Fashion Curating

As the practice of fashion curation extends into commercial galleries, public and retail spaces, and even to the individual self, professional concepts of 'curating' are undergoing rapid change. Today, everyone is seemingly able to 'curate', but where does this leave the traditional understanding of curation as clothing collected and displayed in a museum? This thought-provoking volume explores the practice of fashion curating in the 21st century, bridging the gap between methods of display and notions of 'the curatorial' in fashion exhibitions, commercial settings, and the virtual world.
From fashion's earliest forays into the museum to creative collaborations between luxury fashion brands and artists, this book challenges understandings of fashion curation by drawing on the palpably new spaces, places, and actors in today's curating scene. Exploring poetic and performative museum displays in venues such as the V&A, Somerset House, MoMu and the Royal Ontario Museum, alongside the ways that brands such as Dior, Chanel and Louis Vuitton have made use of 'the curatorial' in their own commercial strategies, Fashion Curatingasks pressing questions about controversial funding and collaboration from the commercial fashion sector, and the limitations of producing exhibitions that are at the same time critical and popular.
Bringing together approaches from fashion curators, designers and world-renowned academics, curation is positioned as a critical practice that opens up new ways of conceptualizing and theorizing fashion, challenging how we think and what we already know.

Hazel Clark is Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, and Research Chair of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, USA. Annamari Vänskä is Professor of Fashion Research at the Aalto University, Finland, and Adjunct Professor of Art History and Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is also a Visiting Professor at Shanghai College of Fashion, Donghua University, China.

List of Figures List of Plates Acknowledgements Introduction Annamari Vänskä, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, Finland and Hazel Clark, Parsons School of Design, New York, USA I. Inside the Museum Inside the Museum: Introduction 1. Confronting Fashion's Death Drive: Conservation, Ghost Labor, and the Material Turn within Fashion Curation. Sarah Scaturro 2. Permanence and Impermanence: Curating Western Textiles & Fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum Alexandra Palmer 3. Unfamiliar places, local voices: Four emerging curatorial narratives in Australia (2010-2016) Robyn Healey 4. Fashion curation at MoMu: Digital challenges Kaat Debo II. The Independents The Independents: Introduction 5. Props and Other Attributes: Fashion and Exhibition-making Judith Clark 6. Staging Fashion in Somerset House, London Alistair O'Neill 7. Boutique - Where Art and Fashion Meet. Curating as collaboration and as cultural critique Annamari Vänskä 8. From Lesbian and Gay to Queer: Challenging the Hegemony in Collecting and Exhibiting LGBT Fashion and Dress Shaun Cole 9. Intervening Fashion: A case for feminist approaches to fashion curation. Nathalie Khan III. Beyond the Museum Beyond the Museum: Introduction 10. Fashion museums and fashion exhibitions in Italy. New perspectives in Italian fashion studies Simona Segre Reinach 11. Beyond Garments: Reorienting the Practice and Discourse of Fashion Curating Marco Pecorari 12. Fashion curates art: Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton Peter Bengtsen 13. Artification and Authenticity: Museum Exhibitions of Luxury Fashion Brands in China Yuli Bai