Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures. EFHA Conference 2018

The paper looks at shifts within Clark’s own practice as a response to the European archives and institutions (both private and public) with which she has collaborated over 20 years working as a curator and exhibition-maker.

In recent years the Polish fashion industry has experienced a renaissance. In Poland, the growing interest in Polish fashion manifested itself via numerous publications on the subject, formation of fashion schools, competitions, and shows. Additionally, Polish fashion designers became household names with some of them running successful international businesses. This process has often been turbulent, and even now the burning question ‘What is Polish fashion and how it seats within the...

In 2016 MUDE organised the exhibition “Down with the Borders! Live the Design and Arts!” presenting side by side the work made by a hundred national and foreign fashion designers and artists. With this exhibition as an example, the paper develops the museum's exhibition strategy to present fashion in interrelations with other disciplines and creative expressions as a form to reinforce its kaleidoscopic nature and contextualise it in time and space, analysing its representativeness and role...

In the 1980s, some European governments promoted designer fashion among other measures as the best way to survive the crisis in the clothing and textile industry. Advanced economies sought to maintain their leadership in creativity once the struggle for clothing production was lost in favour of outward processing. This paper explores how countries such as Belgium and Spain managed to remodel their clothing sector emulating the examples of France and Italy.

Fashion occupies a central place in the economies and in the imaginaries of the contemporary capitalism and has become, since the valorization of ‘creative labour’ in the neoliberal economy, a desirable professional horizon. In fact, fashion creative labour provides a desirable professional status despite the precarious conditions of labour. Through an ethnographic study among creative workers in Paris and in Brussels (models, fashion designers, stylist, journalists, interns...) this paper...

“ITALIANA. Italy through the lens of fashion 1971-2001” is an exhibition and a book curated in 2018 by Maria Luisa Frisa, Gabriele Monti and Stefano Tonchi, which reconstruct the history and the narratives of Italian fashion in the seminal thirty years between 1971 and 2001. A project like ITALIANA inevitably moves between the material and immaterial nature of fashion. It seeks to construct as three-dimensional a view as possible, associating the objects produced by Italian fashion -...

As the first temporary thematic exhibition since the opening of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris in October 2017, “Yves Saint Laurent: Dreams of the Orient” will bring together approximately fifty high fashion designs inspired by India, China and Japan. For the first time, these pieces from the collection of the Museum will be displayed in dialogue with Asian artworks borrowed from the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet and private collectors bringing new perspectives on the...

This paper retraces my trajectory as a fashion curator. As practice made clear, curating also means to deal with a multitude of identities and, to some extent, to umpire them. This presentation focuses on how Arzallus’ experiences as curator at the Cristobal Balenciaga museum in the Basque Country, as a freelance curator working with international institutions, and now at Palais Galliera in Paris, have been marked by a constant negotiation between individual, personal, local, regional,...

Looking at representations of fashion in cultural magazines and satirical images from Germany, Great Britain and Sweden during World War I, this paper aims to discuss the crucial role of visual fashion discourse in creating and consolidating difference and power relations in political and national as well as class- and gender-based identities. The aim is to highlight fashion as expressive dramatizing and clearly differentiating costume for different (satirical) characters on different...

Valerie Steele discusses the reasons why Paris has been the fashion capital of the world for more than three centuries. Drawing on the new edition of her book Paris Fashion: A Cultural History and on research for her forthcoming exhibition Paris, Capital of Fashion, she emphasizes the importance of fashion in the French historical narrative. Her ‘case study’ of Paris looks beyond the typical litany of great designers to explore the influence of artists and writers, milliners and actresses....

The conference involved world-leading academic institutions, archives and museums, encouraging discourse across disciplines, institutional and national boundaries. Through a carefully selected line-up of speakers, the aim was to reconsider assumptions about the place of dress and fashion in the definition of European cultures and offer new and critical perspectives on the role of dress and fashion in relation to many issues, as: individual and collective identities, European policy,...