Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2014

Coinciding with a rising public interest in the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, an exhibition of the costumes of the women of Cromwell’s family was staged twice in different locations in London in 1833–1835. The dresses, accessories and related objects had impeccable provenance, as they had been descended from Cromwell’s daughter to a distant relation, Jane Luson. Upon Mrs Luson’s death, the costumes were exhibited thanks to the enterprise of the heir of this collection; in designing his display, Mr William Anthony, a Clerkenwell clock-maker, unknowingly invented the characteristics of the modern museum exhibition of historical costume. Drawing on archival documents and published accounts, this article describes these exhibitions and argues that, although they are the first documented instance of a dedicated display of historical dress, they nonetheless demonstrate the key conventions of fashion curation practised to this day, including mannequin dressing, props, historical and biographical documentation, label copy, merchandising and sponsor product placement. As fashion exhibitions become more common across cultural venues worldwide, it is important to look back at the beginnings of the trend and acknowledge the debt owed to this early precedent.

Both admired and criticized, Diana Vreeland’s approaches to exhibiting fashion have left a profound impact on how curators choose to display fashion worldwide. Her ‘Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design’ exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is emblematic of what makes her work so notable in the field of museology. Running from 1974 to 1975, the record-breaking show exuded her idiosyncratic way of staging fashion exhibitions that blurred the lines between traditional gallery displays and fashion magazine editorials, and continues to raise interesting questions about what is appropriate in the display of historic dress. The cultural impact of the exhibit is not based solely on its curatorial work or public reception; its true legacy is also founded on how it brought Hollywood costume into the museum setting, elevating it to the status of high art while appealing to the interests and fantasies of a diverse group of visitors. A detailed analysis of Vreeland’s curatorial idioms, including abstract mannequins, dramatic lighting and sound, helps us to conceptualize the practice of exhibiting fashion as a meaningful yet theatrical discipline that dovetails with cinematic production.

This article explores how a department store holiday extravaganza contributed towards the dialogue between fashion, museums and popular culture and the ways in which holiday displays pushed the boundaries of costume conception and exhibition. Key components of Marshall Field’s 1991 holiday spectacle were the Cinderella gowns presented as a uniquely curated costume ‘exhibition’ highlighting imaginative designs of Zandra Rhodes. The commission of sixteen Rhodes fairy tale dresses for Marshall Field’s annual holiday display epitomizes the wonder created for the visitor. Combined with the traditions of the season, the Cinderella dresses encouraged make believe and the idea that dreams really do come true. The opportunity for the public to see the holiday designs of Zandra Rhodes was a move beyond consumerism towards theatre and artistic vision, and represented a chance for visitors to experience a fairy tale spectacle on Chicago’s State Street.

This study investigates how visitors perceived film costume in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) ‘Hollywood Costume’ exhibition. The findings are based on 296 survey responses gathered during the three-month run of the exhibition and eight ‘visitor storybooks’: sets of ten captioned photographs. In the following article, we outline the objective of the exhibition – to educate visitors on the role of the costume designer – and compare it both to issues in dress curation and to the two principal modes of visitor engagement with costume that arose from the data. Despite the exhibition’s emphasis on the role of the costume within the greater system of film, we saw that visitors engaged directly with costumes as objects or works of art in their own right, valued for their physical properties and as products of a material design process. They also appreciated costumes for their function of animating character and making absent figures present. The multimedia exhibition space as well as the context of the museum itself is shown to be essential to framing these modes of engagement. The questions and conclusions drawn by this article highlight the importance of understanding the nuances of visitor engagement with garments in the museum, especially in light of the popularity of exhibitions featuring dress and continued debates in the field.

Digitization of fashion and costume collections is a priority effort for many institutions worldwide. This study intends to examine the content of text and images within the fashion collection database record and how the viewer can extrapolate information beyond the discovery of the object or the given specifications about the object itself. While the digital reproduction may not be able to produce the ‘entire biography’, nor the complete ‘tactile aspect’, of the original object, it is possible for the digital image to provide much valuable contextual and historical information for the curator or researcher. Through an analysis of records in selected online collection databases of fashion, this study proposes to examine how images and their accompanying records can illuminate curatorial decision-making, changing museum and institutional practices, and the life of an object before and after museum acquisition, as well as approximate the sensations so important to the experience and understanding of clothing – texture and embodiment.

This article discusses the critical and curatorial aims, materials and methods that underpin a digital fashion archive devoted to the histories of US women of colour called Of Another Fashion. It argues for the utility of participatory media in efforts to create not only new historical records of minoritized fashion histories but also new systems of record-keeping. Of Another Fashion does more than simply add to the history of US women’s fashion. Relying heavily on the ethics of sharing and co-creation intrinsic to participatory media practices, it is shaped by a techno-feminist approach to the historiography of US fashion histories in which commitments to cooperation and difference are central.

‘Club To Catwalk’, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 10 July 2013–16 February 2014

‘California Design 1930–1963: Living in a Modern Way’, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, 2 November 2013–9 February 2014

‘Exposed: A History of Lingerie’, The Fashion and Textile History Gallery, Museum at FIT, New York City, 3 June–15 November 2014

Overdressed: Barthes, Darwin & The Clothes That Speak, Michael Carter (2013) Sydney: Puncher & Wattman Criticism, 80 pp., ISBN: 9781921450884, p/bk, AUD$19.95

The Religious Life of Dress: Global Fashion and Faith, Lynne Hume (2013) London and New York: Bloomsbury, 176 pp., ISBN: 1360466X, p/bk, $26.95, h/bk, $100.00

Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America, Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors (2013) New York and London: Bloomsbury, 294 pp., ISBN: 9780857853356, $29.95

Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics and Faith, Emma Tarlo (2010) New York; Berg, 242 pp., ISBN: 9781845204334, $34.95