LOVE. FASHION.

Bendigo Art Gallery (BAG) was a noble institution, as keepers of culture go, until 2008. Then its exhibition, The Golden Age of Couture from London‘s Victoria & Albert  Museum ranked it cooler and more visionary than many larger museums. From that show forward, its commitment to the global passion for fashion has lured record-breaking thousands to a string of pearly exhibitions: Grace Kelly: Style Icon, The White Wedding Dress and now Modern Love, a rich history of our contemporary affair with fashion. Modern Love exhibits more than 60 works from Los Angeles‘ FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising) Museum. Curator, Kevin Jones, flew in to install and explain. He spoke to Voxfrock editor, Janice Breen Burns.

Installation photographs: Monty Coles. (For Mr. Coles’ complete photo essay of the Modern Love installation, go to www.theloupe.org)
Other photographs: Bendigo Art Gallery and FIDM Museum, Los Angeles, archives.
Words: Janice Breen Burns

Toni Maticevski’s contribution to the Bendigo Art Gallery‘s Modern Love exhibition, is a seamless white sheath of fleshy neoprene pulled loosely into waist and torso from the knees with an excess of the stuff caught awkwardly onto a shoulder on one side, and rolled into a soft, bulging bodice and kimono-like sleeve on the other. It’s an odd dress, a lovely dress, a ghostly, flowing, work of elegance that, to be honest, might take some puzzled reflection and set of instructions for some conservative punters to appreciate.

“It’s a challenging piece,” agrees Kevin Jones, curator of Los Angeles’ FIDM museum. “And not just because of what it’s made from.” (Neoprene is normally used for wetsuits.) “This dress is dynamic; it’s sculpture, it changes the natural body, it’s got things poking out of it, it’s creating shapes around the body that have nothing to do with standard ideas of beauty.”
And yet it is, quite gobsmackingly, beautiful.

That’s the Modern Love clincher. Mr. Maticevski’s dress fits like jigsaw into the exhibition because, 40 years after Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren‘s punk movement shoved the first crackers up fashion’s modern bottom, it is evidence of the endgame. It illustrates the evolution of fashion and our blossoming as consumers. Ideas that might once have seemed preposterous, are now accepted. “Toni’s dress shows how fashion has trained our eyes to accept different ideas,” Mr. Jones says. “Modern Love is about some of those big ideas.”

Modern Love was curated from the FIDM Museum’s archive to mark a cataclysmic period in fashion history that still impacts the way we dress today. “It is the street cracking open and the underworld coming to the surface,” says Mr. Jones. “It starts in the 80s; subculture was becoming streetwear.”

 

The exhibition opens with an iconoclastic 1974 punk kicker ensemble by Miss Westwood and Mr. McClaren. But at its crucial core are couture, haute couture and pre-a-porter originals from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, by Issey Miyake, Karl Lagerfeld, Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Thierry Mugler, John Galliano for Dior, Rei Kawakubo and dozens of luminary others.

Their designs track the infiltration of punk, the evolution of a radical Japanese aesthetic, and the gradual re-absorption of fashion history itself, joyfully adapted as is, or mashed into new contemporary forms. It’s been a theatrical, at times tinselly, often arrogant age of creativity at its boldest and most shameless.

 

“In the 90s, vintage clothes became acceptable and designers started to look at past fashion much more bluntly,” Mr. Jones says. “They’d say, ‘well, this was an amazing design in its day, why not bring it on again?'”. Alexander McQueen was one of many whimsical masters of the mash: “He loved history, mashed everything together: colonialism, war, the 1950s crinoline, the queen’s coronation.” The so-called Peacock dress is just one of the late Mr. McQueen’s triumphs of beauty over chaos. It will be exhibited in Modern Love for the first time outside FIDM.

For us – for fashion’s consumers – clothes born of this history-mashing radicalism read like a delicious, psycho-expressive menu. Our standard definitions of “beautiful”, “ugly” and “fashion” dramatically altered in less than a generation. Fashion’s raison d’etre – fashion itself – could now change dramatically, person to person, wardrobe to wardrobe.

After decades of shopping from a seasonal cycle of formulaic ideas that visually united us all in fashion, we could feast on a smorgasbord of radical components, compose ensembles to express our individuality. Our self love. Our Modern Love.

Modern Love is described as a “gem” of an exhibition for Bendigo Art Gallery and Mr. Jones’s installation plan partly explains why. “We’ve got a kind of fractured mirror thing going on,” he says cryptically, “A way of (exhibiting) these garments in cases that you can walk all the way around, see them in detail close up, from all sides.” Some cases are also subject to a happy accident of reflection, meaning fragments of videos of original fashion shows will play out in their glass.

Mr. Jones also envisions some visitors will play a passionate part in Modern Love by simply dressing carefully. “We should all frock up for this!” he laughs, then adds slightly more seriously, “When you come to an art museum, you are presenting yourself as much as the artwork is being presented. Here, you’ll walk all the way around the cases, looking at the garments but also seeing people on the other side as they’re also looking, maybe with the reflection of a video (fashion show) going on in the glass. It’s going to be fascinating, I think, like being in a crystal case.”

Modern Love will be officially opened on Saturday, October 26 at a cocktail party with special guest, Toni Maticevski, www.modernlovebendigo.com

(Main photo, top: Vivienne Westwood Ready-to-Wear Collection Fall/ Winter 1993  Courtesy of the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Los Angeles Gift of Arnaud Associates. Photograph by Michel Arnaud