Category: Fashion - Dr. Stephanie Pearson

Drawing in context - National Archaeological Museum, Sofia

7/19/2019

Sometimes even the simplest hint of context can make an object come alive. In the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria, the collection of gold is fantastic—yet if the objects stand in isolation, the way they were used in the past (and the very fact that they were used at all!) can get lost. One solution to this problem is seen above. The medieval gold objects are put into context immediately with a simple line drawing: they were attached to a belt, serving as ornament among the useful everyday objects like a pouch and a knife. It is richly informative in one glance, and far better than a more complicated reconstruction like, say, a full-body dummy!

Current Showcase = Immediate Eyecatcher - Museum of European Cultures, Berlin

2/15/2019

Such a simple yet effective idea: an object-of-the-month display at the museum entrance. Here it's the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, and the object in "Das aktuelle Schaufenster" (the current showcase) is a contemporary Swedish dress used in the celebrations of Saint Lucy. You can see the doors of the main entrance just to the right. What a great way to bring out of storage some objects that may not fit into the other exhibitions, and draw in the visitors as soon as they step over the threshold!

Fabrics in Fashion Cities Africa - Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam

8/8/2018

Another wonderful current exhibition at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam is Fashion Cities Africa. Like the Body Art show described in the last post, Fashion Cities presents a rainbow of human creativity—and of dyed fabrics! The use of cloth in the show cleverly highlights the theme and at the same time subdivides the space into cozy sections. At the entrance (above), sheets of whitewashed plywood are used as backings for introductory images and texts. Each panel introduces a local designer of African fashion, photographed on the street as if you had just run into them personally; once again it's that intimate human connection that flows throughout the museum. The boards are hung up with thick ropes at top and bottom, a very tactile nod to the cloth-and-design theme.

The second room (or second-to-last, if you entered at the other end) is encircled with hanging yards of cloth in various patterns. With pillows and chairs inside, it offers an alluring spot to tuck yourself into—the museum version of a sofa-cushion fort! Panels outside the ring of cloth explain how the colorful patterns came originally from, for instance, Indonesia (batik cloth), reached the Netherlands through colonial exchange, and from there was sent to Africa. It's a much more complex, indeed global history than one might expect. And it stays with you much more when you can touch this stuff of history, feel it, wrap yourself in it!

*stuff: from Old French estoffe = material, furniture. The German word for fabric is in fact Stoff. There's your cocktail-party knowledge for the day!

Home Body Art - Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam

8/7/2018

Last week a new museum topped my list of favorites: the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. All too rarely does a museum visit energize you—but, for me, this one did! Instead of museum fatigue and an aching back, I felt revived. The energy and freshness of this museum come from a beautiful openness of worldview, reflected in both the chosen themes and the carefully-written texts (not to mention the program of events). Even the permanent exhibition about slavery manages to sound considered and non-judgmental while at the same time exposing the horrific facts.

This openness is the ideal, indeed necessary complement to the museum's main focus: people. Period. To such an extent that both the website and the museum itself refuse to limit this focus further by mentioning the "tropical" cultures which originally gave the museum its name, or any other restrictive vocabulary. The mission statement is staunchly about people, for people. It obviously intends to take a stand against the colonialist agenda that informed the museum's foundation. Still, at first I found it almost too vague—until stepping inside. People really are the focus of the exhibitions, and it's fantastically invigorating. Encountering so many vibrant cultures feels like standing in the sun streaming through a stained-glass window, all the blues and reds and greens painting and warming your skin, touched by the cosmic light.

But maybe I just came up with that metophor through the inspiration of one of the beautiful human-based current exhibitions, Body Art. Typical of the Tropenmuseum is the human focus and breadth of people included here. Bodily modifications and clothing are examined not by culture or time but according to the desired effect, from making a person feel "different to the others" (above left, extreme piercings and makeup), expressing a group identity (below center, mafia tattoos), or displaying wealth. This grouping allows for striking juxtapositions: under the title "Eigenzinnig" = "Self-Determined" or "Quirky" (above right) are, on one side, a shockingly tiny belt from the days of corsets; and on the other, a contemporary photograph of a woman with a split tongue. Just so can unexpected differences be drawn, as for instance with tattoos. Facial tattoos were carried out on the beautiful girls in a southeast Asian village so that they would appear too strange or ugly for the local ruler to claim as a wife, and could thus remain safely in their communities. A grandson of a Holocaust survivor had his grandfather's concentration camp tattoo reproduced on his own forearm as a permanent reminder (below left).

For all these reasons, I was deeply affected by this exhibition. Even more so because of the intimacy of the setting, arranged like a living room from last century. The homey feeling gives our bodies a safe, comfortable space to inhabit while we reflect on how we use them to express ourselves.

Fashion Professions Word Cloud - Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg

7/12/2018

At the show Luxury in Silk (Luxus in Seide) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, the subject of yesterday's post as well, this wall caught my eye. Clearly the arrangement of words is based on the word clouds now used on websites to visualize the most frequent search terms and clicks. But here the cloud serves to show the plethora of jobs in the 18th century that had to do with creating clothing, shoes, and jewelry ("Mode-Metiers im 18. Jahrhundert"). It's interesting to see such an aesthetic transition from an online space to a physical one.

Luxury in Silk and Perfume - Germanisches nationalmuseum Nürnberg

7/11/2018

Over the weekend I got to visit two beautiful exhibitions in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg. The one about painting and the birth of photography will be the subject of a future post; today it's all about silk dresses! The show Luxury in Silk (Luxus in Seide, through Jan. 6) centers on a newly acquired silk dress from the 18th century. It is displayed in a chamber of its own in the center of the square exhibition room, with the "supporting actors" surrounding it: brooches and other period jewelry, old books and caricatures documenting fashion trends, and several pieces of clothing and shoes in unfinished form.

My favorite aspect of the show was the innovative decision to pipe a light fragrance into the display area around the silk dress. It's a wonderful multisensory experience! (At right, a detail photo of the righthand wall shown above.) Subtle enough that you might not notice it at first, the perfume emanates through a small panel with a label above it. This "Flora grand poudre" scent was specially commissioned from a Parisian parfumeur who based her creation on the perfumes of the 18th century—a combination of lillies and other flowers, sandalwood, and musk. Aptly named, it smells like a delectable cosmetic powder in a precious gold-and-abalone toilette box. Not usually one for powdery scents, I was enraptured all the same; how can we bring smell into visual exhibitions more often?

Ancient Art meets Modern Fashion in Munich

7/12/2017

A slideshow in Vogue presents the current collaborative exhibition by the Munich Antikensammlungen & Glyptothek with students of the AMD Akademie Mode & Design (links below).

Divine#Design, an exhibition running through October at the Antikensammlungen and Glyptothek in Munich brings contemporary fashion into dialogue with ancient sculpture (somewhat like the exhibit in Aidone, Sicily described in a recent post). Students at the AMD Akademie Mode & Design were invited to create clothing inspired by the highlights of the antiquities collection. The juxtaposition of old and new is meant to raise questions about the social relevance and effect of clothing, makeup, and hairstyle. For perhaps the first time, an antiquities show has earned a slideshow in Vogue magazine! Flipping through the slides shows the many ways the students responded to the ancient objects: in texture ("swallowtail" folds in a hemline), color (lots of whites and beiges), content (a real snake posed beside a head of Medusa), and form (a petticoat cage shaped like a vase; a "fat suit" to imitate musculature). The sheer imagination of these designers brings new life to the collection.

Ancient Statues in Modern Fashion: Museo Regionale di Aidone, Sicily

4/17/2017

The archaeological museum at Aidone, Sicily presents a juxtaposition of very old (6th century BC) and very new (2009) that is at once provocative and instructive. The decision to display the remains of two remarkable ancient Greek statues in a reconstruction by contemporary Sicilian fashion desigenr Marella Ferrera is symbolic, underscoring the equal value of (and even a unity of) Sicily's ancient and modern heritage. In Ferrera's concept, the marble heads, hands, and feet of the statues of goddesses Demeter and Kore/Persephone are affixed to metal wire armatures swathed in transparent rust-red cloth. (Some tweaking has been done over the years; an earlier version used a pale off-white cloth and included a stalk of grain in Kore's left hand. At the time of the first installation, Ferrera's human models were similarly swathed in her Winter 2009 collection.) The result is much more striking than the exhibit for the statues in Virginia, where they were housed until a repatriation claim in 2007 lead to the return of the statues in December 2009. What is more, Ferrera's "in-corporation" of the heads and extremities creatively recreates the original context of the statues: as acroliths, these statues had stone heads, hands, and feet, but their bodies were carved in in wood which no longer survives. Setting the remaining stone pieces back into bodies gives the viewer a proper sense of the powerful physical presence of the original statues—an important factor in their function as figures of worship.

Reflecting Color: Jacqueline de Ribes at The Metropolitan Museum

12/3/2015

A view of the exhibition "Jacqueline de Ribes" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/jacqueline-de-ribes/gallery-views

An article in the New Yorker alerted me to a current exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum, specifically in the newly-reopened Costume Institute. It takes as its focus the fashion figure Jacqueline de Ribes and presents her clothing designs in a number of displays, all lovely—but the one that particularly caught my eye is shown above (and linked through the picture; just click on it to see the original slideshow). Using reflective metal (aluminum?) as the backdrop and flooring for these dresses is a simple yet extremely effective way to emphasize the colors and reflect light upon them without distracting from them. As a display solution, in fact, it has much in common with the clothing designs themselves: it is deceptively simple, quite cunning, and above all elegant.

Dressing like a Roman: Museo Archeologico di Milano

12/27/2014

With this display — one of the many excellently-signed ensembles in the Museo Archeologico di Milano — the museum has accomplished two difficult but worthwhile tasks. First of all, it presents Roman costume in a physical yet not actually tangible way. Seeing these reconstructions of ancient clothes is a fun inroad to imagining life in that period, and this is helped by the fact that the clothes are standing before you rather than drawn on paper or a screen. Placing the mannequins in a doorway (or beside it, as in the case of the male figure) atop the mosaic floors sets them away from the reach of visitors, improving their longevity. Which brings us to the second point: the use of figures enlivens the otherwise very flat and space-hogging mosaic floors, as well as drawing attention to the fact that the floors used to be walked on and once formed part of a house. Simple but important points, presented here in a simple but effective way.

Costumes and mosaics, Museo Archeologico di Milano

Costumes and mosaics, Museo Archeologico di Milano

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