January 2009

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Exhibitions about clothing and fashion provide critics with one mighty visual-arts axe to grind. Pull out the frocks and museums are immediately subject to charges of dumbing down. The public, however, love ’em. The Victoria and Albert Museum is currently showing ‘The Story of The Supremes from the Mary Wilson Collection’ of dresses worn by the Motown trio and last year’s exhibition of Aussie pop chanteuse Kylie Minogue was a tremendous sell-out show but, like its predecessors – including a Vivienne Westwood retrospective attracting the likes of Kate Moss and Sadie Frost – was subject to sneers.
Although it is the V&A that has predominantly held fashion-related shows in the UK, the Barbican is also getting a look-in with its current exhibition devoted to Dutch couturiers Viktor and Rolf. The show provoked the criticism, from Rachel Cooke writing in the Observer, that galleries are ‘to be found swooning at the feet of fashion’, citing The Royal Academy retrospective of Giorgio Armani and the V&A’s of Gianni Versace as well as the Kylie and Supremes exhibitions. ‘Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy’ at the Met in New York received the following review from Steven Wells in the Guardian: ‘deliciously dumbed-down imagery accompanied by wonderfully hyperventilating middlebrow art-porn talk’.
Cooke’s main criticism of ‘The House of Viktor and Rolf’ is that it is one big ad campaign and therefore a disservice to its paying visitors. Fair enough, but why follow this with the old ‘Fashion: Is It Art’ chestnut? Admittedly, it’s hard to take Kylie Minogue’s gold hotpants seriously as an exhibit, but visitor numbers would suggest otherwise and costume in museums is increasingly – and rightly – treated as another of the decorative arts. This may sound a little far-fetched but could it be that it’s easy to have a sneer at costume and fashion-themed shows for being ‘frivolous’ because the audience for them is largely made up of women? I can’t imagine, say, cars or planes – the Design Museum recently held an exhibition devoted to the Model T-Ford, for example – coming in for the same flack, can you?

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