Creative Process Journal: The Cabinet of Curiosities for Fashion

The Cabinet of Curiosities at the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Exhibition at the Met
(Photo by Ingrid Mida 2011)

Most museums today offer an aesthetic of pristine perfection. This connoisseurship bias rejects anything showing signs of use (the sweat or stains of life on a dress for example) or items that are broken or damaged. Order, perfection and education seem to be the guiding principles of museum presentations today, leaving little room for imagination and wonder.

This is quite unlike the idea of the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities that were popular in the 15th to 19th centuries (see my previous post). These rooms or cabinets were packed full of objects meant to inspire delight and wonder at the juxtaposition of rare and unusual objects. The aesthetic of dense accumulation of objects is rarely seen anymore although I can think of one museum where it still exists (The Redpath Museum on the campus of McGill University in Montreal).

The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Blythe House 2010
Photo by Julian Abrams

Artists and designers often accumulate a range of objects in their studio for use in the background of their still-life works or as a source of inspiration. Some have used such objects in their artworks and the idea of the cabinet of curiosities has been used as a concept of presentation within a number of exhibitions of fashion and art. The ones that come to mind include: The Viktor and Rolf Retrospective at the Barbican Gallery in London (2008), The Enchanted Palace at Kensington Palace in London (2010), The Concise Dictionary of Dress at Blythe House in London (2010), and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2011). In each case,  objects of fashion, such as dolls or accessories, were presented in a type of cabinet or room and inspired a sense of surreal delight. Using the concept of the cabinet of curiosities, I intend to create a museum in a box so to speak for this creative project.

Creative Process Journal: The Uncanny

Viktor and Rolf L'Hiver de L'Amour 1994

This post marks the beginning of a new creative project - that I've tentatively titled The Uncanny. The spark of inspiration for this project comes from a passage I read in the book Adorned in Dreams where fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson considers the unsettling feelings created by the haunting spectre of costumed mannequins within a museum setting:

The living observer moves with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead…We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the evanescent of life. (Wilson 1).

The element of the uncanny reminded me of the Viktor and Rolf retrospective exhibition at the at the Barbican Gallery in London in 2008 in which porcelain dolls of various sizes were used to present the designer duo’s fifteen years of work. The installation played with scale and was somewhat like a trip to Alice in Wonderland, which was exactly the intent of the exhibition designers (Evans 6).

Viktor and Rolf had used dolls in their collections before. Dolls were part of an early collection called “Launch” presented at the Torch Gallery in Amsterdam in October 1996 in which they presented their hopes and dreams for the future in the form of a miniature design studio, runway show, photographic shoot and boutique. Dolls reappeared in their subsequent collections as well and became the locus of their retrospective at the Barbican.

Over the weeks to come, I will explore the idea of the uncanny, dipping into Freud's essay of that name and as well as researching related topics like mannequins, dolls and the museum. The final outcome will be a visual response to this material. I hope you'll join me on my creative journey!

References:

Evans, Caroline and Frankel, Susannah. The House of Viktor and Rolf. London: Merrell, 2008.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985, reprinted 2011.

Postcards of my travels

I've been burning the candle at both ends... So much so that my brain hurts and I seem to be incapable of stringing a coherent thought together. The timing was unfortunate as today I gave a talk on art and fashion at Ryerson University and felt like I stumbled my way through it. I'm craving sunshine and sleep this weekend, neither of which are on the agenda so I thought I'd travel back in time with my postcard collection. Here are some of my favourites  with links to the posts I wrote at the time.

From the Viktor and Rolf Retrospective at the Barbicon, London 2008

Viktor & Rolf Hana doll 2008
From Bedtime Story, Autumn/winter 2008-09
Photo by Peter Stigler

From the Chanel Mobile Art Container in New York Central Park, 2008

Sophie Calle for Chanel-Mobile Art 2008

From the YSL Retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal

YSL Wedding Dress, spring-summer 1969
Photo by Diane Michals

From the exhibtion Watteau to Degas, French Drawings at the Frick Museum, New York, 2009

Femme Debout, rue de doi, vers 1742
by Francois Boucher

Happy weekend!

Viktor and Rolf

I first fell in love with the work of Viktor and Rolf when I attended a retrospective in 2008 at the Barbicon Gallery in London. It was there that I realized the boundaries between fashion and art sometimes overlap. For Viktor and Rolf, creativity and innovation are expressed in a form of wearable sculpture. I particularly enjoyed their Flowerbomb 2005 collection which included extravagant bows like a gift wrapper gone wild!

Viktor and Rolf's show on March 9, 2010 featured Kristen McMenamny dressed in layers comprised of  the entire collection which were then removed one by one and given to other models. This format was  similar to the routine for their Babushka collection from ten years prior. In a season that has seen a lot of restraint, this performance did not go over well with the critics who seemed to suggest that the show would be remembered "more for the spectacle than the clothes".  

In spite of the poor reviews, I have to applaud Viktor and Rolf for not playing it safe. Apparently many of the clothes have dual uses (for example, a leather coat which reversed to a beaded one), which in a recession, sounds like investment dressing to me!