Autobiography as a Proposed Approach to a Fashion Exhibition

When considering collections of fashion in the museum as a ‘public wardrobe’ it is pertinent to review not only those private curatorial activities of collecting, research and documentation but also the very public activity of exhibiting collections. In particular, we might reflect on how museum displays interpret and present fashion in relation to other contemporary media, particularly the recent online phenomenon of personal style blogs, labelled by critics as ‘ego-blogs’. This article explores the notion of ‘fashion autobiography’ and asks whether, inspired by internet blogs and in the spirit of the public wardrobe, it might prove a viable approach to the construction of a fashion exhibition. Central to this investigation is an attempt to construct such an autobiography, not in conventional literary form but as a proposal for a hypothetical exhibition which, like many fashion blogs, untangles its narrative threads from the interaction with my own clothing. I describe this project as a ‘fashion autobiography’: a work in which an individual relates their life-history through clothing associated narratives.