Notes on Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion

“Fashion exists in an interaction between forgetting and remembering, in which it still remembers its past by recycling it, but at the same time forgets that the past is exactly that.” —Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy

I skipped writing about last year’s Costume Institute exhibition because it was more irritating than informative. This year struck a balance between the two—hinging way too much on the 4D experiential Smell-O-Vision gimmick. I appreciate the experimentation, but it was done much better at the Mugler exhibition at MAD Paris / Brooklyn Museum. Also, the organization of the exhibition by taxonomy (minus the section defined as ‘buttons’) worked well enough but there were much better options for organization.

Otherwise, it had beautiful garments and a gorgeous heap of research to accompany. Mark Fisher would have felt vindicated by the theoretical implications of this exhibition—the past as the method by which we ‘produce’ our future; the future as the method by which ‘reconstitute’ our past. The bouncing between pre-modern, modern, and ‘post’-modern objects materialize the very temporal collapse proffered by the assertion(s) of hauntology. Nostalgia terrorizes us, but in fashion, that terror that entraps us (at the very least) entertains with its spectacle. Each piece reminds us of our hatred for the Miuccia Mandate (the undoing of the spectacle that grounded Caroline Evans’s text on fashion shows’ relations between capital(ism) and visual culture) and yet, the vacancy embedded in each garment by half / invisible mannequins reminds us of how Fashion required her intervention.

Many areas of improvement needed but a gorgeous thesis to sink your teeth into and gorgeous garments to fawn over. (The razor clamshell dress from McQueen SS01 that was destroyed by Erin O’Connor entranced me...same with the Charles James ‘Butterfly’ dresses, top 3 American designers of all time...and seeing Madame Grès for the second time ever: pictures don’t do enough!)