As it happens, museums, galleries and exhibiting spaces in general dedicate ever more often part of their annual program to the history, industry and culture of fashion. Not by chance, institutions like the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London have recently dedicated much of their time and energy in developing major fashion shows – met with equally great acclaim both by the critics and the public. Fashion has, indeed, become the very last form of cultural business.
Fashion curation is an emerging and flourishing field, an area of rapid growth in museums worldwide, which sees in viewers’ emotional engagement the key of its peaking popularity. But, when fashion crosses the boundaries of the art world, one main ontological question must arise: how should fashion be displayed within an art museum? An intelligent answer comes from DESTE Foundation, with its recent exhibition titled “DESTE FASHION COLLECTION: 1 TO 8” occupying the Benaki Museum in downtown Athens (on view through October 12, 2014).
Since 2007, DESTE Foundation has been conducting research on the meaning of fashion today, seeking the contribution of contemporary artists, architects and creative minds on the critical discourse around this fast-paced discipline. It is an incremental, evolving and potentially open-ended project whose main goal is to test and stretch the boundaries between art and fashion in an innovative and experimental way. Each year an artist is offered the opportunity to build a capsule collection for the Foundation’s archive and to freely re-interpret it through the means of art, graphic design, cinema, architecture, publishing or fashion itself. The project’s first edition was curated by the Paris-based graphic design duo M/M Paris, followed by photographer Juergen Teller (2008), fashion designer Helmut Lang (2009), writer Patrizia Cavalli (2010), artist Charles Ray (2011), film director Athina Rachel Tsangari (2012), architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2013) and photographer Maria Papadimitriou (2014). Next year will be the turn of Sonic Youth’s front-woman Kim Gordon.
This year’s exhibition assembled the first eight years of fashion experiments conducted by the DESTE Foundation in an original display designed by architects Mark Wasiuta and Adam M. Bandler, both professors at Columbia University in New York, and respectively director and curator of the school’s gallery. Through a visually catchy, but at the same time very rigorous system of moving chain walls, the installation itself reflected on the idea of fluid boundaries between disciplines, with fashion and art constantly penetrating each other’s territories.
The curatorial apparatus highlights unexpected relationships: on one hand, it revealed the differences and tensions between two disciplines by examining them separately; on the other it inscribed them within the same cultural domain. In fact, navigating through the exhibition display and its dissolving rooms – rather than limiting themselves to passive admiration of displayed objects – the viewers were asked to force themselves to reveal the cultural interpretations hidden behind each single fashion piece, rediscovering it as an original artist’s work.
