With the increasing popularity of blockbuster fashion exhibits in museums attracting new audiences, museum professionals and scholars are looking more critically at how dress and fashion are displayed and contextualized in contemporary museum practice. Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice discusses the reasons behind this surge in popularity, the potential museological implications, and the lessons learned past and present vis-à-vis fashion in museums as discussed in the 2011 conference, “Public Wardrobe: Rethinking Dress and Fashion in Museums,” held at Nordiska Museet in collaboration with Designmuseum Danmark. Editors Marie Reigles Melchior, assistant curator at Designmuseum Danmark, and Birgitta Svensson, professor of European ethnology at Stockholm University and Nordiska Museet, have compiled this volume from most of the papers presented during that conference.

Fashion and Museums is an excellent addition to Joanne B. Eicher’s Dress, Body, Culture series that analyzes the connections between dress and culture. Melchior introduces the book by defining the concepts of dress museology, which focuses on a single object, and fashion museology, which focuses on creating a visual experience and an engaging narrative, as well as the “controversy” sparked by the “catwalk economy” of this new fashion museology (13). Melchior argues that institutions must find the right balance between scholarship and spectacle to both enrich the field and attract a broader audience.

The first section of the book explores the history of the relationship between museums and the fashion industry. Harold Koda and Jessica Glasscok of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, relate the history of the Costume Institute’s collections and exhibition practices, from its beginnings as a community theater wardrobe in Manhattan to the early twenty-first century. The second chapter discusses how fashion as an art form, particularly avant-garde fashion, can be best explained through museums. José Teunissen argues that museums are ideal display venues because they go beyond the wearer of the garment to include the context of creation, which not only reveals the design narrative but also helps bolster the designer’s brand. Chapter 3 dives deeper into the “blurring of the boundaries between museum and industry” with MoMu in Antwerp as a case study (51). Marco Pecorari discusses MoMu’s curatorial strategy of inviting contemporary fashion designers to curate or co-curate exhibitions of their work. Pecorari argues that museums should be careful not to focus solely on select fashion names and objects and should also be sure to address consumption and dissemination to explain contemporary fashion. The next chapter focuses on an element of the fashion industry that has received little attention in museums. Anna Dahlgren considers the collection and exhibition practices of fashion photography, as well as the definition of the genre itself. Dahlgren finds that there has been an interest in fashion photography in Swedish museums, but such images in the collections have been “neglected” (perhaps due to financial and staffing limitations) in that they do not appear as a coherent genre and have not been consistently preserved over time (71).

The book’s second section brings attention to some of the challenges that museums face with the topic of fashion in terms of gender, class, and the body. Julia Petrov discusses the issue of gender inequality in museum fashion collections and exhibitions and challenges the museum’s success in fulfilling its purpose as “public wardrobes” (15) when primarily “women are doing women’s work with women’s objects” (87). Marianne Larsson continues to examine issues of class and gender in the next chapter. Larsson uses female skiing ensembles in early twentieth-century Sweden to demonstrate how functional recreational wear played a part in women’s liberation and ability over time to wear trousers outside of outdoor recreational sports. Annie-Sophie Hjemdahl shifts the focus to museum display methods as they relate to the relationship between dress, the body, and time in chapter 7. Hjemdahl discusses how the Swedish System mannequin offered the mechanical flexibility to exhibit tailored dress as it would have appeared on the body.

The third section features case studies of new and different collection, display, and community engagement strategies that museums can replicate to more fully explore fashion-related items and themes. Curator Rosemary Harden relates the history of the Fashion Museum in Bath’s collection and exhibition strategies to attract a diverse audience in a major tourist destination. Designmuseum Danmark’s curator, Kirsten Toftegaard, focuses on museum collection strategies. She argues that museums must balance their collecting of textile, dress, and fashion items. Fashion garments pass through multiple stages (i.e., design, textile production, construction, marketing, distribution, consumption, recycling); therefore, all items should be considered equally important, not just the final product. In chapter 10, Ingeborg Philipsen, director of Amagermuseet in Denmark, explains her institution’s strategy to “modernize a minor provincial museum” (153). As a local heritage museum with a core collection of folk dress, Amagermuseet struggles to engage younger visitors without alienating local folk dress enthusiasts. Responses to the exhibit “Dressed! From Country Bumpkin to Saggy Pants” taught Philipsen and her staff to involve members of the target audience (teenagers) in future exhibition development for more desired results. Curators at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Tone Rasch and Ingebjørg Eidhammer, describe an educational program that uses fashion to understand the industrialization process as well as the individual. Chapter 10 introduces a “hypothetical autobiographical fashion exhibit type” that celebrates the individual wearer rather than the high-end fashion designer (16). Independent curator and exhibition maker Jeffrey Horsley points out that although fashion autobiographies are present in literature, television, and digital media, they do not occur in physical museum spaces.

In her conclusion, editor Birgitta Svensson reflects on the future discussions and museum practices that Fashion and Museums can inspire. Each contributor demonstrates the inclusive potential of fashion in museums and offers cautionary considerations for incorporating fashion into collection, exhibition, and community engagement strategies. This book examines these issues through the lens of select European museums and museum professionals, but provides insight and models that are applicable in institutions around the world.

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[Review length: 988 words • Review posted on May 18, 2016]