Fashion at the Museum

From July 3, the exhibition FACELESS part I at freiraum quartier21 INTERNATIONAL/MQ presents contemporary works of art and fashion in which faces are hidden, transformed or masked. FACELESS takes a radical look at this fairly recent phenomenon of everyday media culture and shows how it manifests in visual art, fashion, photography, advertising, and dance. The show features works by artists like Marina Abramović, Thorsten Brinkmann, and Maison Martin Margiela as well as projects created by unknown internet dwellers.

For the two curators, Serbian-Dutch artist Bogomir Doringer and Brigitte Felderer of University for applied Arts, the sociopolitical consequences of 9/11 are the initial points of the exhibition. Thus, Doringer´s thesis is: "Our instable identity craves for a return of the mask, in order to wear it as a protection, as camouflage, as a prop or just for fun."

In avant-garde fashion design, masking has been used for years in order to erase individuality of the wearer. FACELESS presents creations of labels like Maison Martin Margiela, Gareth Pugh, Viktor & Rolf and Bernhard Willhelm. For the first time in Austria, works of artist and designer Jun Takahashi for Japanese fashion label UNDERCOVER and works of stylist
Katsuya Kamo for Junya Watanabe’s COMME des GARÇONS will be on display.

End of June, the exhibition website www.facelessexhibition.com will be online. Visitors and artists are invited to upload "faceless" images. Some of them will be presented in FACELESS part II, the second part of the exhibition that will be opened on September 27 and is all about the reinvention of privacy.

In Frankfurt/Main the exhibition Draußen im Dunkel. Weitermachen nach der Mode opened last week. With it, Museum Angewandte Kunst

tries to answer the question: What is fashion now?

More precisely: If fashion, dearest child of merchandise, is being seen as indicator for the process of modernism, how does fashion look that is created in times of great issues? It is being said that in fashion the present age is reflected. Happiness researcher Wilhelm Schmid recently declared melancholy as the appropriate attitude. But how does the melancholic dress, what is fashion like that expresses this age?

The experimental set-up starts with the concept of a time that is termed as the birth of anti-fashion. In the 90ies, designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen and Helmut Lang or Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo defined a fashion after fashion. Their visions broke with the colourful world of the 80ies by no longer supplying the décor for this lifestyle but by starting to work with its dark sides and by this developping their own aesthetics.

These concepts of contemporary fashion became indicators for the works of the next generation of designers. It was no longer about dressing the (post)modern human being but much more about questioning universal life concepts. In the rejection of the big utopias of post/modernism, they chose retreat, the way of contemplation and melancholy in search of their own essence that had to be dressed.

In works of amongst others Maison Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Boris Bidjan Saberi, Augustin Teboul und Yohji Yamamoto for Y-3, Draußen im Dunkel presents fashion as a thin membrane between everyday life and this other side on which fashion designers explore the borders of human being - in continuing after fashion.