The multiplicity of viewpoints on the relevance of fashion to culture demonstrates the many potential representations of it in a museum setting. Fashion falls between disciplinary boundaries: sometimes classed as a decorative art, occasionally slotted into social history, or displayed as an anomaly in and of itself, it does not, therefore, draw on any single set of display norms conventional to its subject class. As this book will show, the affiliation of fashion with any given discipline has had important repercussions not only for its potential intellectual content but also for the visual communication of that content. The very act of harnessing fashion to any disciplinary discourse has implications for what it is made to say and, equally, the visual and narrative means by which it is made to say it. In the strongest exhibitions, scenography and the physical mechanics of display will combine with curatorial narrative to deliver a message; sometimes, however, the narrative is superimposed onto a standard set of exhibitionary forms, which are drawn from separate fashionable discourses. Parallel critical approaches are therefore necessary, and throughout this book, I draw upon museological theory on exhibition display and history; historiography; body theory; semiology; fashion studies; materiality and phenomenology; and visual representation. Synthesizing these approaches achieves a hermeneutical analysis of the museum interpretation of historical fashion.
It became clear at an early stage of the research that the development of historical fashion exhibitions did not follow a neat evolutionary trajectory that showed the development of one form into another. Rather, it was evident that multiple display strategies coexisted simultaneously, sometimes within a single exhibition, and that though preferences for these waxed and waned, their use was not always in keeping with the dictums of exhibition theoreticians. Therefore,
the issue of why any given display mode was used became important, and for this reason, the discussion in the book is divided into thematic chapters that compare and contrast exhibitions from different museums and decades.
Exhibitionary forms are not natural or self-evident, and that their diversity reflects an equal diversity of curatorial goals. The analysis in this book focuses on how the mechanics of display (mannequins, props, labels, and settings) influences the informational and narrative content of exhibitions by re-presenting historical fashion. These ephemeral traces of assemblages, which are no longer intact, are compared to critical and theoretical literature to provide a new evaluation of the relationship of display to wider cultural narratives.
The material suggests that the discourses of historical fashion exhibitions have been heavily influenced by the anxieties and values placed upon fashion more generally. The discipline of fashion curation is deeply rooted in and dependent upon much earlier display practices in museums, galleries, and shops. Moreover, historical fashion, as it has been displayed in the case study institutions, also reflects the function of the museum institution itself, especially its visual marking of time and social contexts.
Overview
While I have avoided writing a simplistic time line or biography of fashion history exhibitions, the book nevertheless begins with an overview of the precedents for the twentieth-century entry of fashion into museum exhibitions. It is evident from the earliest material on the subject that a continuity exists in the discourses around exhibitions of historical fashion: for example, the 1833 exhibition of Cromwellian relics on waxwork mannequins, the 1847 satirical suggestion of a museum of fashion trends, and the 1869 editorial advocating for a costume reference collection for artists are all direct antecedents of contemporary display culture. Therefore, the history of fashion exhibitions presented here is organized into typologies based on display characteristics and thematic premise, making the connections between museum fashion and other contexts for fashion clear.
The thematic chapters that follow compare and contrast exhibitions across case study and other institutions over the last century. The chapters are divided into themes—commerce, social science, art, theater, living contexts, and history—
that can be considered as prisms through which one can view the development and deployment of museum conventions utilized within exhibitions of fashion history. These themes have arisen directly out of the archival material studied.
The interplay between personal and world-historical narratives in exhibitions, the celebration of consumerism and corporate brand identity, and claims to aesthetic universality and quality continued to surface across historical fashion exhibitions in all the institutions studied. The simultaneous materiality and ephemerality of
historical dress are also shown to demonstrate the paradox of historical fashion in the museum: the near-impossibility of satisfactorily conveying the embodied experience of fashion in its routine manifestation. In each exhibition studied, display techniques were used to highlight some particular feature of the objects on display, usually connecting them to a larger narrative. This “selective valuing of one feature over another” (Knell 2012: 323) demonstrates the contingent nature of the museum exhibition. In each chapter, the broad theme acts as an overarching concept for the related means by which historical fashion has been contextualized in exhibitions through visual symbolism and metaphor. Evidence of the connections between the different contexts for fashion (in shopping, art, theater, and even the personal wardrobe) is presented as being key to the understanding of fashion in the museum. Even within each broad context, fashion may be framed in a variety of ways, and so this book offers a wide range of possibilities, rather than focusing too closely on a limited few.
The conclusion returns to a more chronological approach and reviews the changes in the field, which have occurred after roughly 100 years of development.
While there are certainly more fashion exhibitions worldwide than ever before, can they be said to be innovative? Has the scholarly discourse around fashion exhibitions caught up with the reality?
After all, fashion historians have only recently begun to acknowledge and examine the history of fashion in museums. Daniel Roche’s seminal book The Culture of Clothing, first published in French in 1989, begins with the following sentence: “[W]hilst the last decades of the twentieth century have seen the appearance of museums of fashion, a phenomenon by definition short-lived, historians have yet to think how to write about something other than these sumptuous and insubstantial phantoms” (1994: 3). Yet this sentence contains a mistake: in fact, museums of fashion appeared earlier in the twentieth century.
Furthermore, while fashion theory, in large part, thanks to scholars like Roche, has certainly moved forward in its methodology, and with evidence drawn from various sources and methodologies from many disciplines, nuanced and definitive narratives have emerged, dress historians have thus far made few inroads into examining the “insubstantial phantom” that is the museum exhibition of historical fashion. This book, then, provides a history of fashion in the museum through the methods of its display.
The public is fascinated with fashion and eager for content from authoritative sources such as museums. This has led to a surge in media around the subject.
We may think that documentaries showing behind the scenes of dress displays like The First Monday in May (2012) are new, and yet that is not entirely true.
Pathé newsreels featured the costume collections of New York museums as early as 1934 (“Caught by the Camera No. 14”) and later filmed historian and curator James Laver at the V&A (“Pathé Pictorial” 1952) and collector Doris Langley Moore’s private museum in Kent in the 1950s (“Ancient Models”
1955); the acquisition of socialite Heather Firbank’s wardrobe by the V&A was celebrated with a Board of Trade short film called Sixty Years of Fashion, which featured models wearing gowns from the museum’s and Doris Langley Moore’s collections in the galleries in 1960; New York television station WNDT devoted a half-hour of evening television in 1963 to visiting the MFA Boston exhibition She Walks in Splendor (“Television” 1963: 52); Diana Vreeland’s legendary exhibition The Eighteenth Century Woman was the subject of a 1982 documentary narrated by the top model (and granddaughter of designer Elsa Schiaparelli) Marisa Berenson. These rare glimpses show the development of fashion exhibitions over the twentieth century. However, the roots of these displays go back much further.
This chapter explores the sociocultural circumstances surrounding the exhibiting of fashion in museums in Britain and North America. While the first permanent display of historical fashion in an English-language museum opened in 1911, historical dress had been displayed in various ways and venues since the late eighteenth century. From wax museums such as Salmon’s and Tussauds to effigies in royal robes in palaces across Europe, dress reform campaigns