The objects on display in the galleries of any museum are divorced from their original context. They are no longer in use or in situ, and indeed, their purpose and location within the museum frequently minimizes their materiality (Petrov 2011; Wehner 2011). For example, it is intuitively obvious that the ways in which people relate to clothing in the mundane circumstances of everyday life are not the ways in which they do so in museums, and this has to do with the way in which museums present objects: Amy de la Haye argues that
to represent worn, historical clothing on a modern model is to deny the biography of the consumer who originally chose the garment, and, in the case of haute couture, who commissioned it to fit her body perfectly, and who wore it. Perhaps more than any other medium, worn clothing offers tangible evidence of lives lived, partly because its very materiality is altered by, and bears imprints of, its original owner. […] When worn clothes enter a museum they embark on a new “life” and serve new functions. In the process, what was once intimate can become impersonal. (de la Haye 2006:
135–136)
Indeed, one common objection to the display of fashion in museums is how disembodied and lifeless it is. Although some museums, such as Bath, the Met, the ROM, and the V&A (Figure 6.1), did allow their collections to be worn by live models into the 1960s (select examples are discussed in Mida 2015a), the practice had adverse effects on the condition of the garments. While as late as 1972, some museum writers still encouraged dressing up in historical costumes to “create a social occasion which will draw attention to your society, amuse the membership, intrigue the public, and please the press” (Briggs 1972: 1), the practice increasingly came to be frowned upon, though even critics agreed that
“the incompleteness of costume without the human body will probably always lead to a desire to display it on a human shaped form” (Sykas 1987: 157). The International Council of Museums published guidelines for costume collections, which explicitly forbade the wearing of historical costume for display (ICOM 1990: 127). Fashion journalist Prudence Glynn, on the other hand, represented the strong feelings of individuals who thought that the aesthetic impact of historical fashion was significantly lessened if it could not be worn by a live model:
You understand, I deplore the death of any magnificently designed object.
[…] What I hate is stuffed fashion. […] So now, at the cost of being banned from visiting major fashion collections all over the world, I pronounce that in my view clothes in museums, with certain obvious provisions, should be
allowed to be shown on live models. […] When you see them on the dummies, mute, pasty-faced, inviolate, you do maybe wonder at the construction, the workmanship, the beading, the social interest. When you see them live, wow!
(Glynn 1980: 7)
Figure 6.1 Undated postcard showing a model wearing a dress from the Talbot Hughes collection, given to the V&A by Harrods in 1913. The text gives the gown’s measurements for scale. Author’s collection.
However, the risks of such practices to museum material ultimately outweighed the benefits; even Doris Langley Moore, who had allowed models to pose in her collection of clothing for film and still photographs throughout the 1950s and 1960s, had eventually come to recognize the damage this wrought on fragile fabrics (Glynn 1980: 7). Compromise was necessary: “On the lay-figure in the museum, silk, velvet, cotton, lace retain something of the potentiality of life” (“History in Clothes” 1962: 9). Some museums returned to the older wax mannequin form to imbue their displays with lifelike energy as they acted out the routines of daily life with period-appropriate bodies: “How else than by means of wooden or wax mannequins could an observer of one hundred years hence know for certain the once fashionable figure or hairdressing?,” asked a New Zealand newspaper rhetorically (“A Dress Museum” 1925: 16). For the 1983 LACMA exhibition An Elegant Art, tableaux with custom-built realistic mannequins supported the garments on display:
Great attention was given to the production of mannequins which were especially designed and constructed to create the appropriate eighteenth-century posture. Even the mannequins’ features and expressions were designed to reveal the subtle differences in posture and posing required by the vignette locales and time periods. (Craig 1983: 98)
Although the mannequins could not move, they were frozen in attitudes that would mirror the embodied behaviors of the wearers they represented.
Where possible, mechanical means are sometimes used to animate the display of dress: the use of motorized turntables for mannequins (Fashion: An Anthology, V&A, 1971; Ballgowns, V&A, 2012), video screens or projections for mannequin “faces” (The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2011), holograms (Savage Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art and V&A, 2011 and 2015), and wind machines (Figure 6.2) have all been utilized. In addition, ambient sounds and the wafting of perfume through galleries are also devices that have been used individually or in concert in exhibitions from the 1970s (particularly by Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute) to the present day. With the advent of digital technology, photographs of period clothing on mannequins can be combined with images of models to create convincing collages, as was done by photographer Edwin Olaf for the publicity for Catwalk:
Fashion in the Rijksmuseum exhibition in 2016 and by Virginia Dowzer and Bronwyn Kidd at the National Gallery of Victoria for the 200 Years of Australian Fashion exhibition in 2016.1 In the gallery, life had to be turned into merely lifelike.
The mimesis of embodiment is a key convention used in museums and, in particular, in displays of historical fashion. In 1972, an American Association for State and Local History leaflet suggested that “one can use costumed figures to tell a story […] or to enliven and humanize a historic house” (Briggs 1972: 1) and
Figure 6.2 A mannequin animated by a wind machine from the Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty press preview, May 2, 2011, in New York (Paola Messana/AFP/Getty Images).
a year later, another leaflet stated that “even when articles of furniture and other period items are displayed in the last exceptional detail, life-size figures give realism to the room when arranged in attitudes of arrested motion” (Halvarson 1973: 1).
For examples of this in practice, one can look to the installation photographs of the 1944 Brooklyn Museum America 1744–1944 exhibition, which combined American decorative arts from across the museum’s departments, or the 1963
Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, Costumes: Period Rooms Re-Occupied in Style. This is a very popular display style, frequently encountered in history museums around the world, and is also a common way of “populating” period interiors, as discussed in the previous chapter. The Regency Exhibition held at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 1958 used mannequins dressed in historical fashion gathered from Doris Langley Moore’s collection (later part of the Fashion Museum, Bath) to showcase the newly renovated rooms of the former royal residence. Moore’s conceit was revisited in 2011 for the exhibition Dress for Excess: Fashion in Regency England at the same venue. While it is debatable whether they truly added drama to the scene, the mannequins did give a sense of proportion to the grand interiors in which they were posed, suggesting a similar scale for the human onlookers and visitors to the exhibition.
The film studies concept of haptic visuality, or embodied spectatorship (Kuhn and Westwell 2012: 201), may explain the processes by which audiences are able to understand the sensual nature of clothing on display, even though they are using only their vision. Nevertheless, it is sometimes insufficient, and many museums of fashion have attempted to overcome this by having special stations within their galleries where visitors can try on replica garments, such as corsets or hoopskirts: the V&A installed such a section in 2001 (Durbin 2002) and was followed the next year by the ModeMuseum in Antwerp, which reproduced six items from their collection for visitors to touch and try them on (Forman 2002:
T3). The Museo del Traje in Spain installed a special sensorial section in 2014, where visitors could touch replica muslin garments from a chronology of fashion (displayed on hollow-core mannequins) and compare their bodies to the row of sculpted torsos in ideally fashionable silhouettes across time.