Fashion Exhibition as Film

This article reflects on the film project 1914 Now: Four Perspectives on Fashion Curation (2014) in which I invited internationally renowned fashion curators to present their curatorial thesis on film rather than working with dress in three dimensions within the familiar context of the gallery or museum. When I devised this experimental project, I set out to test notions of curatorial authorship as evidenced upon the final public presentation and to appraise film as a medium for curatorial interpretation. This article examines museological concepts associated with the curation of fashion and dress and assesses curatorial trajectories and interventions, scenography and the animation of objects as applied to film. What happens when a curator, used to dealing with the object, no longer has the object to install?

A paper which examined the use of film as medium for fashion exhibitions, taking the project 1914 Now as a case study. 1914 Now invited curators from fashion and dress to work with film, as opposed to working with objects in three dimensions within a museum or gallery setting. This paper reflected on the potential of film as a medium for communicating a curatorial thesis.

This paper formed part of a special issue of the academic journal Film, Fashion and Consumption which I edited and invited curators from design, architecture and fashion to examine the use of film within exhibitions. Papers included Charles and Ray Eameses’ Museums Without Walls by Catherine Ince, Chief Curator V&A East; The Modern Art of Filmmaking: Architecture on-screen at MoMA by design and architecture curator Pete Collard; Fashion Exhibition as Cinematic Experience by curator and archivist Ingrid Mida; Introducing Movement into the Motionless: Fashion in the Rijksmusem by curator Bianca M. Du Mortier and Yves Saint Laurent: Style is Eternal, Bowes Museum, exhibition review by curator NJ Stevenson.