Just What Is It That Makes Yesterday’s Fashions So Different, So Appealing?
Design Practices: Exhibition Design



“Just What Is It That Makes Yesterday’s Fashions So Different, So Appealing?” is a concept for a fashion exhibition of vintage clothes from the 1940s and 50s. What is the reason for adopting a certain form of dress and lifestyle from an era never lived and how does this enactment of fantasy make the participant feel? By its very nature, the practice of wearing vintage and styles from the past is a contemporary occupation. The garments are highly relevant and special to their users from the perspective of today. Vintage dressers imagine stories for their garments and bring them into their lives of the present day. They treat their objects with a mixture of care – mending and maintenance and irreverence, “wearing to death”. Light damage can be valued as scars of an undocumented, unknown history and wearing these items is a means of referencing an earlier period and making it meaningful. Vintage is an emotional conduit to the past. “Yesterday’s Fashion” makes fashion in the museum context more relevant by overtly accepting that all historical objects, whatever they may be, are also contemporary objects. It uses personal stories to draw out this idea and employs the language of the vintage experience to design the exhibition and to tell the stories. The audience has to learn this language to explore the exhibition, “work hard” - as in the vintage experience, and become immersed in someone else’s world.


Key Collaborators:
Kim Patrick (writing stories), Rakhi Rajani (Advice on interviews), Alex Spyropoulos (concept development).

Special thanks to: all the women who gave their time to speak to me, Annalisa, Shar, Valentina, Maria, Anna and Annie, Arnaud Dechelle, Katherine Skellon, Vesna Petresin and Simon Leach.







Contact:
Caroline Lowe
07809568400
carolinelowe@hotmail.co.uk