Cinderella and the Brilliant Scavengers

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, the through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo 1989), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences. Fashion museums and fashion exhibitions are on the rise. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, Kylie Minogue or Princess Grace draws in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Reigels Melchior notes: fashion is fashionable in museums (2014). What is interesting is the New Museum's refrain of social inclusion (Sandell 2003). Yet welcoming all has never been the mantra of the avant guard of the fashion world. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds. Fashion hierarchies will always remain. Tastes makers will always be two steps ahead. Fashionistas, one step. Everyone else follows in their wake or buying tickets at the museum front desk. The impact has seen the rise of independently curatored exhibitions, within established museums, which engage in serious critical analysis of the relationship of the body to society. Landmark exhibitions, such as Spectre: When Fashion Turns Back (2004) curatored by Judith Clark, have given innovative fashion-lites new intellectual and physical spaces to work within. Through museums new hierarchies of the fashion system are being fashioned. Rather than exploring the tensions around museums as the gateway between the fashion industry and the public, this paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as "theatre of memory" where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy and desire are played out. While institutions construct the academic frameworks (or Cinderella's shoes) of "history" or "design" in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit, this paper argues that it is the arousal of memory through dress and a seeking , or reaffirmation, of identity that is the work of fashion exhibitions. Memory is subjective and the plaything of the emotions, "wallowing in its own warmth" (Samuel 2012). It is the brilliant scavengers, such as Clark, that pick over what others consider as remains, the dissonant, bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where retrieval from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Show more