Boston's Museum of Fine Arts hosted a gala on Saturday, November 4th in honor of its new exhibition, "Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006," which will open to the public on November 12th.
The exhibition, which showcases a mix of prêt-a-porter and couture designs from the current season, is the first of its kind for the MFA, and for any of the world's museums for that matter. Normally a costume or fashion exhibition is presented in either a historical manner or as a retrospective.
"I wanted to assess what's going on in fashion today," said Pam Parmel, the curator of "Fashion Show." "What is a fashion show? It's not the salon show it originally was…designers are creating clothes for the runway that will never be [commercially] produced." In essence, what some of these designers are putting on the runway is just for show, their oeuvres, if you like. What Parmel is doing is displaying where art and fashion intersect, and what better place to do that than in a museum?
Didier Grumbach, president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, who liaised to bring a well-edited selection of Yohji Yamamoto, Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, Maison Martin Margiela, Rochas, Azzedine Alaia, Christian Dior, Valentino, Christian Lacroix, and Chanel to Boston for the exhibition, was also in town for the event.
"To show contemporary fashion [in a museum] is quite controversial," he explained as he walked through the galleries a few hours before the gala. "But we wanted to show that the shows are not just about the clothes, they are about the music, the lights, the setting. Fashion is partly art, party industry. In Paris, if you forget the arts, you have nothing…France has become more and more international and spectacular. We have a Turkish designer [Chalayan] showing with a Japanese designer [Yamamoto] showing with a Belgian designer [Margiela]."
Mr. Grumbach's job is more or less to preserve the art of haute couture, so exhibitions such as this are important to him as well as to the perpetuation and understanding of the French and international houses themselves. As it stands, there are only ten official members of the haute couture – Adaline André, Chanel, Dior, Gautier, Givenchy, Lacroix, Scherrer, Dominique Sirop, Franck Sorbier and Ungaro. The other designers who show on the haute couture calendar, like Giorgio Armani, Viktor and Rolf, Valentino and Martin Margiela, are considered "guests" and these change from year to year.
As Ms. Parmel and Mr. Grumbach have demonstrated with this fresh, fashion forward exhibition that there is a lot more to fashion than meets the eye.
"Fashion Show" will be on display from November 12th, 2006 until March 18th, 2007. |
