Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing The Display Of Dress
by Julia Petrov /
2019 / English / PDF
6 MB Download
The last decade has seen the growing popularity and visibility of fashion as a cultural product, including its growing presence in museum exhibitions. This book explores the history of fashion curating and exhibitions, highlighting the continuity of past and present curatorial practices. Comparing and contrasting exhibitions from different museums and decades - from the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 to the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 - it makes connections between museum fashion and the wider fashion industry.By critically analyzing trends in fashion exhibition practice over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Julia Petrov defines and describes the varied representations of historical fashion within British and North American museum exhibitions. Rooted in extensive archival research on exhibitions by global leaders in the field - from the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Bath Fashion Museum to the Brooklyn Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum - the work reveals how fashion exhibitions have been shaped by the values and anxieties placed on fashion more generally.Supplemented by parallel critical approaches, including museological theory, historiography, body theory, materiality and visual representation, Fashion History in the Museum demonstrates that in an increasingly corporate and mass-mediated world, fashion exhibitions must be analysed in a comparative and global context. Richly illustrated with 60 images, the book will be essential reading for student and scholars of fashion history and museology, as well as curators, conservators, and exhibition designers.
