Fashion exhibition as a critique of contemporary museum exhibitions: The case of ‘Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism’

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CSFB 5 (2) pp. 313–336 Intellect Limited 2014

Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty Volume 5 Number 2 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/csfb.5.2.313_1

Tereza Kuldova University of Oslo

Fashion exhibition as a critique of contemporary museum exhibitions: The case of ‘Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism’ Keywords

Abstract

fashion exhibition museums India design sponsorships infantilization curating

The article pursues a critical inquiry, grounded in theory and practice, into the dominant trends in current organization of fashion exhibitions in museums. It presents the case of ‘Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism’, an exhibition that I curated and designed at the Historical Museum in Oslo, and that was on display from 13 September 2013–13 September 2014. This exhibition was grounded in my ethnographic research, and conceptualized as a critique of current museum practices. The article outlines some themes of this exhibition that address uncritical approaches, which use the ‘aesthetic’ to mask hierarchies of power. These include the problems of exhibiting fashion as art, corporate and private sponsorships, fashion designers as co-curators,

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spectacular exhibition design (form) over content, and persistent policies of infantilization and patronage of the audiences. On 13 September 2013, a fashion exhibition opened at the Historical Museum in Oslo, one of the research museums of the University of Oslo that hosts both ethnographic and archaeological collections. It was the evening of the Cultural Night (Kulturnatten), a night when all museums, galleries and other cultural institutions are open until late at night and are free of charge. In our press release of the exhibition: Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism, we combined the words spectacular and fashion and promised an inauguration with a fashion show and bubbles. More than seven hundred people flooded the museum. If we would like to follow the wave of current discourse, we could congratulate ourselves not only for the visitor numbers, but also for the ‘democratization of fashion’ to which museum fashion shows and displays are said to contribute (Lipovetsky 1994). After all, the audience could experience the work of Samant Chauhan, one of India’s leading designers, and all that for free. But that was not our aim. Neither was it our aim to represent Samant as a unique creative genius and turn his work into high art. Rather, our aim was to engage in a wider critique of the fashion system, including the conditions of production. More specifically, our aim was to critique the complicit role contemporary museums play in creating design heroes and thus serving as a mere instrument of added value creation for companies, in the form of prestige and recognition. Fashion is primarily big business, not art, something that museums all too wilfully forget when eager to increase their visitor numbers. As Marie R. Melchior has also observed, ‘the challenge is that while fashion exhibitions make museums attractive, they do not necessarily make museums reflective or particularly critical, nor do they transform museums into a forum for debate’ (Melchior 2014: 13). Indeed, our exhibition had already identified and was determined to address this challenge. Our mission was to reveal elements of the dynamics that structure the field of fashion, in India, and the logic that fuels rising inequality. We wanted to address the direct expulsion (Sassen 2014) of millions of workers in the industry beyond the borders of ‘good society’ that turns them into second-rate citizens if not internal enemies. We also wanted to address the powerful discourses and apparatuses that turn those like Samant into design heroes, while in the process impoverishing others and sustaining hierarchies. What follows is neither an outsider’s review of a fashion exhibition, nor a value-neutral academic article. Rather, it is a reflection on a fashion exhibition that I curated and designed and that was firmly grounded in my ethnography and doctoral research. This research followed the movement of a delicate traditional embroidery from impoverished villages surrounding Lucknow and workshops in the old town of this city to high-end designer studios in New Delhi and the wealthy Indian elite clientele (Kuldova 2013a). My reflections are grounded in the experience of making a fashion exhibition, with all the institutional obstacles and biases common to most western museums. My reflections are also

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Fashion exhibition as a critique of contemporary museum exhibitions 1.

Although I do not distinguish between art museums and fashion museums in my discussion, fashion museums have proliferated since the 1970s. They are found all over the world, ­including America, Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy and Spain) and Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea) (Crane 2012).

grounded in research visits to other museums and fashion exhibitions, as well as engagement with museum anthropology and museology. The following is to be read as a critical inquiry into current fashion exhibitions based on these practical and theoretical encounters, and a suggestion of an alternative to the hegemonic trend. In particular, my exhibition and my approach take issue with what I perceive as the dominant problems of this field, such as the fraught relationship between fashion and art (Tseëlon 2012); art as public good vs corporate and private sponsorships; form vs content in exhibition design; the issue of fashion designers as co-curators; and persistent policies of infantilization and patronage of audiences.1

Fashion as art? ‘India: Fashion Now’ versus ‘Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism’ In 2012, having finished my doctoral fieldwork in New Delhi, where I worked with some of India’s leading designers as well as with artisans, I visited the India: Fashion Now exhibition at Arken, in Copenhagen (curated by Mathias Ussing Seeberg, 18 August 2012–13 January 2013). Both the exhibition design and the brief talk with the curator made it patently clear that the sole purpose of the exhibition was to select and display seven influential Indian designers (Manish Arora, Morphe by Amit Aggarwal, Little Shilpa, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Prashant Verma, Varun Sardana and 11.11 by Cell DSGN) and showcase their works as works of art, representative of the ‘new’ India that is innovative, buzzing and overflowing with talent and creativity. The press release for the exhibition is a testimony to the uncritical reproduction of the idea of India as the next superpower, an idea that is extremely popular with the Indian political and economic elite and its ideologues: More than 1.3 billion people live in the world’s biggest democracy, and over 300 million Indians have a living standard that corresponds with Denmark’s. India is slated to become the world’s next superpower by virtue of its explosive economic growth and the fact that its population has many young and few old people. (Arken 2012) This text echoed the press releases of the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), a public–private partnership working on behalf of the Indian government, selling India to the world, and spreading positive economic perceptions of India globally. I have described the utopian dimensions of this discourse and its relation to the fashion industry elsewhere (Kuldova 2014). In line with this discourse that largely dismisses realities on the ground, the Indian fashion designers were turned into artists and creative visionaries and the material turned immaterial. And so, in a manner characteristic of current fashion exhibitions that have become defined by the fashion–art synergy, i.e. ‘a marriage of convenience between fashion’s insecurity and the art world’s yearning for fashionability’ (Tseëlon

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2012: 111), we were faced with nondescript mannequins dressed in designer creations and placed within a large room with white walls. This was accompanied by bombastic statements, supplied even by the designers, statements that uncritically reproduced clichés that cover up more than they reveal. The only information about these creations was their title and a very short biography of the designer. Not surprisingly, Manish Arora, being the most famous Indian designer in the West, received extra attention. A documentary about him was shown in a separate, small room attached to the exhibition hall. This documentary focused largely on the unique persona of the designer, his creative visions, passions and talent. It also focused on his collaborations with brands like Nike or Nivea as the marks of his global success. In this sense, the documentary served merely to reproduce the hegemonic ideology of the creative genius and self-made man, who made it through his hard work and creative power all the way to global recognition, and a man who has become a cult for some of the elite fashionistas. The exhibition encouraged the audience to admire and to stand in awe in front of the designer’s creation and in front of his reputation. The underlying injunction was: ‘Admire and Aspire!’ As such, this fashion exhibition, like many others put up in contemporary art museums (Tseëlon 2012), was complicit in (re)producing the (power) mystique of the designer, becoming his prestige enhancer and a vehicle of future profit. Interestingly, other designers from Indian fashion weeks, with whom I was familiar, became completely unrecognizable as most of them supplied their garments strategically, so that these would fit with the presumed minimalist Nordic taste. The garments were nothing that would appeal to the Indian clientele, nor were they exactly representative of the designers’ style. As such, they told the visitors in Denmark more about the designers’ idea of what western audiences expect of artistic fashion than about Indian tastes in contemporary fashion design. Exhibiting contemporary fashion as art has become, in the last two decades, the dominant modus operandi of museums worldwide; of art museums, fashion museums and increasingly also ethnographic museums. The overall tendency is to display a sanitized version of a designer’s couture creations, robbed of their social and economic contexts of production, circulation and consumption. The museums’ lack of self-reflection dovetails with their reception of sizable sponsorships from brands whose designers are represented in such exhibitions. As I have discussed elsewhere (Kuldova 2015), the artification (Korolainen 2012; Shapiro and Heinich 2012; Shiner 2012) of fashion is on the agenda of corporate sponsors of the fashion industry as well. These include the global alcohol industry that in the process even seeks to turn its own products and their consumption into a form of art and connoisseurship, along with fashion, turning all into a high life lived as high art itself (Tseëlon 2012). The recently opened exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – an art and design museum in Rotterdam – called The Future of Fashion is Now, is indeed a living testimony to the drive towards artification accompanied by profound decontextualization. Here again, we meet the standard repertoire of selected designs by people like Martin Margiela, Iris van Herpen, Rei Kawakubo (Comme

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des Garçons), Hussein Chalayan, and so on, accompanied by a brochure that explained each of the 58 designs through renderings of the underlying design idea formulated in roughly fifty words that could all together form a dictionary of contemporary artspeak or ‘international art English’ (Rule and Levine 2012). We learn nothing of the positioning of the designers, nothing of their role in the global business of fashion, and nothing of their role in the businesses they are attached to. In brief, we learn nothing of the aesthetic economy in which they are implicated (Entwistle 2009). If anything, we are told that fashion is art, and that, as artists, these designers can change the world into a better place. Indeed, the problems of the increasingly overlapping discourses and markets of fashion and art and the penetration of fashion into the art world (Becker 1984) and museums, have been critically discussed elsewhere (Geczy and Karaminas 2012). However, what is interesting here is the increasing emphasis on radically ethical fashion, on activism, or simply on ‘doing good’ – or else, on capitalism with a human face (Žižek 2009). Not only does this exhibition display fashion as art, thus increasing the value of the included designers, but it also fuels the ideology of activist art that through its quirky installations can reveal something about the world that we did not know before and unsettle what it presumes to be widespread common-sense views. Along with its revelatory potential, it provides us with claims to the possibility and necessity of ethical and sustainable fashion, those too often empty buzzwords of contemporary fashion branding, providing not much more than an added aura of importance and value, for the product, its buyer and his or her self-esteem (Tseëlon 2011). In this process, the museum itself becomes fully embedded in the aesthetic economy, often inseparable from the commercial economy, without any apparent attempt to openly reflect on its own implication in the fashion system. Museums like this produce their own versions of elitist glossy catalogues and coffee table books to ensure us with their well-established authoritative voice that indeed fashion can change the world into a better place, ethically, aesthetically or even revolutionarily (for example, see Claire Wilcox’s ‘Radical Fashion’ at the V&A, 2001). Often striking is also the emphasis in such exhibitions on the individual, on the body, on the style, on changing trends, on notions of identity or victimhood, where even the activist is framed as ‘an individual’. Fashion exhibitions that celebrate individual design heroes are indeed made for consumption by individualized consumers who are encouraged to use the museum visits, often documented on shared selfies, or the products, as individual prestige enhancements in the game of social distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Larger socio-economic relations are curiously circumvented and missing. This is not to say that questions of form, individual creativity and aesthetics are not legitimate topics to explore. However, what is communicated superficially or directly excluded, tells us something about the directions in which these mythologies, fixated in exhibition practices, are pushing us, and about what they attempt to conceal. Museums like this, far too often end up functioning as the perfect branding platform for fashion businesses by establishing the designer and the brand as hyper-prestigious and worthy of recognition beyond its commercial potential. They also act as a

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powerful ideological smokescreen through which they systematically exclude or communicate superficially in favour of that which they privilege and highlight. The same issues are found in MoMu, the Fashion Museum in Antwerp, where the fashion business meets fashion archives, under both corporate and state sponsorship that together seek to turn Antwerp into a European fashion (business) centre. As one observer noted: ‘MoMu’s displays remind the visitor that fashion is happening NOW, on the streets of Antwerp all around the museum, in the current configuration of talented producers/designers and consumers, available technologies, and educational strategies, all thrust together by historical momentum’ (Niessen 2003: 2). Notice the collapsing of the producer and designer into each other, reflective of the widespread systematic erasure of the actual global conditions of production of cloth and fashion in both fashion and art museums. We could even claim that such museums become ultimately complicit in turning the producers into an invisible worthless collectivity of undifferentiated machine-like bodies set in opposition to creative individuals. Likewise, the strategy for acquisitions of fashion pieces at MoMu largely privileges Belgian fashion designers and is restricted to emotional resonance on the part of the curator, and the power of the conceptual artspeak produced by the given designer. The chief curator Lisa Loppa described her selection process as follows: First, a garment must move, affect and enchant me. Second, it must tell an interesting tale through its texture or the way it is made, its pattern or its colour composition. Will such items of clothing stand up to the challenge of time? Does the garment relate a personal story about the designer, or his or her state of mind? (Loppa 2002: 129) Such statements can be read as a legacy of some of the most influential fashion curators in business. For example, Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue editor-turned-curator at the influential Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was known for her spectacular and theatrical exhibitions marked by commercialism and historical inaccuracies. Her single designer shows (Yves Saint Laurent, 1983), were heavily criticized for being mere vehicles of ‘high’ advertising (Tseëlon 2012). Similarly, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, influential curators Richard Martin and Harold Koda, known for their exhibitions such as Fashion and Surrealism (1987) and retrospectives of Versace, have proven to be instrumental in convincing audiences as well as other museums that fashion should be considered, contemplated and displayed as art with the sole focus on the designers and their vision. At MoMu some designers even curate their own retrospective exhibitions. This puts us in mind of examples like the Giorgio Armani exhibition in 2000 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that not only fetched a whopping US$15 million in donations, but was also heavily influenced by Armani’s direction. In other cases, we have seen that designers have been explicitly credited as

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co-curators of their own exhibitions, such as in the case of ‘Balenciaga’ and the designer Nicolas Ghesquière in 2006 at the Museé de la Mode (Steele 2008). Be it the superstar designers or less widely known designers (though certainly very familiar to those following fashion on the ramps), the paradigm is largely the same, especially when it comes to exhibitions of contemporary fashion. Since 1983, and especially during the last decade, these exhibiting strategies have become normalized. After this digression, we clearly see that the exhibiting style that I encountered in Arken’s India: Fashion Now exhibition, accompanied by the same cynical attitude of the curators interested merely in the hip pieces on the Indian ramp and trendy designers, is a mirror image of what is happening on a global scale. Moreover, the exhibition strategies of art and fashion museums are also taking over the ethnographic museums that increasingly feel the pressure to invest in seductive design and aesthetics and welcome any allusion to high fashion to increase their own value and thus profit from what the art museums already achieved in collaboration with the industry. Indeed, based on my acquaintance with the Indian designers, they were keen to be exhibited in a museum. They have long ago realized how such exhibitions are capable of enhancing their prestige, profit and brand value back in India, and among their wealthy Indian and Middle Eastern clientele. Indeed, when I mentioned to some of them that I work at a museum in Norway and that I am planning an exhibition on Indian fashion, they were all very keen to participate. In this case, it was not because of a promise of profit in the West, but because of a promise of prestige (that indeed often translates into profit elsewhere). Most of them perceived western markets as increasingly uninteresting due to the impact of economic crisis. Consequently, they have reoriented themselves in the last decade towards new emerging economies and the new wealth in India, the Gulf, Russia and Singapore. Nevertheless, it was western museums which promised added value of recognition deriving from the museum’s authority. Heavy embroideries and feathers certainly do not sell in Norway, no matter how much they fascinate. The fact that Samant Chauhan, whom we invited for the inaugural show, did not make a single krona in Norway, but still lent us his dresses, and put up a show for free against covered shipping costs and a single flight ticket, is a testimony to this. However, an analysis of this momentum in India is not at stake here, though it was one of the questions discussed within the exhibition itself and elsewhere in my work (Kuldova 2013a). The point of having a fashion show, as I also emphasized in my inaugural speech, was to do what museums do best – display in order to contemplate and analyse. At some point in the process of thinking through the exhibition concept, I came across the following statement: ‘many academics perceive museums a branch of the entertainment industry, with the unrelenting quest for money and audiences making the museum an increasingly unlikely source of innovative research’ (Haxthausen 2003: xx). In contrast, my approach was to create a fashion exhibition that would be based on research and produce knowledge. Even though the museum belonging to the University of Oslo has strong research departments of archaeology, conservation, numismatics and ethnography, it is still internally split on the question

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of exhibition making. On the one hand, the academic departments dismissed exhibitions because they did not translate into a publishable product. On the other hand, the exhibition department consisted of educators taking matters into their own hands and engaging in programming largely directed at school children. Driven by political correctness, they were focused on including all possible minorities under the paradigm of ‘happy multiculturalism’. The idea of a research-based exhibition, of an academic as curator and project leader, and in my case also exhibition designer, was indeed hard to swallow for some. However, this was happening in the process of restructuring and rethinking our role as a museum, when the director Egil Mikkelsen retired and the new director, Rane Willerslev, professor of anthropology, brought creative energy to and strengthened the role of research in exhibitions. Fashion India could happen only in this window of revolutionary destabilization and chaos when alternative ideas could be pursued, before new structures and bureaucracy fell into place and before the incoming new director resigned, on personal grounds.

‘Fashion India’: An exemplar With this background in mind, I return to the inaugural fashion show as an entry point into the exhibition. Part of this staging within the museum was designed to examine the fashion show critically. At the same time it opened the door for audiences more diverse than the regular Fashion Week crowd. The show was not staged as a celebration of the designer and his unique creativity, but rather as an experience of fashion’s power to seduce (see Figure 1). The audience was invited to reflect through this spectacle. The exhibition itself problematized in several display cases the artificial and powerful opposition between fashion as art and craft, between intellectual and manual labour, and in the construction of value in aesthetic economies. Indian fashion is heavily dependent on diverse crafts and hand-woven fabrics produced by hundreds of thousands of impoverished artisans all around the country. The denial of their creativity and individuality and the rendering of their work as traditional, collective and thus incapable of innovation, creativity or understanding the market (Kuldova in press), is a technique of power that maintains the hierarchical status quo (see Figure 2). The fashion show itself took place within an exhibition space that was established as a space of insight and critique. As such, the opening show was aimed at production of knowledge and insight rather than a blatant celebration of a single designer. Of course, no one can control and impose the reception of an event and neither did the exhibition claim to provide any final answers. The exhibition was structured around a series of processes that structure the Indian industry and that could shed light on the aesthetic and ideological construction of the elite in India and its techniques for maintaining power. It also highlighted structures of global capitalism, and issues such as commodification of culture, history and political beliefs, and the importance of the aesthetic in sociopolitical and economic contexts.

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Figure 1: Samant Chauhan with his Spring/Summer 2014 collection, posing backstage after the show. ©Adnan Icagic, Museum of Cultural History, 2013.

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Figure 2: Detail from the installation display window called ‘In Shadow of Visionaries’ that used hands crafted by Kumartuli artisans of the workshop of Monti Paul in Kolkata on the bottom, and a disco head on the top. See pic 3 for one of the exhibition texts that was attached in between the disco head and the hands at the bottom. Image ©Kirsten Helgeland, Museum of Cultural History, 2014.

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The challenge was not only to exhibit fashion, but also to exhibit contemporary India, without falling into crude stereotypes and without representing only one side of the story. Far too often we see exhibitions of the ‘spiritual India’, the ‘heritage India’ or the ‘poor India’ from which the wealthy are strangely missing. However, as I attempted to illustrate in my exhibition, one cannot be theorized without the other. The exhibition also raised the question of how India wishes to be seen and represented. Indeed, that is the question that runs through the veins of the Indian fashion industry, where most designs revolve around providing the aesthetic and material content of proud Indianness that can be worn and displayed by the elites on their bodies. India’s leading designers are all concerned with heritage, craft and embellishment, producing neo-aristocratic attires that rework traditional cuts and draw heavily on the golden ages of Indian pre-colonial royal history. By creating a new elite of ‘cosmopolitan maharajas’, they (re)produce the feudal and hierarchical structures that maintain the status quo. In such a setting, how can we not talk about the connection between these aesthetic expressions, for instance, and the rise of Hindu nationalism and ideas of India’s future economic superpowerdom? How can we leave out the thousands of artisans without whom none of this fashion would exist (see Figure 3)? As one of the women embroiderers in Lucknow once told me, it is them who are dependent, they come and beg us to embroider for them, they want us to work more, promising us more money, but I do not care for that, I want to live aaraam se [at ease, without tension], I do not want to be like them, all stressed. (personal communication, 28 August 2011) Indeed, organizing artisans and forcing long working hours on them and timely deliveries is often a problem designers struggle with. They create NGOs intended to educate the workers, since they ‘do not know what is good for them’ (Kuldova 2013a). The question here is, how can a museum exhibition convey at least a fraction of these complex relations that constitute the field of fashion? How can we re-embed designers in the socio-economic realities in which they operate daily and where their role is that of cultural producers catering to the wealthy? My intention was to create an exhibition that would attract visitors, but not by ingratiating celebrity culture in museums. I wanted to resist the ‘catwalk economy’ (Löfgren 2005) that has swallowed museums such as the V&A like a cherry on the cake. Recently for instance, the V&A exhibited the wedding dresses of Kate Moss by John Galliano and of Dita von Teese by Vivienne Westwood (‘Wedding Dresses 1775–2014’, 3 May 2014–15 March 2014) in temporary exhibitions with a ₤12 entrance fee. With their exhibition being supported by Monsoon Bridal, luxury travel agency Kuoni, and Waterford Crystal, it becomes hard to insist on independent research in such a setting. To return to the question of my exhibition and the way it was set up, I want to provide a glimpse of the key problems addressed in the exhibition, although there is not enough space to deal with all

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Figure 3: Example of one of the exhibition texts in the display ‘In Shadow of Visionaries’. Image ©Kirsten Helgeland, Museum of Cultural History, 2014.

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Figure 4: Among the objects on exhibit: original charkha (spinning wheel) from the time of Independence struggle, Handloom Denim jeans by Samant Chauhan, and a statue of Gandhi made by Kumartuli artisans in the family workshop of Monti Paul in Kolkata, next to statues of goddess Durga one of the most sought after items of their production, pointing to the importance of nationalist narratives and imagery in contemporary India. Image ©Kirsten Helgeland, Museum of Cultural History, 2014.

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of it.2 One of the entry points into the exhibition was a display window called Buying into Gandhi (see below and Figure 4) that addressed the role of khadi in the Indian independence movement and of Gandhi. Further, it addressed the current use of khadi and handloom in designer fashion and their role in discourses on ethical and sustainable fashion, as well as the dynamics of cultural capitalism. James Ferreira, an Indian designer, claims that ‘It’s high time that we bring Indian khadi back in fashion. Khadi is the most beautiful fabric and has been highly disregarded in modern times. I have tried to give it a new life with my collection. We should be proud of whatever we have’.

‘Gandhi Cool’ Sustainability is the buzzword, ethics the new elegance Images of Gandhi and khadi fabrics have become a popular staple of the Indian youth fashion, especially the intellectual middle-class university crowd. The capitalist market has turned Gandhi, with his khadi, into a commodity or even a lifestyle brand. Gandhi-inspired products often invoke concepts like ‘slow’, ‘ecological’ and ‘ethical’ fashion. Khadi aimed at the ‘aware youth’ is then typically marketed as ‘sustainable clothing’ whose purchase helps the development of rural communities of weavers and artisans. Khadi fashion items often become symbolic of the wearer’s connection to ‘Mother Earth’, of an alternative ‘free-spirited’ New Age lifestyle. What is sold here is not only a pre-packaged ecological and ethical lifestyle but also good conscience and imagined redemption from the baneful capitalist system, of which, paradoxically, this is only a manifestation. The Indian ethical eco-fashion, be it boho-chic or haute couture, that claims to support rural development and help generate employment for traditional handloom weavers and other artisans, is symptomatic of the current rebranding of capitalism into a ‘capitalism with a human face’. Good conscience and feeling good about doing good become the added value of the garments that are purchased by the ‘ethical consumer’. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has analysed this tendency within contemporary capitalism where the anti-consumerist duty (to do something for the environment and the poor) is already included within the product. As he says, within contemporary capitalism ‘the act of egotist consumption already includes the price for its opposite’. The problem is that such remedies do not cure the disease: they are part of the disease. Another display window labelled Cosmopolitan Maharajas dealt with the contemporary wealthy elite in New Delhi and its dressmakers, who provide it with an aesthetic overflowing with historic references to kingly power, attires repetitively citing the pre-colonial fashionable styles. Among fashion pieces on display was Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s lehenga (‘long skirt’) with antique elements worked into the new garment. This piece could be contemplated both aesthetically in its materiality and as a manifestation of the current dominant trend that I have labelled ‘royal chic’ (Kuldova 2013b) in the industry and its meanings (see Figure 5). The installation also addressed the

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I have edited an academic and yet accessible volume to accompany the exhibition that elaborates on some of the issues in greater depth and that includes chapters by anthropologists, such as Caroline Osella, Constantine Nakassis, Paolo Favero or Marion Wettstein. It also includes two chapters of mine (Kuldova 2013b).

Fashion exhibition as a critique of contemporary museum exhibitions

Figure 5: The display of ‘Cosmopolitan Maharajas’, in the middle we see a lehenga by Sabyasachi Mukherjee. Over the chair an zardozi sari roughly 80 years old; designers often employ people to look for such pieces all over India in order to copy these, get inspired or to directly transpose them on new fabrics. Similarly other objects displayed were contextualized in their current role as related to the design industry. Image ©Kirsten Helgeland, Museum of Cultural History, 2014.

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interdependencies between the art world and collecting in relation to the industry. This referred both to textual material and to our own collections of antiques from all over the world. It displayed typical objects of desire amongst the elite, objects that one can see in designer studios and elite homes, along with carefully selected branded goods. Moreover, this display showcased the discourses of the museum curatorship of objects that have been appropriated by designers who explicitly use the word to ‘curate’ when advising their clients on wardrobes and interior designs or purchases of antiques or art. Indeed, many leading Indian designers such as Sabyasachi, Rohit Bal and Abu Jani– Sandeep Khosla design and ‘curate’ interiors in addition to their fashion businesses, while their studios and boutiques directly play with the concept of a museum. Also, they claim to ‘curate brands’ and match them for their clients. Here we see the practices of the museums being absorbed into the practices of designers themselves. Again, as I pointed out in this display, referencing ‘museums’ and ‘curatorship’ is a strategy for enhancing the value of the brands. The display window Embroidering Lucknow: The Old World Charm Commodified, centred on the commodification of the past (see Figure 6), in this case, of the city of Lucknow, a city that, in the pre-colonial era, built its reputation as a fashion centre of languorous grace. This display followed not only the commodification of this mythologized city of opulence but also the multi-staged production of traditionally white-on-white chikan embroidery found in this city – a myth materialized. Chikan embroidery has become popular with a great number of Indian fashion designers, from Tarun Tahiliani via Ritu Kumar to Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla, and has been reclaimed by individual designers as a staple of their creativity. And so today, for any luxury connoisseur, chikan embroidery evokes the indulgent worlds of the Nawabi rulers of Awadh, synonymous with cultural refinement and Indo-Persian style and with Lucknow, which used to be called the Venice of the Orient, Shiraz-i-Hind or the Constantinople of India. The display emphasized, however, not only the processes of retrospective construction of greatness for sale, but also the creativity involved in the process of making and designing this embroidery, thus revealing the vast number of artisans connected to the industry, from block-makers, printers and embroiderers to dyers and finishers, who each invest their unique skills and creative imagination in the process. Far from being static, unchanging crafts, waiting to be rescued by designers, a closer look reveals the change and creative passions inherent in all stages of production. Using a concrete example of the multi-staged production of a luxurious white-on-white sari that took six women a year to embroider and for which special blocks were designed by a printer in collaboration with a block-maker and a local trader, the installation aimed to unsettle the narratives of creative ownership in face of highly collective creativity at work. Saris like this are regularly sold under numerous Indian designer labels. Pieces produced by these artisans, with little involvement of the designer beyond giving orders and determining desired colour schemes and fabrics, adorn Indian celebrities, the artisans’ artistry being in the process hijacked by names like Shehla Khan.

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Figure 6: Display window ‘Embroidering Lucknow: The Old Charm Commodified’. In the centre we see the traditional white on white sari displayed as an example of distributed creativity, and on the wall the artisans involved in its making. Among other artefacts are the typical objects associated with Lucknow. Image ©Kirsten Helgeland, Museum of Cultural History, 2014.

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Other displays included, for instance, the Spectacle of Excess, about the great Indian wedding; Fake It till You Make It, about designer copies that are never like a copy; Patrons and Power, about the corporate sponsorship and patronage in the industry, with special focus on the role of the alcohol industry in sponsoring fashion weeks; and Dream Factory, focusing on the connections between Bollywood costume design and the ramp, and several other displays. The exhibition also featured several short movies that I created together with Arash Taheri and that were edited by Tage Rivas Tollefsen.3

Questions of power: Industry, design and market Since the days of Diana Vreeland, we have seen an increasing involvement of fashion insiders in what has become the business of exhibiting fashion, Lisa Loppa from Antwerpen ModeMuseum (MoMu) being one of the latest additions. Feeding off the prestige of the museum the brands profit, and the museum is turned not only into a vehicle of corporate prestige, but into a business in its own right. While the state may have many interests and its own propaganda, be they of the nationalist or happy multiculturalism kind, for instance, its power over or engagement with individual exhibitions is fairly limited compared to the direct control designers or sponsors exert over the way they are represented, censoring statements and publications in the process. This became obvious to me when discussing loan options for my exhibition with several designers in New Delhi. Most of them insisted on having full control over what was being published, the context in which their pieces were exhibited, and what the labels said. Only a few were willing to give me a free hand to contextualize the pieces the way I saw fit (i.e. Samant Chauhan and Sabyasachi Mukherjee). The other exhibited pieces by Satya Paul, Manish Arora and Rina Dhaka, were purchased independently by the museum and now belong to its collections, and the designers were not involved in the process. While I recognize the value of discussing their work with designers, and indeed that formed a great part of my research, as a curator I am reluctant to be told what to exhibit, how to exhibit it and most critically what information to leave out (Stevenson 2008). Such an enterprise can easily become a mere reproduction of the brand narrative set within the authoritative setting of a museum that to most visitors is still a neutral institution connected to ideals of education, learning and even ‘truth’. Thus the institution gives weight and authority to the knowledge that it transmits. While my aim has not been to present the ‘one and only’ truth, the aim of the exhibition was to transmit some of the insights gained in my long-term anthropological research. This aim would have been compromised by the requirement of the designers, regardless of how much I respect their work, to have total control. Therefore, I exercised my curatorial liberty and created an exhibition largely informed by my research and, even with Samant, we developed a presentation that was both critical of the idea and role of designer, while at the same time pointing out the conundrums that designers face, for instance in relation to their labour force.

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3.

All short movies can be watched here: https:// vimeo.com/terezakuldova/videos, accessed 10 November 2014.

Fashion exhibition as a critique of contemporary museum exhibitions

Some would argue that my position is pure idealism and that museums cannot do away with private sponsorships in the current economy (Melchior 2014) as they depend on increasing visitor numbers for their own survival. Apparently, being spectacular has become one of the sole objectives of museums (Pecorari 2014) since only spectacular shows are said to be able to bring in enough people. The word ‘spectacle’ in the title of my exhibition was therefore not accidental. However, rather than implying that the exhibition itself is spectacular, the word was intended as a hint of the role of the fashion industry in the economy and ideology of ‘spectacular capitalism’ and ultimately also of the museum itself. ‘Spectacular capitalism’ refers here to the dominant understanding of what capitalism is, and what it does in the world, a ‘mythology about capitalism that disguises its internal logic and denies the macroeconomic reality of the actually existing capitalist world’ (GilmanOpalsky 2011: 17). This is expressed in such classical statements as ‘anybody can make it if they work hard enough’ or ‘capitalism will eradicate all inequalities’. The idea of the designer as a selfmade genius is one of the more powerful expressions of this mythology and as such it has a grip even on contemporary museums. If the first problem was about fashion designers trying to gain control over the message for commercial interests, the second problem was about exhibition designers trying to impose their own design ideas on the content presented. The underlying assumption was that culture becomes entertainment, and the value of exhibition design is reduced to being ‘attention grabbing’ and media-friendly. Such an approach privileges entertaining, inclusive and participation-friendly aspects over intellectual and thought-provoking ones. It means a disproportionate investment in form over content in the form of gadgets and fancy designer solutions or design experiments as they call it, whose value is spectacular but pseudo-educational. The assumption that the popular exhibition is high-tech and entertaining affected even ‘Fashion India’ in its initial phases. Due to lack of in-house capacity, our museum typically outsources exhibition design to an external private company. This involvement presented us with two problems: the cost of their intervention far exceeded our budget, and the exhibition designers saw their role as artists and, instead of being interested in the actual intended content and message of the exhibition, they rejected content in the name of design. Thus they censored artefacts based on the fact that they did not fit into their design vision. They informed me that rather than translating my vision and content into exhibition design (as I naively assumed), their role was to create their own vision based on their exposure to and contemplation of the objects at hand. In practice this translated into a proposal of minimalist white walls, a fashion ramp, a streamlined bunch of artefacts and a couple of smart design solutions that would embody one idea or the other about identity and dress. Not only was this design over-priced to the extent that it would prevent purchases of ethnographic artefacts, fashion pieces and other expenses related to collecting for the exhibition, graphic design, video editing and publicity, it also completely ignored the message and intention of translating

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research-based knowledge into an exhibition. Our solution was to reclaim an in-house design that would be truer to the spirit of the content, and would work with the site-specific constraints. We painted display cases that we inherited from previous exhibitions in gold, added a box with a motor on which the showstopper dress would spin around, added screens and projections, had design students do the lighting, and designed the interior of the displays according to the concepts behind them, giving flesh to the ideas, using objects from our collections strategically. At least we were free from the oppression of seductive and minimalist form and could actually engage the topics that we wanted to freely and on our own premises. The balance between form and content represents populist conceptions about the nature of the audience and the nature of learning. The implicit assumption that informed the advice I was given both by the designers and by the educators in the exhibition department was that people are superficial and only want to see something sensational that they can photograph and post on Facebook. I was told that people’s attention span is seriously limited to short sound bites and that they cannot process more than roughly fifty words at a time. This perception of the audience which is also typical of media researchers and advertising practitioners would see no value in long, thoughtful exhibition texts beyond the meaningless quotes on the walls that have become the staple of so many fashion exhibitions (e.g. ‘The Future of Fashion Is Now’). They regard the text, as Furedi (2005a) puts it in his defence of book reading, ‘as a non-essential indulgence’. As I have also been advised, people are easily bored, and they have to be seduced into actually engaging with the presented material. Valerie Steele argues along similar lines: ‘people need to be seduced into really seeing and identifying with fashion before they can learn about it’ (Steele 2008: 14). While I seriously doubt that identification is a condition for learning, this type of argument is extended to cover the second function of museums: educating school children. Since the museum is also responsible for educational excursions, as the educators in exhibition departments like to point out, the material needs to be apparently sufficiently simplified to be comprehensible to an average 12-year-old. Such rhetoric ignores the mediating function of museum guided tours and parental explanation. It illustrates the policy of infantilization (Furedi 2005b). Indeed, this policy of infantilization is in practice closely tied to the superiority of the design perspective, and the related emphasis on seductive form and surface over content. To counter this, I can only attest that after each guided tour the audiences, whether children, interest groups or seniors, were interested in discussing the issues at hand, and were grateful to us for creating an exhibition that made them think. Some even returned, and others went on reading the texts after the guided tour, skimmed through the books, and noted what interested them. Many also came to my lectures where again a lively discussion followed, one that was enriching for both parties involved. There is a lot to be learned from the visitors and their critical engagement with exhibitions, and from the questions that they raise. They are far from passive consumers waiting to be seduced into bothering. They testify to the idea that success need not be measured by visitor 332

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numbers lured in by celebrity fashions. It is engagements like these that matter. Turning complex ideas into simplified entertainment is disrespectful for the audience. Few appreciate being patronized.

Coda: Exhibiting high fashion in ethnographic museums In the above, I have attempted to sketch the issues that arise when attempting to exhibit contemporary fashion in an unorthodox way, a way that goes against the hegemonic trend established by designers and recently also by fashion museums. I have also discussed possible solutions to such challenges. In many ways, the situation we face resembles the debates, by no means resolved, around ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ art that we saw in the 1990s. In particular, I have in mind the heated debates around the inclusion of ‘tribal art’ in the Louvre (Corbey 2000), during which the highly influential collector, aesthetic advisor, friend of Jacques Chirac and connoisseur, Jacques Kerchache, came under critique by anthropologists, like Louis Dumont and Maurice Godelier, for his aesthetizing and exoticizing approach to ritual objects that lacked any cultural contextualization and that were directed largely at the global art market, in which Kerchache was already a powerful player. Even in the case of fashion exhibitions, be they at art, fashion or ethnographic museums, we see the power of the interests of the market, the industry, the fashion designers, the outsourced exhibition designers and design companies, and of the increasingly influential curators. In the process, even research agendas have a tendency to be hijacked by the interests of these markets. I suggest that we must resist the temptation to yield to these forces but, at the same time, we should not shy away from using their own techniques of seduction when pursuing their critique.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Rane Willerslev, the former director of the Museum of Cultural History (University of Oslo), who supported this project and its vision both financially and intellectually and thus enabled me to break new ground and conceive of the exhibition space as a space of critique, grounded in academic research that refuses to infantilize museum visitors. I would also like to thank the team that worked for me on the exhibition, especially Ellen Semb, responsible for PR, Mari S. Mathiesen, my right hand and the practical brain of the project, and Johnny Kreutz, our relentless graphic designer.

References Agarwal, Anita (2011), ‘Khadi, Gandhi Topis at James Ferreira’s Show’, RealBollywood News, 12 October, http://www.realbollywood.com/2011/10/khadi-gandhi-topis-james-ferreiras-show.html. Arken (2012), ‘DKK 134 million for art, culture, elite research and student exchange programs – India today Copenagen tomorrow’, http://indiatoday.dk/presse/. Accessed 10 November 2014. 333

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Becker, H. S. (1984), Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. R. Nice), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Corbey, R. (2000), ‘Arts premiers in the Louvre’, Anthropology Today, 16:4, pp. 3–6. Crane, D. (2012), ‘Auction prices of fashion collectibles: What do they mean?’ in E. Tseëlon, A. M. González and S. Kaiser (eds), Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Volume 1, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 145–50. Entwistle, J. (2009), The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Values in Clothing and Modelling, Oxford: Berg. Furedi, F. (2005a), ‘Give them a little textual pleasure’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 21 October, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/199276.article. Accessed 21 January 2015. Furedi, F. (2005b), Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? London: Bloomsbury Academic. Geczy, A. and Karaminas, V. (eds) (2012), Fashion and Art, London: Berg. Gilman-Opalsky, R. (2011), Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy, New York: Minor Compositions. Haxthausen, C. (2003), The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, Worchester, MA: Clark Studies in the Visual Arts. Korolainen, K. (2012), ‘Artification and the drawing of distinctions: An analysis of categories and their uses’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 10, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=637. Accessed 10 November 2014. Kuldova, T. (2013a), ‘Designing elites: Fashion and prestige in urban North India’, Doctoral dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Oslo: University of Oslo. Kuldova, T. (ed.) (2013b), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism, Oslo: Akademika Publishing. Kuldova, T. (2013c), ‘Laughing at luxury: Mocking fashion designers’, in T. Kuldova (ed.), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism, Oslo: Akademika Publishing, pp. 167–194. Kuldova, T. (2013d), ‘The Maharaja style’: Royal chic, heritage luxury and the nomadic elites’, in T. Kuldova (ed.), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism, Oslo: Akademika Publishing, pp. 51–72. Kuldova, T. (2014), ‘Designing an illusion of India’s future superpowerdom: Of the rise of neo-Aristocracy, Hindutva and philanthrocapitalism’, The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal, 4: 1, pp. 15–22. Kuldova, T. (2015), ‘The Indian cocktail of value/s and desire: On artification of whisky and fashion’, in O. Fuglerud and L. Wainwright (eds), Objects and Imagination, Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 230–247.

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Kuldova, T. (in press), ‘Heads against hands and hierarchies of creativity: Indian luxury embroidery between craft, fashion design and art’, in M. Svašek and B. Meyer (eds), Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Circulating Images, Oxford: Berghahn Books. (Accepted for publication December 2015). Lipovetsky, Gilles ([1987] 1994), The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (trans. Catherine Porter), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Loppa, L. (2002), ‘Collecting’, Het ModeMuseum/The Fashion Museum/Backstage, Ghent: Ludion, p. 1. Löfgren, O. (2005), ‘Catwalking and coolhunting: The production of newness’, in O. Löfgren and R. Wilim (eds), Magic, Culture and the New Economy, Oxford: Berg, pp. 57–71. Melchior, M. R. (2014), ‘Introduction: Understanding fashion and dress museology’, in M. R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–18. Niessen, S. A. (2003), ‘MoMu: A stylish newcomer in the world of fashion and museums’, Material Culture Review, 58, http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17971/22001. Accessed 10 November 2014. Pecorari, M. (2014), ‘Contemporary fashion history in museums’, in M. R. Melchior and B. Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 46–60. Rule, A. and Levine, D. (2012), ‘International art English’, Triple Canopy, http://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english. Accessed 10 November 2014. Sassen, S. (2014), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shapiro, R. and Heinich, N. (2012), ‘When is artification?’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 10, http://www. contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=639. Accessed 21 January 2015. Shiner, L. (2012), ‘Artification, fine art, and the myth of “the artist”’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 10, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=642. Accessed 21 January 2015. Steele, V. (2008), ‘Museum quality: The rise of the fashion exhibition’, Fashion Theory, 12:1, pp. 7–30. Stevenson, N. J. (2008), ‘The fashion retrospective’, Fashion Theory, 12:2, pp. 219–35. Tseëlon, E. (2011), ‘A critique of the ethical fashion paradigm’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 2, pp. 3–68. Tseëlon, E. (2012), ‘Authenticity’, in A. Geczy and V. Karaminas (eds), Fashion and Art, London: Berg, pp. 111–21. Žižek, S. (2009), First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, London: Verso.

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Suggested citation Kuldova, T. (2014), ‘Fashion exhibition as a critique of contemporary museum exhibitions: The case of “Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism”’, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 5: 2, pp. 313–336, doi: 10.1386/csfb.5.2.313_1

Contributor details Tereza Kuldova is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo and a researcher with the international HERA project ‘Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and Connections in the Fashion Industry since 1945’. As an anthropologist, she has been working on contemporary Indian fashion industry and the relationship between design and craft and has among other things curated and designed the exhibition Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism based on her Ph.D., at the Historical Museum in Oslo and edited a volume of the same title. E-mail: [email protected] Tereza Kuldova has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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