Museum spaces can also be choreographed to put visitors into the contexts of fashion—shops, studios, runways, wardrobes—where they can imaginatively enact the behaviors of couture clients, fashion journalists, or designers. One of the most notorious examples of this staging was the 2000 Armani exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The famous Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramp was covered with a red carpet, and guests paraded alongside mannequins wearing garments worn by the designer’s celebrity clients. In this and subsequent restagings, “audience members become performers, rather than passive onlookers, allowing them to experience the performative and bodily nature of the runway” (Potvin 2012: 60). Likewise, Valentino: Master of Couture at Somerset House in 2012 placed visitors on a runway, surrounded by effigies of stars and socialites who regularly wear the designer’s elegant pieces and attend such events as fashion weeks.
Immersion into normally restricted spaces of fashion also occurs when museum galleries are styled to recreate designer methods. The studio of legendary couturier Yves Saint Laurent was recreated at the Denver Art Museum for the retrospective Forty Years of Fashion in 2012 and again at the Bowes Museum for Style Is Eternal in 2015. Likewise, the Design Museum’s Hello, My Name Is Paul Smith (2013) recreated the interiors of menswear designer’s offices and boutiques. When the faithful recreation of a studio interior is impossible, it is often evoked with the display of a designer’s working methods and materials.
The National Museum of Scotland received the archive of designer Jean Muir, which enabled them to devote space to a section on her working processes, including sketches and toiles, in a 2008 special exhibition and more recently in a spotlight section of their permanent galleries (reopened 2016). Similarly, toiles, sketches, and pattern pieces were featured in the Met’s recent Charles James retrospective (2014) and formed an important design centerpiece for the 2011 Dior exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, sponsored by the brand itself, who were keen to highlight the workmanship behind the aesthetic impact of couture clothing. The workspaces of the craftspeople who actually construct couture have also been staged, as in the “Atelier” section furnished to evoke the boiserie interiors of Parisian haute couture houses in the ROM’s Elite Elegance (2002) (Figure 5.6) or in the section called “Embroidery” in the V&A exhibition The Golden Age of Couture (2007).
Figure 5.6 Installation view of Elite Elegance: Couture Fashion in the 1950s, “Atelier”
section, November 23, 2002–May 4, 2003, with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.
This behind-the-scenes access has also been constructed to represent the spaces within which fashion is consumed. The section called “Lady Alexandra:
A Couture Client” in the V&A’s The Golden Age of Couture (2007) evoked the architecture of an aristocratic dressing room. At the Met, an actual dressing room, used by the Gilded Age socialite Arabella Worsham and taken from her Manhattan townhouse in 1938, was staged in 2017 with the types of garments this elite nineteenth-century woman would have housed within (Figure 5.7). An elaborate French ball gown (which did not actually belong to Worsham herself) hung on a hook, while drawers and doors were opened to allow glimpses of undergarments and accessories. This was a historical counterpart to a display in an adjacent gallery: Sara Berman’s Closet, a minimalist and monochromatic recreation of a walk-in wardrobe, celebrating the meticulous life of the mother and grandmother of the two artists (Maira and Alex Kalman) who reassembled it as an art installation. At the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, rolling racks with artifacts on hangers were used to evoke the wardrobes of tasteful consumers who donated them to the museum in 1999 in Garde-robes: Intimités Devoilées (Figure 5.8), as well as later in an exhibition curated by the couturier Christian Lacroix (Histoires de Mode, 2007–2008), where they represented the designer’s fantasy wardrobe from which he took inspiration. Unusually, the Textilmuseet, in Borås, Sweden, has a whole wardrobe of twentieth- century pieces for visitors to try on. This handling collection of approximately 3,000 items enables visitors to touch materials that they would not otherwise be able to in a gallery, and some of the robust items of clothing and accessories are rotated as part of the “Try-On Wardrobe” activity section in the building available to all visitors.
These displays are not just allusions to the production and consumption spaces of fashion (see Chapter 3) but also a way in which audiences can themselves pretend that they are performing fashion alongside or even instead of the original creators or wearers. In the most interactive of these, audiences can experience the embodied aspects of fashion within the normally hands-off museum gallery.
These stagings show the many different ways in which exhibition makers have attempted to animate fashion beyond the clothing itself. It is clear that the theatrical effects used in fashion exhibitions are most often a means by which to evoke the contexts for fashion within a gallery setting. Whether attempting to recreate a feeling of witnessing authentic historical events or merely bringing a sense of immediacy to past fashions, the influence of theater on fashion exhibitions has been evident since their earliest inception and is now even more powerful with the advent of digital technology and the increasing acceptance of temporary and experimental installations. However, despite efforts to pose fashion on animated mannequins and in elaborate settings, the primary context for clothing is the most challenging to recreate: the bodies that filled the garments in museum collections are long gone.
The following chapter will therefore examine how the bodies of wearers have been imagined and made material for museum visitors to fashion exhibitions.
Figure 5.7 Installation view of the Worsham-Rockefeller dressing room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by Billie Grace Ward, July 10, 2017.
Figure 5.8 Postcard promoting the Musée de la Mode et du Textile exhibition, Garde-Robes, 1999–2000. Author’s collection.
The presentation of fashion in the museum differs from the ways in which it can be encountered in day-to-day life: the agency, subjectivity, and materiality of the lived body can only be represented by visual means, depriving fashion of its vitality. Museum visitors have been confronted with different conceptions of the body through exhibitions that demonstrate changing silhouettes, use ghostly mannequins, silhouettes, or hollow core supports to demonstrate how dress is a second skin, or encourage reflexive embodiment (Crossley 2006: 140) in other ways. Whether invisible, abstracted, flattened, or fully articulated and accessorized, the substitute bodies of mannequins in galleries frame the fashion on display in different ways. This chapter examines bodily boundaries and how museum exhibitions have tackled the problems of signaling absent human wearers.
The display of dress has been seen as dissatisfyingly disembodied. Fashion historian Valerie Cumming explains,
Garments should be seen in movement on a human body, not frozen on a display figure. This is one of the many difficulties when curating collections of costume and also why some modern writers find costume collections physically and intellectually lifeless. (2004: 83)
Aileen Ribeiro also represents such a view when she writes, “It is, perhaps, a paradox that dress achieves immortality through the portrait, that the canvas gives it a vitality that cannot be achieved in the half-light of a museum existence”
(Ribeiro 1995: 6). While the previous chapter demonstrated how theatrical techniques sometimes sought to bring these charismatic images to life in tableaux vivants, it is still challenging to communicate the experience of dress in an exhibition. Indeed, Denise Witzig has categorized fashion exhibitions as “a tableau morte, a tribute to human culture that is aesthetic, but without the living, breathing interpretations and insurrections of the corporeal beings the culture