30 January 2019
Since 2015, the ethnographic museum NMVW in the Netherlands has a curator for popular culture and fashion. For the museum, reinterpretation of its clothing collections from across the world through fashion theory and practice, offers new insights into its originally colonially assembled collections. Ethnographic clothing has always been categorized within these profoundly European institutions as dress or clothing outside of the fashion realm that was defined in the west. Dress items were described as such and presented as ethnographic object, as curio for the onlooker to admire, not to be seen as part of a process of social and personal identity within the culture it originated. The maker or designer is hardly ever known, and the objects were never studied from a fashion perspective.
On the other hand, dress collections and exhibitions in other kinds of institutions such as decorative or fine arts museums, are always approached from a more aesthetic angle. The maker is deemed most important, where social roles and function of the object are secondary.
Topics for discussion include: how fashion in the ethnographic museum does or should or could go beyond ethnographic approaches, and to what extent fashion exhibition in decorative arts or fine arts museums may, should or do include an ethnographic dimension or approach. Beyond this is the question of what is the role of fashion exhibitions, and how do they deal with sociological, historical or indeed ethnographic dimensions in the museum. And of course ultimately the issue is what fashion and ethnography have to do with one another….