we take over an exhibition we always ask if we can rework the exhibition designs, so that we can also give it a MoMu feel or a MoMu interpretation. What I think makes MoMu special is that we are a small museum. We have a team of 35 people to run the entire museum, the library, and the archive, which makes us more flexible than bigger institutions like the VNA or the Metropolitan. We can decide fast. We can sometimes program more experimental stuff. We really can decide 100% for ourselves on our program.
The future of the museum is very important to me. I started 12 years ago. The museum opened in this location 11 years ago. With our first exposition, and exhibition designs, we immediately got a lot of international press attention. We got very good reviews. People thought we were very experimental. I think fashion curation since then has been a very hot topic and I think that fashion exhibitions themselves became more and more popular. I really want to question how we work and if we can keep on working and making exhibitions the next 20 years in the same way that we have done it in the past 10 years.
The digital evolution is something that a lot of museums are not aware of. They use it in order to document their collections, or they all have digital databases, but they don’t know how to open these up to the audience. It’s really more of a technical question. I think that we still use our social media and online communication as a communication tool and not as a way to curate a collection or the ideas we have. So that’s something I want to work on in the forthcoming years, to invite people to do stuff with our collection, but digitally. To focus more on fashion film. How as a museum that we can use this tool in a way that’s relevant for us and our audience. This doesn’t mean that I want to be a second SHOWstudio. SHOWstudio is a great platform and I think Nick Knight has done groundbreaking work when it comes to communicating fashion in a digital era. But I want to think how can we open up as a museum in a digital era.
We are based in Antwerp and we have about 100,000 visitors a year. Maybe we can still grow a bit, but we will never have 300 or 400 thousand per exhibition. It’s not that I dream of that number of visitors, but I know that a lot of people around the world are aware of what we do and I want to provide them with more content without them coming to Antwerp, to communicate and interact with them in a way that’s interesting and relevant. That’s something that we are working on with the team here. How can we do that? And I really want us to allow ourselves to experiment with it. Which also means maybe we will do projects that won’t work, that are not what we thought it would be. But, that is the essence of an experiment.
ER: Can you talk more about your plans with film?
KD: We are now making three films with our collection. We invited an Antwerp based art director to interpret pieces of our collection. Of course they are limited because the garments can’t be worn by people. That’s one of the restrictions of the museum. It’s up to their creativity to make an interpretation of these garments. What they are doing looks really amazing and we’re going to present these films for the first time at the festival of Diane Pernet. Diane’s festival is an important part of this whole new aspect of the museum that we want to develop. Diane certainly is a pioneer in what she does. We don’t have to invent everything ourselves, we just have to link up with a lot of interesting people around the world.
During my visit to Antwerp I got to sit down with Kaat Debo, the director of Antwerp’s fashion museum, MoMu, to talk about her work. Below is an excerpt from our conversation.
Eugene Rabkin: How do you go about picking exhibits in today’s fashion milieu?
Kaat Debo: When it comes to our exhibitions we always try to make a mix of thematic and solo exhibitions. Of course there is a big focus on Belgian fashion design because we have that same focus within our collection policy. It doesn’t mean we only do our exhibitions on Belgian designers; I think it’s important to open up to the rest of the world, and to also place our designers within an international context. For example, when we decided to do a Stephen Jones exhibition, there was a very important link to our collection because there is an Antwerp private collector with a huge Stephen Jones collection who gave that collection on long-term loan to the museum. For me, that was a valid reason to organize a Stephen Jones retrospective.
Sometimes people come to you and propose topics, or now and then we take over an exhibition from another museum when it’s a collection or an exhibition that really inspired me, or a theme that inspired me. When we take over an exhibition we always ask if we can rework the exhibition designs, so that we can also give it a MoMu feel or a MoMu interpretation. What I think makes MoMu special is that we are a small museum. We have a team of 35 people to run the entire museum, the library, and the archive, which makes us more flexible than bigger institutions like the VNA or the Metropolitan. We can decide fast. We can sometimes program more experimental stuff. We really can decide 100% for ourselves on our program.
The future of the museum is very important to me. I started 12 years ago. The museum opened in this location 11 years ago. With our first exposition, and exhibition designs, we immediately got a lot of international press attention. We got very good reviews. People thought we were very experimental. I think fashion curation since then has been a very hot topic and I think that fashion exhibitions themselves became more and more popular. I really want to question how we work and if we can keep on working and making exhibitions the next 20 years in the same way that we have done it in the past 10 years.
The digital evolution is something that a lot of museums are not aware of. They use it in order to document their collections, or they all have digital databases, but they don’t know how to open these up to the audience. It’s really more of a technical question. I think that we still use our social media and online communication as a communication tool and not as a way to curate a collection or the ideas we have. So that’s something I want to work on in the forthcoming years, to invite people to do stuff with our collection, but digitally. To focus more on fashion film. How as a museum that we can use this tool in a way that’s relevant for us and our audience. This doesn’t mean that I want to be a second SHOWstudio. SHOWstudio is a great platform and I think Nick Knight has done groundbreaking work when it comes to communicating fashion in a digital era. But I want to think how can we open up as a museum in a digital era.
We are based in Antwerp and we have about 100,000 visitors a year. Maybe we can still grow a bit, but we will never have 300 or 400 thousand per exhibition. It’s not that I dream of that number of visitors, but I know that a lot of people around the world are aware of what we do and I want to provide them with more content without them coming to Antwerp, to communicate and interact with them in a way that’s interesting and relevant. That’s something that we are working on with the team here. How can we do that? And I really want us to allow ourselves to experiment with it. Which also means maybe we will do projects that won’t work, that are not what we thought it would be. But, that is the essence of an experiment.
ER: Can you talk more about your plans with film?
KD: We are now making three films with our collection. We invited an Antwerp based art director to interpret pieces of our collection. Of course they are limited because the garments can’t be worn by people. That’s one of the restrictions of the museum. It’s up to their creativity to make an interpretation of these garments. What they are doing looks really amazing and we’re going to present these films for the first time at the festival of Diane Pernet. Diane’s festival is an important part of this whole new aspect of the museum that we want to develop. Diane certainly is a pioneer in what she does. We don’t have to invent everything ourselves, we just have to link up with a lot of interesting people around the world.
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