Breaking the fashion boundaries

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In a way it was only natural that Rotterdam’s Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum became the chosen destination for “The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions”, a new exhibition exploring the work of designers who have broken in their work the boundaries between art and fashion.

In the last few years, Dutch academies turned into hotbeds for talented designers, but local museums also helped spreading the interest in fashion, organising cross-disciplinary exhibitions, acquiring new pieces and starting partnerships with art collectors such as Han Nefkens who proved instrumental with his H + F Fashion on the Edge Foundation in supporting work by innovative and avant-garde designers such as Viktor & Rolf and Hussein Chalayan.

“The Art of Fashion” exhibition is particularly important since it features five brand new pieces specifically commissioned to five designers, Anna-Nicole Ziesche, Hussein Chalayan, Naomi Filmer, Viktor & Rolf and Walter Van Beirendonck.

The works are exhibited alongside pieces by international designers, from Elsa Schiaparelli and Jana Sterbak to Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons, Louise Bourgeois and the newest generation of more avant-garde artists including Charlie Le Mindu with his surrealistically oversized wigs and Nick Cave with two examples of his richly embroidered audio-tactile “soundsuits”.

All the pieces are connected one to the other through fine metal structures devised by Judith Clark, guest curator of this exhibition together with José Teunissen.

“I wanted to get away from traditional fashion exhibitions in which the items are displayed on plinths and divided by themes,” Clark explains, “so I opted for low but heavy bases on which mannequins are exhibited, surrounded by these sort of metal constellations that connect different pieces.”

Clark’s exhibition design is very effective: visitors are first introduced to Anna-Nicole Ziesche’s film Childhood Storage, a video of her reconstructed childhood bedroom used to evoke past experiences and memories, then they are allowed to draw comparisons between Jana Sterbak’s Remote Control I (1989) and Hussein Chalayan’s more recent remote controlled or mechanical dresses and the latter’s Micro-Geography: a Cross Section, an entirely new piece consisting of a rotating mannequin immersed in a sort of aquarium and surrounded by air, earth and water with cameras installed at various points around the dress that help understanding how there are different ways of looking at clothes and fashion.

While Christophe Coppens’ Deer Cape (2005) explores the tailored spaces around the body, jewellery designer Naomi Filmer’s four Breathing Volume sculptures, explore “uncelebrated” spaces such as the mouth, chin and neck areas.

Filmer’s work is related to Helen Chadwick’s seminal Body Cushions (1973-74) while Walter Van Beirendonck’s 2357 - The Sequel, a brightly coloured 6 metre-high temple carrying all his symbols - bears, suns, moons and ejaculating penises - in which the designer imagined people will find his sarcophagus (the latter was originally created for the Paris-based Galerie Polaris a few months ago), brings into the exhibition an imaginary world suspended between comic book and fable.

Comme des Garçons’s anti-perfumes Series 6 Synthetic (2004) and Schiaparelli’s Le Roy Soleil (1946) and Snuff (1945) focus on the power of the senses and on smell in particular, a theme that culminates in Viktor & Rolf’s Alternative No. 1, a perfume bottle formed by several different bottles, all bearing the V&R logo, accompanied by a very conceptual and slightly disturbing advertising campaign, an image taken by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin portraying a girl with a half-opened rose in her mouth that looks like a vagina.

“We curated this exhibition in the dark since, when we started researching it, the big five commission pieces didn’t exist yet,” Clark explains, “but I think that this aspect made the conversation much more exciting and, once the pieces were unveiled everything came into focus. The results of the exhibition are amazing because they show what happens when people who are already part of a conceptual conversation in fashion are given a budget to do something even more conceptual.”

Walking around the museum galleries and watching pieces by Dai Rees, Sandra Backlund, Robert Gober and Freddie Robins, visitors will discover that fashion is definitely a form of performance art and that it has also transformed throughout the years, assuming subtler messages and turning into a powerful media that can help expressing specific cultural messages and even tackle identity issues.

“There are designers who make installation pieces and designers who work as artists,“ adds José Teunissen, “but I feel that, nowadays, there are even more fashion designers intrigued by the boundaries between fashion and art and I would urge visitors to come and see this exhibition since it will allow them to see new and exclusive work, while sharpening their vision and making them ponder about the relationship between the body and the environment surrounding us.”