Last Chance to See

The summer is drawing to a close as are a number of exhibitions of fashion in the museum. The list includes:

Surreal Body Gallery from Impossible Conversations: Schiaparelli and Prada at the Met
Photo courtesy of the Costume Institute at the Met

Impossible Conversations: Schiaparelli and Prada at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York closes TOMORROW Sunday, August 19, 2012. My review of the exhibition was published on Fashion Projects and can be read here.

Tutu Cozy by Svetlana Lavrentieva
Photo by Setareh Samadi

The Tutu Project and Sixty Years of Designing the Ballet at the Design Exchange in Toronto will both close on Saturday, September 2, 2012. In celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the National Ballet of Canada, these two exhibitions together provide a whimsical portrait of the tutu on stage and as a work of art.

Fashionality: Dress and Identity in Canadian Art at the McMichael Gallery, north of Toronto in Vaughan, Ontario closes Monday, September 3, 2012. In this exhibition, curator Julia Pine draws on theorist Roland Barthes' interpretation of clothing and adornment as “vestimentary code" because it conveys gender, class and cultural heritage. This exhibition features a number of Canadian artists who have used clothing for "its expressive qualities" and relationship to Canadian identity.

Marc Jacobs

Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs at Les Arts Decoratifs in Paris closes Sunday, September 16, 2012. This exhibition traces the legacy and relationship between Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs. Marc Jacobs, who is not a fan of fashion exhibitions said: "I always find it a bit difficult to deal with the idea of fashion and museums and I've said that before. And I think curators have a kind of cerebral, heady, comparative narrative thing going on. For me the reward of doing what we do is doing it, not when it's done. And when people wear it and love it and covet it or can't wait to have it, whatever it is. So I think my attitude towards the whole thing was that I was very flattered, but how do we make this experience of what fashion is all about - which is the joy."

Online Historic Costume Collections

In a click of a mouse, I can visit the historic and contemporary costume collections from around the world. Although some museums and university collections welcome visiting scholars, digitizing a collection reduces the handling of fragile garments and also offers everyone a chance to see garments that are not on display.  Here are my top picks of accessible collections (click on museum name for related link): 

Dior 1947 Bar Suit, Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute

Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Collection: The Met has over 35,000 costumes and accessories in their collection, with the earliest piece going back to the 15th century. This New York museum sets the gold standard for online digitized collections, providing multiple images and extensive descriptive information and provenance details for each item.

Victoria and Albert Museum Collections:  Although the storage and research facilities for this London based museum collection are currently being renovated (scheduled to reopen in October 2013),  the V&A website gives access to images from their extensive costume collection and also provides videos, articles, suggested books, and related material. An inviting and friendly website, the fashion related section is organized by period, with links to all related material available on the site. Like the Met, the information provided for each fashion item is extensive, including multiple viewpoints, photos of related accessories, marks and inscriptions and exhibition history. 

FIT Museum Collection: FIT Museum currently has over 50,000 garments and accessories in its collection. Although they have pieces going back to the 18th century, their focus is on contemporary fashion and they seek to add new pieces that "make fashion history". They have an extensive online collection and are adding to that regularly.  FIT has a smaller study collection of approximately 1200 pieces that is accessible to students, faculty and visiting researchers.

Kent State University Museum: Kent State has one of the largest study collections in the world with over 40,000 pieces including historic pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries to the present. While only a small sampling of items have been digitized, this museum believes in accessibility and welcomes students, faculty and visiting researchers.

Drexel University Historic Costume Collection: An online collection featuring detail closeups and 360 degree views of 129 selected pieces from the collection. Of particular note are the photos related to the conservation of an 1885 gown by Charles Frederick Worth (link here).

Chicago History Museum Costume & Textiles Collection: This museum's costume collection includes over 50,000 costumes and textile artifacts from the mid-18th century to the present, and is one of the largest in the world. Recently launched, the digital collection features multiple views of nearly 400 costume and textile artifacts.

Creative Process Journal: The Dress in The Museum

Untitled by Valerie Belin, 1997

This dress, stuffed with archival tissue, is from a series of works by French photographer Valerie Belin that were exhibited at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in an exhibition called "State of Things, States of Places" in 1997. The work is described in the exhibition catalogue as follows: "These dresses are like bodily remains...still moulded in places to the shape of their former presence, giving the appearance of the body itself." (Muller 78)

Having been behind the scenes in many museums, and having surreptitiously taken a few photos of beautiful things inside museum storage facilities, I am drawn to this photo.... It evokes so many things for me including the duality of beauty and decay, life and death, as well as my affinity for museums and  the ephemeral nature of fashion.

If I could, I would create a series of photos taken behind the scenes in a museum like the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee de la Mode in Paris... But baring that, I will have to find some other way of depicting this idea. It seems to bring me back full circle to the original source of inspiration for this creative project, which was a quote from Elizabeth Wilson's book Adorned in Dreams when she wrote:
"The living observer moves with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead…We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the evanescent of life.” (Wilson 1).

References:

Muller, Florence. art and fashion. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000
Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams. London: Virago Press, 1985.

Roger Vivier at the Bata Shoe Museum and other Must-see Exhibitions for 2012

Roger Vivier at the Bata Shoe Museum, photo by Ron Wood, copyright of the Bata Shoe Museum

The explosion of fashion exhibitions in museums has made it virtually impossible to see everything that there is to see. Discerning the extraordinary from the run-of-the-mill show takes work and this is my list of top choices for 2012.

1. Roger Vivier: Process to Perfection at the Bata Shoe Museum beginning May 10, 2012
The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto never disappoints. This jewel of a museum is headed by curator Elizabeth Semmelhack and she knows how to put on a good show.  In Process to Perfection, the exquisite work of Roger Vivier, known for bejewelled and elegantly sculptural shoes and one of the 20th century's most important master shoemakers,  will be displayed for the first time in North America. Loans from museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will make this show into a shoe-aholic's dream display.

2. Schiaperelli and Prada: On Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning May 10, 2012
This exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Met in New York will explore the affinities between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miucca Prada who come from two different eras. Curated by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, the title of the exhibition is based on Umberto Eco's books on the philosophy of aesthetics - On Beauty and On Ugliness  and organized according to the book's outline by topics such as "On Art," "On Politics," "On Women," "On Creativity". The exhibition will run until August 19, 2012.

3. Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs at Musee des Arts Decoratifs beginning March 9, 2012
This exhibition tells the stories of two men of fashion, separated by a century, Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs, and will highlight their contributions to the fashion world. Designed to be an analysis rather than a retrospective, this parallel Vuitton-Jacobs comparison is intended to provide new insight into the fashion system during its pivotal periods, beginning with its industrialisation and ending with its globalisation, focussing also on its artistic professions and crafts, technological advances, stylistic creations and artistic collaborations.

I chose these exhibitions because they are about fashion game-changers. Each one - Vivier, Schiaparelli, Prada, Vuitton and Jacobs - brought a unique vision to the world of fashion. Plus, the curators behind these exhibitions are the best of the best....

Harold Koda on Fashion in the Art Museum at the Bata Shoe Museum Founder's Lecture

Harold Koda (Photo by Karin Willis)

Last night, Sonja Bata introduced The Founder's Lecture series at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto as being part of a new initiative to bring "one truly outstanding personality" related to fashion to speak about their work. Harold Koda, the "rock star of fashion curators",  is the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was the first speaker in the series.

Harold's talk was entitled "The Arrangement: Fashion in the Art Museum" and traced the history of the costume collection at the Met from its earliest incarnation in 1947 as a resource collection for the fashion industry through to the present as one of the largest costume collections in the world.

The history of the Costume Institute is a story of personalities - from Diana Vreeland through to Richard Martin and Harold himself. An engaging speaker, both brilliant and humble, Harold kept all of us in rapt attention throughout his talk.

Not shy about the necessity of raising funds to support the Costume Institute, Harold mentioned the  strategies used by the museum to create excitement and raise funds for the collection. He gave credit to Diana Vreeland for recognizing that the annual party needed to have a high and glamorous profile in order that people would pay a lot of money to attend. He gave credit to Richard Martin who had the idea to create conceptually developed themes to generate audiences. Harold did not take any credit for himself, but he should have -- for his intra-museum collaborations for shows like "Dangerous Laisons" and his foresight in developing exhibitions of women of style like Jacqueline Kennedy and Nan Kemper as well as monographic designer displays like Chanel and Alexander McQueen.

Although fashion is one of the industries that drives the world economy, it seems that there is an uneasy relationship between fashion and finance and I was impressed that Harold addressed this head on. He said that when the museum presents a monographic designer exhibition (like Chanel), they often receive criticism as if there has been some kind of "collusion between high culture and the museum". And this problem is "complicated by fashion brands curating their own shows" in which the "concept never becomes as lucid as having someone outside the house reflect on it." Although the museum has to ask for the cooperation (and often sponsorship) of the fashion house, he made the point that "we are not working for the fashion company...we ask for access to their collection and archives...but there is a type of firewall between curation and the company."

Harold also talked briefly about the relationship between fashion and art and he mentioned that art is something that "elevates us beyond our daily experience". He gave examples of a few designers that he feels do this including Hussein Chalayn (and his airplane dress), Roberto Capucci who used "dress as a medium for sculpture" and Jean Paul Gaultier who uses "fashion as a vehicle for some other narrative". He said that the pattern for collecting at the Costume Institute is "focused more and more on the objects that have artistic virtue but are estranged from the experience of daily life".

To read more about Harold's views on the relationship between fashion and art, visit Fashion Projects here for the transcript of our conversation.

To join the Bata Shoe Museum and be at the front of the line for other illuminating talks and their upcoming show on Roger Vivier, visit their website here.

Savage Beauty by Alexander McQueen

Fall 2008 Collection of Alexander McQueen

The work of the late Lee Alexander McQueen will be the subject of the spring 2011 exhibition at the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition will celebrate McQueen’s contributions to fashion from his Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection in 1992 to his final runway presentation, which took place only weeks after his death in February 2010. Titled Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the exhibition will celebrate the work of  McQueen in challenging and expanding the scope of fashion from mere beautiful clothes to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity.

This exhibition will be on view from May 4 through July 31, 2011 and will be preceded on May 2 by The Costume Institute Gala Benefit. The evening’s Honorary Chairs are François-Henri Pinault and Salma Hayek, and the Co-Chairs will be Colin Firth, Stella McCartney, and Anna Wintour.

Here is an extract of the press release describing what will be on display:


The exhibition, in the Metropolitan Museum’s second-floor Cantor Galleries, will feature approximately 100 examples of Mr. McQueen’s work from his prolific 19- year career. Drawn primarily from the Alexander McQueen Archive in London, with some pieces from the Givenchy Archive in Paris as well as private collections, signature designs including the bumster trouser, the kimono jacket, and the Origami frock coat will be on view. McQueen’s fashions often referenced the exaggerated silhouettes of the 1860s, 1880s, 1890s, and 1950s, but his technical ingenuity always imbued his designs with an innovative sensibility that kept him at the vanguard.


Galleries will showcase recurring themes and concepts in McQueen’s work beginning with “The Savage Mind” which will examine his subversion of traditional tailoring and dressmaking practices through displacement and deconstruction. “Romantic Gothic” will highlight McQueen’s narrative approach to fashion and illuminate his engagement with Romantic literary traditions such as death, decay, and darkness. It will also reveal the main characters of his collections, including femme fatales and anti-heroes such as pirates and highwaymen. “Romantic Nationalism” will look at McQueen’s fascination with the distant past, while “Romantic Exoticism” will examine his focus on distant places. “Romantic Primitivism” will explore McQueen’s engagement with the ideal of the “noble savage.”


Five of McQueen’s landmark collections that explore his engagement with the Romantic sublime and the dialectics of beauty and horror will be interspersed among the galleries -- Dante (autumn/winter 1996-97), Number 13 (spring/ summer 1999), Voss (spring/summer 2001), Irere (spring/summer 2003), and Plato’s Atlantis (spring/summer 2010). “Cabinet of Curiosities” will include various atavistic and fetishized objects often produced with milliner Philip Treacy and jeweler Shaun Leane, longtime collaborators of McQueen’s. A separate screening room will display videos of McQueen’s renowned runway presentations.