• Fashion Lives

    • from 11 November to 06 February 2005

    • Project Type: Exhibition
    • Email: a.o-neill@csm.arts.ac.uk
    • Statement:
      Devised and curated for The British Library, this exhibition promoted the new recordings of the National Life Story Collection, collected by the Library’s Sound Archive under the title ‘The Oral History of British Fashion’. Fashion is increasingly exhibited world-wide, and a range of scholarly exhibitions in Europe and the USA have established its significance as a vital constituent of modern material culture. ‘Fashion Lives’ was part of this continuum but was the first to be organised around sound as opposed to material objects, and the curatorial challenge was to make a visual exhibition based on oral history recordings from major participants in the last 50 years of the British fashion history. Rather than illustrating these tapes literally, using the orthodox method of exhibiting surviving dress on mannequins, printed material culture drawn from fashion archives and the library’s collection were selected. The exhibition thus challenged the pre-conception of what a fashion exhibition should contain by using sound without recourse to conventional dress display techniques. To make the curatorial programme visually intelligible, fashion practitioners rather than exhibition designers were commissioned to work on particular elements of the display. These included wallpaper design by fashion designers Eley Kishimoto, photography by Gareth McConnell and graphic design by William Hall.
    • View publication(s):
      - London: After a Fashion
      - Imaging Fashion