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The Power to Charm

November 2013

  • Suzanne Fraser

Modern Love at Bendigo Art Gallery

The recent past can be an unsettling subject of study. It exists in the memory of our own lived experience and consequently, unlike the distant past, it confronts us with the immediate progress of time. Not to mention the total changeability of fashion. Yet if we overcome the uneasiness of looking just behind the present, we can discover anew the excitement of those events, styles and ideas that were ground-breaking not that long ago.

In the latest costume exhibition to open at Bendigo Art Gallery, Modern Love, a selection of innovative fashion pieces from across the last three decades is presented as a reflection on the recent past – through a sartorial lens. Loaned from the collection of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles, the pieces that comprise this exhibition are united in their determined creativeness, but little else. This salutation to diversity is a general characteristic of the time period under consideration in this show. As curator at Bendigo Leanne Fitzgibbon is quick to note, “The exhibition is not about travelling back to the 1980s. It is about innovation.”

The exhibition begins at the dawn of punk, at which point Vivienne Westwood set about inverting the norms of fashion and inserting shock and scandal into the neat panorama of haute couture. Designed in collaboration with her then partner (in love and business) Malcolm McLaren, Westwood’s Bondage Ensemble (c 1976-80) incorporates restraint straps into the traditional design of a suit; ironically such details proclaimed a new entitlement to freedom in the way people chose to dress. Over the next few years, Westwood would continue to push against the restraints of convention and bourgeois propriety in her designs.

The exhibition proceeds past punk into the high-energy, high-impact design zone of the 1980s – with the diverse line-up of Jean-Paul Gaultier, Yohji Yamamoto, and Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. The latter of these figures serves to reveal the role of young designers at this time in rejuvenating to the point of revolutionising historic design houses. In Lagerfeld’s redesign of the classic Chanel Evening Jacket (1991), we see a garment that adheres to the basic formula imagined by Coco Chanel, whilst incorporating the sleek, active-wear aesthetic which marked the early 1990s.

This decade continues in the exhibition with the designs of John Galliano, Dolce and Gabbana, and Alexander McQueen. In these pieces we find the quintessential “recent past” dilemma: that being the uncanny awareness of familiarity and historic distance.

Moving towards the contemporary, a highlight of the current exhibition – and indeed of the extensive collection of the FIDM Museum – is the elaborate Alexander McQueen Evening Dress, commissioned by the museum in 2010. As Leanne Fitzgibbon notes, in the case of this piece, “the client is the mannequin”, since the gown was designed specifically to the proportions of the inanimate frame. Standing at 190cm tall, the McQueen display cuts a commanding figure, complete with innumerable layers of tulle and rich detailing across the bodice and skirt which, in total, took two people seven months to complete. This gown also highlights the role of fashion beyond its “wearable” foundations, existing as it does purely as an exhibition piece and thus a performance of creative innovation.

The present collaboration between Bendigo Art Gallery and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising emerged out of Bendigo’s phenomenally successful 2012 exhibition Grace Kelly: Style Icon, to which FIDM loaned a piece from their collection. Since 1999, Bendigo Art Gallery has introduced regular fashion exhibitions into their schedule, although it is only in the last few years that this series has built momentum. Having staged largely historic costume shows previously, the team at Bendigo felt it was “a natural progression to now look at contemporary fashion,” says Fitzgibbon. After exchanging ideas with FIDM’s Kevin Jones during his installation trip to Bendigo last year, the current exhibition began to take shape. The context of regional Victoria provides an elegant and interesting context in which to display this snapshot of the Los Angeles collection.

The diverse garments of Modern Love reject any further classification than the timeframe under consideration. The styles and ideas represented in this show are ephemeral and disparate. Yet the outcomes of such innovations – namely, the clothing – continue to exist as witness to the vivacity of the fashion industry in recent decades.

In the lyrics to David Bowie’s 1983 track ‘Modern Love’, the sincerity of contemporary society is seemingly called into question with the lines, ‘There’s no sign of life, It’s just the power to charm’. When considered in relation to the current exhibition at Bendigo, these words are transformed into a celebration of the animating role of fashion in our lives. The bright, shocking, lavish, and minimalist pieces on display enliven the mannequins on which they hang, proceeding to engage you in a conversation on the recent past. Extending the sentiments of David Bowie, this conversation has the power to charm the pants off you.

 

Modern Love: Fashion Visionaries from the FIDM Museum, Los Angeles, shows at Bendigo Art Gallery until February 2.

bendigoartgallery.com.au 

 

Images:

1. Miuccia Prada. Spring/ Summer 2008. FIDM Museum Purchase (2009.5.11A-F). Courtesy of FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Los Angeles, CA.. Photograph by Brian Sanderson

2. Dior. Autumn/winter 2003. Image courtesy of catwalking.com

3. Vivienne Westwood Ready-to-Wear Collection. Fall/ Winter 1987. Courtesy of the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Los Angeles. Gift of Arnaud Associates (SC2000.1095.1 AS030111). Photograph by Michel Arnaud

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