Fashion & Folly: Developing a Site-Responsive Fashion Exhibition for Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House

This practice-based, cross-disciplinary thesis contributes to the fields of fashion curatorship and fashion studies through the development of a proposal for a siteresponsive exhibition entitled Fashion & Folly. Fashion & Folly revives the eighteenthcentury bibliographic practice of extra-illustration as a metaphor, method and format for site-responsive exhibition-making. The proposal for Fashion & Folly is delivered in the format of an extra-illustrated book created in response to Walpole’s own extra-illustrated version of the guide to Strawberry Hill that he first published in 1774. The Fashion & Folly extra-illustrated proposal is a document of curatorial practice, a working proposal and an experiment in the revival and re-appropriation of a scholarly pastime of Walpole’s era that simultaneously highlights the palimpsestic nature Strawberry Hill, extra-illustration and fashion exhibition-making. Topically, Fashion & Folly examines fashion history through the presentation of four centuries of fashion graphic satire in tandem with historic and contemporary dress interwoven with the history and biography of Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole. The project posits site-responsive exhibitionmaking as a viable and innovative means for presenting fashion exhibitions in venues other than museums with dress or textile collections. This exhibition model holds the potential to enrich dialogues among historic sites and contemporary fashion curatorial practice. In this project the practice of exhibition-proposal writing becomes the object of interrogation and is temporarily isolated from the practical considerations of mounting a large-scale exhibition, in order to focus on the creative development of the concept. To an independent curator, the period of conceptualising and proposing exhibitions is crucial to successfully procuring and realising exhibitions with host venues or organizations. Research supporting the exhibition’s construction, and the recording of its development, aims to contribute knowledge useful as documents of practice to other researchers and practitioners, as well as towards new understandings of fashion exhibitions as sites for reflection and discourse amongst creative and academic professionals, and their publics. In addition to its focus on eighteenth-century graphic satire, the project engages with Walpole studies, because the particulars of devising Fashion & Folly as a site-responsive exhibition at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill house required deep investigation of the site and its founder.

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