We are on the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art.
My name is Paola Antonelli.
I'm a Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design here at MoMA.
And together with a quite outstanding curatorial team – I cannot name all the names right
now, but you should look them up – I organized the exhibition "Items: Is Fashion Modern?"
This is the first fashion show that MoMA has done in more than 70 years.
That means that the last time MoMA tackled fashion and garments was in 1944,
when a curator called "Bernard Rudofsky" did an exhibition called "Are Clothes Modern?"
And that's where the subtitle of this show comes from.
"Items" consist of 111 items of clothing or things that we can wear on our body that had
a strong impact on the world in the past 100 years.
As curators of design at MoMA, we believe that it is our task not to tell people what's
good and what's bad, but rather help people develop and sharpen their own
critical tools.
So by coming to this exhibition, people will have this kind of shock of the familiar.
Right?
They will see pieces that they own in the context of a museum exhibition in such like
an august hall as MoMA.
And that kind of moment of recognition will spark a new reflection on the things we wear.
And also, ultimately, on the impact that they have on society, and also on the environment.
There are many museums that do fashion shows, and they do a great job at
that.
We didn't want to repeat what they already do.
We didn't want to do a monographic show about the mastery of one designer.
We didn't want to talk about one style in a particular moment.
That's not our expertise.
What we're really good at is design.
So we decided to do a design exhibition about fashion in which we would focus on every single
item and really look at the way this item was born, why it was there, what
it implies, what the sociological, historical, technological, and also aesthetic context
is.
This particular platform gives a sense of what it means to do a design show with fashion
as the subject.
You see, it starts with a piece of high fashion.
It's Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garcons 1997, a collection called "Body Meets Dress – Dress
Meets Body," when a journalist from "The New York Times," Guy Trebay, came to see the exhibition
and noticed that this piece is next to Vivienne Westwood's bum bag and to a fanny
pack from MTV from the 1980s.
He told me that, actually, when he interviewed Kawakubo in '97 after this collection had
been released, she told him that she had been influenced by kids in the street wearing fanny
packs.
And you'll see in this platform, you move from this idea to actually, maternity, the
first Snugli that was designed in the early 1970s.
And then a prototype that we commissioned of a young Chinese designer, Wei
Hung Chen, of a modular maternity dress, and then examples of maternity clothes from the
1950s.
You see, this platform is about bodies changing, bodies not being always perfect but getting
fat, getting thin, getting pregnant, having accidents.
Just the idea that fashion has to accommodate a changing body and not oblige the body to
adapt itself to it.
These sculptures that you see here, they're quite gorgeous, they come from the
previous MoMA show about fashion, the 1944 "Are Clothes Modern?"
So these beautiful plaster statues that you see here represent what female bodies should
have looked like in different moments in history to match the fashion of that time.
So this crazy centaur shape is from the middle of the 19th century.
And then you move to the Victorian era, all the way to the flapper, concave,
breastless shape.
So it's a way to point out how fashion sometimes does not match reality and human bodies.
This platform puts next to each other the bikini and the burkini.
One would think that they are polar opposites but in truth they represent two different
examples of attempts to legislate women’s bodies in history.
Not only that, you can find pictures from the same beaches in south France in which
in the 1950s police were harassing women for wearing too little and last year they were
harassing women on the same beaches for wearing too much.
So it’s fascinating how modesty or the sense of what is decent and indecent is legislated
in different ways in different moments in history and different locations.
The exhibition will also address the idea of luxury.
You know, what luxury means to us today, the power of brands, the idea of scarcity whether
real or provoked by a marketing campaign.
And for instance, you see here the Birkin bag.
This is the one that really belonged to Jane Birkin, and it's beaten up and it had stickers on.
It's like so different from what you would think an "it" bag to be.
Usually, it's kept pristinely and perfectly.
We also have a great, great New York-born and bred example in the work
of Dapper Dan.
In the 1980s, he had a great boutique in Harlem and he made his own clothes.
He was a great tailor and also super-elegant person.
And he wanted to carry Louis Vuitton and Gucci, but the companies did not really see eye to
eye, or were not interested.
Who knows?
So he decided to make his own.
And with that silk screen over there, he was creating jackets that were absolutely his
own tailoring and his own design that had, that carried also those logos.
People have no idea of what an excitement it is to work on an exhibition.
I like to say that when you're a curator, you're a little bit like a director
and a producer of a movie, and MoMA is the studios.
But you get to work with an amazing crew of individuals that…
Well, of course, the curators, but then there's the registrar that takes care of every single
item that comes into the exhibition.
There's the art handlers that set everything up.
For this exhibition, we had an incredible master dresser, Tae Smith, with her crew.
And also, there's the Audio Visuals people.
And sometimes they are responsible for the real success of certain installations,
for instance, the tattoos here.
So for this installation, the team and I wanted to render the fact that tattoos have been
forever in history and very much part of many cultures.
But lately, they have become also a fashion for people that do not necessarily belong
to cultures that have tattoos as tradition but want to kind of represent their own personality
in different ways.
So in order to do so, we wanted to show different tattoos.
And what our Audio Visuals crew did is they took pictures of tattoos on bodies,
and then they remapped them onto mannequins.
Which by the way, are real people, not the usual Size 0's.
This is a special order, Size 10, so a real woman.
They remapped them so that they also can follow the curves of the body.
It's a very complex and fascinating work that is completely rendered effortless when you
watch it, but in truth is a marvel to reckon with.
And we're getting now to a section that we call the "Power Section."
Actually, it is a section in which we try to discuss the idea of power.
There's the Savile Row suit that we start with, and then there's the unstructured suit
with Armani in the 1980s and Yamamoto.
One of the masterpieces in the exhibition is the Zoot Suit that we borrowed from the
museum in Los Angeles, LACMA, the Burton suit, a Bill Blass, all the way to women's
suits that nonetheless still mimic and adapt men's hard power for women.
So it really is about this staple of power that has been for many, many decades, the
suit.
In particular, the Savile Row suit.
But in this day and age, you should not be sure that the person wearing the Savile Row
suit in the room is the tallest poppy.
It's not necessarily so.
The tallest poppy, in truth, might be wearing this t-shirt.
That's really what power is today – the ability to be yourself no matter the circumstances
and to really project your identity.
And it's also good to be able to end the whole exhibition with the white t-shirt.
In front of the Savile Row suit, of course, but also by itself, it condenses all the issues
that we have tried to discuss in this exhibition.
It talks about aesthetics, it talks about ethics, it points back to the raw materials
that sometimes are gathered with violence and with injustice, if you think
of picking cotton.
And it goes on all the way to the end of the life cycle of garments to the idea of waste
that sometimes Western societies saddle Eastern and Southern societies with.
So it's a whole world, a whole universe of issues and of possibilities, and of responsibilities
that people should make as their own when they decide to wear a particular garment.
If you want to find out more about the white t-shirt, about the Savile Row suit,
about the designers behind the items and about the circumstances around them, please go on
the Coursera platform.
We have produced a whole online course that is called "Fashion as Design."
And if you want to see more videos like this, subscribe to the MoMA YouTube channel.