Introduction: Understanding Fashion and Dress Museology

Establishing Fashionthropy: A History and Analysis of Fashion and Philanthropy’s Convergence

“…The history of dress and fashion within museums can be classified into three time periods (Fukai, 2010, Melchior, 2014); Fukai's categorization (Pre-1970 and The 21st Century) differs from Melchior's stages (1930s-1960s, 1960s-1970s and 1980s-present). These periodizations provide evidence of how fashion philanthropy developed in Western museums.…”

“…The second period encompasses 1960/1970-1999 and is distinguished by museums' transition from solely dress museology, focusing on the historical object, to also include what Melchior calls 'fashion museology,' which places more emphasis on the narrative and the visual culture aspect by cultivating an immersive experience through fashion display in museums (Melchior, 2014). The relatively new development of fashion museums, and fashion in museums, popularized only in the late 1990s (Fukai, 2010), coincided with the decline of financial support for museums by government bodies and the rise of corporate culture in the form of marketing strategies, and new sponsorship streams, discussed briefly in Fiona Anderson's article "Museums as Fashion…”

“…In the third period fashion museums and exhibitions proliferate in popularity with fashion retrospectives of 20 th -century designs and displays of contemporary fashions, often by well-known designers (Melchior, 2014). The pervasive power of popular culture in the form of fashion in museums has inadvertently dimmed the spotlight on costumes and textiles (Cumming, 2004 (Steele, 2008).…”

This is Not a Costume

“…Although royal raiment, historic and regional dress, and garments demonstrating craft techniques or technological progress have been publicly displayed in Europe since at least the 18th century, Petrov dates the first "fashion exhibition" curated from a permanent public collection as 1911 and argues that major museums in Europe and North America did not begin explicitly and systematically collecting and classifying clothing as high "art" until the second half of the 20th century (2019,(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25). See also the discussion in Riegels Melchoir (2014). 4.…”

From the physical to the digital and back: Fashion exhibitions in the digital age

“…Echoing some of the debates that have informed the curatorship of art through the decades, the curatorial discourse on fashion has undergone interesting changes, where the idea of the museum as a neutral and objective institution has progressively left space to an increased emphasis on the curatorial stance in articulating narrative spaces, and soliciting in the viewers a critical response. Through the past twenty years, the discipline of curating fashion has dramatically advanced, experiencing a widely recognized cultural turn (Breward 2003;O'Neill 2008;Steele 2008;Granata 2012;Melchior and Svensson 2014).4 Those that were controversial or unorthodox approaches are now seen as pioneering and significant in having encouraged debates and opened the discipline to rethinking existing paradigms. Fiona Anderson (2000) states that a key premise in the current museological debate is the identification of museums and galleries as media, which mirror and contribute to the fast-moving circulation of information typical of the contemporary fashion system.…”