Their creations are usually reserved for a few
wealthy clients, but European museums are currently allowing the public to
admire up close the works of star fashion designers Jean Paul Gaultier,
Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld.
The Gaultier show, which opened in Paris Wednesday as part of a global
tour, and the McQueen one in London running for the past two weeks have
proved
to be hits according to organisers.
The Lagerfeld exhibition, in the German city of Bonn, has just begun and
is
certain to draw crowds curious about the Chanel designer’s work.
“Those who don’t get a chance to attend the fashion shows rarely see
what a
haute couture creation looks like,” said Jean-Paul Cluzel, the president of
the Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris displaying the Gaultier
retrospective.
“Even the very best images, the very best televised reports are not
able to
show the richness of the material, of the embroidery. Only an exhibition
allows common mortals to see that.”
The success of the Gaultier exhibition shows no sign of flagging. It has
already been seen by 1.4 million visitors since starting out in Montreal in
2011 and making eight other stops around the world.
The French designer is famous for innovative and sometimes outrageous
pieces, perhaps most famously Madonna’s cone bra.
In London, the Victoria and Albert Museum is featuring “Savage Beauty”,
the
biggest-ever exhibition in homage to Alexander McQueen, the brilliant
British
designer who committed suicide in 2010 aged 40.
The display started out in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011,
organised by its Costume Institute, where it achieved “blockbuster” status
that year with 660,000 visitors.
Trend started by US journalist
The Met has been at the forefront of the thriving retrospective shows of
designers ever since launching the trend in 1983 with an Yves Sant Laurent
show that was the brainchild of influential American journalist Diana
Vreeland.
Vreeland, a Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue columnist who was also consultant
at
the Met’s Costume Institute before her death in 1989, was behind numerous
fashion exhibitions around the world.
“She felt that clothing as art had to be associated with individuals,
charismatic individuals in any period,” explained Harold Koda, the curator
in
charge of the Costume Institute.
“She didn’t believe that art percolated up from the masses, she believed
it
trickled down.”
But, Koda admitted to AFP, “she had a very loose connection to fact. I
think if people saw her shows now they would say ‘But there is no
content!'”.
That aspect has changed, as today’s public is more sophisticated and
knowledgeable, the curator said.
Now, the focus is on more substance — “the public requires it,” he
said.
‘Interpreting’, not selling the designer
Olivier Gabet, director of Paris’s Museum of Decorative Arts that
organises
two or three fashion exhibitions each year, also stressed how much more
demanding the public has become.
“It’s so hard to escape fashion these days. Advertising is everywhere.
And,
what’s more, it fascinates people,” he said.
What is important in the museum exhibitions, he said, is to include
scientific and artistic information. “There has to be a point of view and
analysis. Otherwise it’s just a marketing operation.”
The collaboration of a designer with a museum showing his or her work is
valuable, but contains its own danger of the designer “also becoming his own
curator”.
The need to keep some distance was the cause of some tension when the
Museum of Decorative Arts showed works last year by the Belgian designer
Dries
Van Noten. “There was a real discussion — a fairly sharp one sometimes,”
between the designer and the museum, Gabet said.
Koda said “it’s always more fun” to have the artist involved in the
exhibit.
But he too noted that “it’s very important for the museum to draw a line”
and tell the designer that their work is being interpreted and “it isn’t
your
representation of your own work. And that’s not negotiable.”
He added: “A great art work is sometimes beyond the intention of the
artist.” (AFP)
AFP, by Anne-Laure Mondesert
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