Between the Store and the Gallery: Museums, art and shopping and Intersections: Retail Hybrid Spaces

Between the Store and the Gallery: Museums, Art & Shopping’, Interrogating Fashion Event ICA/LCF 28-29 November 2005. ‘Intersections: Retail Hybrid Spaces’, Fashion in Context: presentation and display, audience and engagement workshop LCF 21-22 April 2005.

Part of the EPSRC & AHRB funded project ‘Interrogating Fashion: New Paradigms for Fashion Design in the 21st Century’. The research field is fashion, branding and shopping.

The Interrogating Fashion project involved a wide range of academics, artists, designers, scientists and technologists operating as a network cluster to identify questions and develop research projects that would create new paradigms for the use of fashion as a catalyst for social change. Ryan delivered more than one research paper during the process of concept development and a summary of my workshop paper and complete symposium paper were published in the proceedings. ‘Intersections: Retail Hybrid Spaces’ analysed key developments in retail design and in particular focused on the relationship between the store and the museum. Ryan argued that the huge resources involved in the design and marketing of high concept flagships and multiple store re-fits, raised issues of sustainability and waste and highlighted examples where retailers had attempted to address these concerns. ‘Between the Store and the Gallery: Museums, Art & Shopping’ considered claims about the blurring of boundaries between stores and museums and discussed the rise of iconic store design, the increasing mobility of a cultural workforce and the obfuscation of market forces. I argued that greater transparency in relation to commercial operations could benefit both store and museum and concluded by suggesting specific examples of interventions where this could occur. Artist Caroline Broadhead expressed interest in working with me on a performance art piece involving a mainstream retailer and a number of potential collaborative exhibitions were disc