When Karl Lagerfeld passed away, the fashion press celebrated his ‘controversial genius’¹ with a plethora of articles which listed his most contentious designs and statements. In considering examples of his most innovative work—think the sportswear and hip-hop-inspired maximalism of Chanel’s 1991 Autumn/Winter collection, which masterfully subverted the founder’s sartorial vocabulary whilst simultaneously paying homage to it—alongside eyebrow-raising instances of cultural appropriation like the dresses from Chanel’s Spring/Summer 1994 with printed quotes from the Koran, these articles made a tacit statement: that these examples should be considered as equally creative and even, perhaps, as the two sides of the same coin. In doing so, the fashion press was amplifying Lagerfeld’s own thoughts on the matter, which were summed up in 2010 by one of his famous aphorisms: ‘Be politically correct, but please don’t bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that’s the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation.’²

Despite this statement, the designer has usually apologised to those who felt disrespected by his work. This is not by any means an isolated case; from Yves Saint Laurent to Rei Kawakubo and Marc Jacobs, examples of cultural unawareness are historically accompanied by reluctant apologies. These apologies often sound like crocodile tears, in part because they tend to employ PR speak, in part because culprits like Lagerfeld often quickly move on just to stumble upon another cycle of controversy-apology a couple of years later. This overall feeling is amplified by the pervasive omertà of the fashion media at large which, as some commentators have noticed, are happy to publish these stories for clicks yet keep tacitly condoning this kind of behaviour by invoking creative genius or eccentricity to shift focus from the structural issues of the system.³

Sometimes, however, journalists set their usual professional caution aside. In the March issue of Vogue Italia, writer Angelo Flaccavento penned a self-professed ‘rant’ against political correctness in fashion, which he sees as ‘a conformist trap, set in the name of a false respect that is perhaps even more divisive and discriminatory.’⁴ ‘Awareness,’ he continues, ‘cannot be cultivated by force’ because the creative act is by definition ‘anarchic, boundless, bulimic and incorrect’⁵ and should therefore elicit outrage. The article was written as a reaction against what Flaccavento sees as the ‘intransigent moralists who raise their shields at the slightest hint of appropriation, whether real or presumed’ and the ‘guard dogs who, in the name of a foolish notion of inclusiveness, impose ridiculous parameters that are merely exercises in censorship.’⁶

But if fashion designers can and should shock and provoke, isn’t the social media outrage not only to be expected, but also an intrinsic part of increasingly performative fashion conversations as well? And why would fashion designers specifically enjoy unlimited freedom of expression? Who would claim this right next? Artists? TV presenters? Politicians? Do fashion designers really want to be the creative equivalent of Piers Morgan?

More to the point, any claims to censorship in this case sound preposterous given the meaning of the term and its relation to power. The word censorship describes ‘the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good’⁷ and is usually applied by governments or by those in power positions through laws and regulations. So how can someone who is given a voice in the pages of the most powerful fashion magazine in the world claim that fashion is being censored? And can social media backlash against creative directors at the helm of powerful global brands like Lagerfeld or, more recently, Miuccia Prada and Alessandro Michele, ever be considered an example of censorship?

While creative freedom is essential, fashion critic Vanessa Friedman notes that some social media outrage is equally ‘legitimate’ and that one needs not ‘climb on a politically correct high horse’⁸ in order to question a designer’s output. Scholar Mathilda Tham once argued in Vestoj that both risk and shame should have a place in fashion and calls for a ‘collective vision … for defining what types of risk sincerely have a place in fashion and which have not.’⁹

Building on this, I propose that we frame the question not in absolute terms — as in, should fashion be politically correct or politically incorrect? — but rather in terms of risk. We could ask instead: what role can political correctness play in fashion? In doing so, political correctness can help us frame a collective vision and discourse which establish what risks are worth taking to maintain fashion’s provocative, playful, innovative and subversive enfant terrible attitude and what risks are to be considered fashion faux pas — and I am not referring to sporting white after Labour Day.

In my experience of teaching historical and critical studies to fashion students, I have seen first-hand how political correctness can work as a tool for unpicking the system in productive ways. Discussing controversies in the history of post-war fashion for instance — from Dior’s New Look and YSL’s wartime-inspired Libération collection to the poorly-timed 1995 Comme des Garçons show for which Rei Kawakubo was accused of appropriating the concentration camp aesthetic — can become a way for students to think collectively through concepts like creativity, power, representation, and socio-cultural context. The first two examples in particular show students that the term political correctness itself is relatively recent and that, at a time when it did not even exist, designers nonetheless received plenty of criticism, only it was not as immediate and wide-reaching as it is in the age of social media.

In other words, political correctness should be divested of the connotations which politically conservative political discourses have assigned to it in the past couple of decades — let us remember that this is the rhetoric used by those who mock people who fight for the collective good by calling them ‘snowflakes’ and ‘Social Justice Warriors’— and reclaimed instead as a productive tool to discuss the underpinnings of the industry in innovative and forward-thinking ways. After all, I would suggest that when we talk about political correctness in fashion, we are actually having a conversation about the creative constraints and challenges within which fashion operates. Political correctness challenges designers to walk away from the easy temptation of cultural appropriation, to leave their ivory towers and to think outside of the box. As a conceptual tool it forces us to realise that true creativity in fashion flourishes within and because of real-life constraints and that it is these constraints that make us appreciate the magic of fashion even more. Political correctness functions as the moral barometer which helps us distinguish between true creativity and laziness, between innovation and cultural stagnation, between ‘Yas qween!’ and ‘thank u, next.’

Alex Esculapio is a writer as well as a PhD student and lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. ‘The controversial genius of Karl Lagerfeld,’ BBC News, 20 February 2019.  ↩

2. ‘Karl Lagerfeld Quotes,’ Vogue, 19 February 2019. https://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/karl-lagerfeld-famous-quotes.  ↩

3. See for instance Lara Witt, ‘Stop mourning oppressors: anti-condolences for Karl Lagerfeld,’ Wear Your Voice Magazine, 19 February 2019. https://wearyourvoicemag.com/culture/anti-condolences-karl-lagerfeld?fbclid=IwAR1D7QGNs1kLbHt2u_nYAL5wIgO0T5UGEq3K2fq4kGy49CnqC4kuPN3zfuM ↩

4. Angelo Flaccavento, ‘On creative freedom and political correctness,’ Vogue Italia, 13 March 2019. https://www.vogue.it/moda/article/di-liberta-creativa-e-politically-correct ↩

5. Ibid ↩

6. Ibid ↩

7. George Anastapio, ‘Censorship,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/censorship#ref58991.  ↩

8. Vanessa Friedman, ‘Should fashion be politically correct?’ The New York Times, 15 October 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/fashion/should-fashion-be-politically-correct.html. ↩

9. Mathilda Tham, “The green shades of shame,” Vestoj. http://vestoj.com/the-green-shades-of-shame/.  ↩

THE MUSEUM IS A site of power, both guardian and producer of cultural capital: museums define and reproduce notions of what is worthy of our gaze. The year 2017 reified fashion’s space within the museum: though debates as to its place in the museum still sputter on, another string of blockbuster shows in New York and London¹ alone, confirmed that fashion, as a craft and art form, status symbol and performative practice, draws crowds and press in a way that few other creative mediums can do.

In the context of this increasing acceptance of the validity of fashion in museums, it is interesting to delve more deeply into what these blockbuster shows say about fashion, dress and clothes. How are clothes in the museum positioned and framed, and how do these ways of ‘dressing’ the museum shape collective ideas on our relationship to fashion and the creative self? Many of the successful 2017 exhibitions might be described as ‘designer-as-artist’ shows; shows which construct a visual narrative around the creative genius and modus operandi of a single named designer(s). These monographic exhibitions use the construct of the designer as the author (or auteur) to showcase the work of famous designers in relation to wider histories of fashion and dress, often (although not always) with secondary importance placed on the social implications of the clothing on display.

Two of the biggest fashion exhibitions of the last year, the elegant Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion at the V&A and the conceptual Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fit this model. As such viewers were treated to a reappraisal of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s technical innovation and design influence, through x-ray analysis that doubled as artistic intervention, a collaborative project with London College of Fashion students, and carefully chosen juxtapositions from the museum’s collection. The singular and spectacular innovation of Rei Kawakubo was celebrated and re-imagined, reconsidered within a conceptual framework of binaries and dualities (such as male/female, object/subject, clothes/not clothes and model/multiple) which were crossed and re-crossed as we walked around her voluptuous forms.

The monographic fashion exhibition builds upon an established exhibition-making tradition that fetishises and reifies the trope of the artist as lone genius, subtlety negating the broader creative networks and contexts in which ‘fashion’ is made. In positioning fashion as the output of a single creative mind these exhibitions often feed into the narrative so often presented by the fashion industry: where collections and brands derive from a single identifiable figurehead, rather than from collaborative studios and market decisions. Despite their extraordinary beauty and power, these exhibitions reinforce a very particular (and hierarchical) narrative of what fashion is; one, which privileges spectacle and craftsmanship over the meanings drawn from everyday dress. In presenting visual narratives that revolve around the designer-author and pristine showroom-ready garments these exhibitions present fashion as a meaningful yet glossily impenetrable surface, glamour as the implicit desired end result of our self-fashioning. As social theorist Nigel Thrift² writing on the allure of consumer goods suggests, glamour is produced through the construction of smooth and shiny surfaces, a coalescence of technological advancement and capitalist disavowal of the untidiness of the everyday. Often this focus on fashion as a beautiful spectacle comes with the exclusion of embodied and social approaches to both fashion and dress, an exclusion that reinforces hierarchies of cultural production, leaving high fashion within the reach of a minority.

Our relationship with clothing is not only aspirational and image led, a myth that spectacular exhibitions cannot help but propagate: it is cultural, sensory and embodied, and we, as everyday dressers, are also authors of fashion. However too often fashion exhibitions centre around visual engagement with the glamorous surfaces of fashion, rather than forge connections to the real world of senses and emotions. Does this emphasis on a particular kind of visual encounter limit the viewer’s capacity to engage with the garment as a locus of multi-sensory experience, the ways we feel in and feel about our clothes?

The monographic imagining of fashion in museums sits in contrast to fashion as bodily and lived; the everyday experience of wearing clothes. We produce our clothed identities through acquiring, styling and collating clothes from multiple sources. These ideas resonate in viewing an inconspicuous closet moved from its original home in a small Greenwich Village apartment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it comprised the entirety of the exhibition Sara Berman’s Closet on view last year. Inconspicuous yes, but enormously powerful as we related the neat piles of clothing and other personal possessions such as worn shoes, a wooden recipe box and a perfume flask, to the tastes, smells and movements of everyday life. With the knowledge of the subject’s various pasts gleaned briefly through a wall text, we understood that for Berman, dress was a process of self and re-fashioning, the confluence of multiple agents and selves. We wondered, did her dutifully ironed and folded clothing wipe away the clutter of a failed marriage, or hark back to her childhood home in Tel Aviv, for example?

The exhibition didn’t answer these questions, but it provided the impetus for us to redirect the line of questioning. How do we fashion ourselves in our own daily practice of dressing, through acts of mimicry, appropriation and subversion, for instance? Occasionally in the fashion exhibition the imperfect and changeable nature of our relationships to clothing are brought to the fore – the scuffed heels and taped hems of Isabella Blow (written about so beautifully by fashion theorist Caroline Evans) displayed in Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013-14, Somerset House) for example; which poignantly embodied a fashionable life lived. These poignant garments are an example of what museum scholar Jeffrey David Feldman³ describes as ‘contact points,’ objects, which through bodily contact have become a link or bridge between the viewer and the display. As traces of their encounters with bodies other than our own, these accruals of information are the links that allow a meaningful encounter to occur. Whereas, according to Feldman, in locating the museum encounter as primarily visual, we often disregard the haptic contexts of their previous uses, and the ‘rich sensory information accumulated in objects.’⁴ This information, the material ways that a garment changes through interaction with the bodies and things which surround them, are powerful reminders of our own subjective experiences and emotions. In failing to highlight these contact points do fashion curators miss opportunities for their public to make these connections?

In these contexts, how might clothing on display embody the social person who once wore them? A reframing of fashion authorship in exhibitions may be a means to spur broader definitions of dress to better reflect our lived experience. Several recent exhibitions challenged the primacy of the designer-led fashion exhibition by positioning the wearer as ‘author’; as the primary creative agent of fashion practice. In this reframing they shift the creative focus from designing dress to the collation of a wardrobe, its styling. Sitting between biographical overviews, artist’s retrospectives and social histories, two recent exhibitions exploring twentieth-century artists’ lives and identities, Gluck: Art and Identity at Brighton Museum and Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern at the Brooklyn Museum both reveal a conflation of the creative, professional and personal self through dress. Fluidly moving between the author-artists’ creative outputs and dressed identities, both these practises were presented as a means of maintaining creative personae. In these explorations of the wardrobes of a famous artist protagonist, whose creativity is already acknowledged, the garments may be everyday, but the wearer extraordinary. When the ‘wearer’ is an artist or designer, their creative capacity, and thus the validity of dressing as an aspect of their creative output, is harder to challenge and fits neatly within accept narratives of authorship within artistic production.

Beyond the designer-led fashion exhibition we see the intersections between style, biography social and personal histories more frequently. Clothing took a lead role in exploring how O’Keeffe constructed her public image, a central premise of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern. Displays of O’Keeffe’s sewing tools alongside homemade garments allowed us to begin to grasp the embodied context of production, while photographs and texts describing her everyday life began to shape the absent social body. Conversely, we left Sara Berman’s Closet wanting to know more about the subject behind the display. The exhibition presented the psychical taxonomising and curating of a wardrobe by a relatively unknown person, as a creative act. Viewers connected to the ‘everydayness’ of the scene, simple folded garments and other personal objects in a closet, while reflecting on how their own clothing choice and organisation might also function as creative acts. By leaning on personal histories and the familiarity of the everyday, these two shows provided tools to enable visitors to apply their experiences as wearer-authors themselves. To acknowledge creative agency located not in acts of design but in the production of identity through the ready made.

In parallel, a spate of thematic shows displaying clothing belonging to anonymous wearers or made by anonymous hands brings a very different perspective on dress. In Items: Is Fashion Modern? at the Museum of Modern Art, display objects functioned variously as archetypes, stereotypes and prototypes of a design idea, encouraging viewers to consider the creative practises of both the high fashion designer and mass-manufacturer. The equalising display of a range of objects challenged hierarchies of visual culture. The wearer-author entered into the exhibition narrative through the display of garments that were ‘everyday,’ such as a red Champion sweatshirt and Levis jeans. Despite their unworn nature, these garments contain elements of Feldman’s ‘contact points,’ for in viewing them, our bodies ‘fit’ back to them through memories we possess of wearing similar garments. Although Items unpacked traditional boundaries between high and low design, it lacked tangible engagement with the experiential and bodily elements of dress, which blocks us from identifying as author of these narratives.

In contrast, bodies were materialised and made playfully present in North: Fashioning Identity at Somerset House. Despite a limited amount of clothing on display, fashion was the central focus in North, an exploration of the image and culture of the north of England. Multilayered installations shaped a picture of looking and feeling ‘northern’: garments featuring alongside diverse groupings of multimedia work, photography and film. Jeremy Deller’s interactive interiors asked viewers to sit in others’ chairs, and to contort their bodies to another’s posture, a demand which spoke to the fact that our dress is an interface between the body and space. Installations by designers John Alexander Skelton and Christopher Shannon, and Jason Evans’ photographs, showed clothing in contexts of a constantly refashioning self, which exposed a subtext of self-authorship and the embodied nature of dress.

The ways clothing is mediated to a museum audience affects collective ideas on the significance of clothing and dressing, and in turn has the potential to shape people’s realities and agency. The anxiety expressed about fashion exhibitions in museums can often be understood as a fear that, in bringing clothes into the gallery it will become a site of commerce rather than culture; a glorified designer showroom. In order to differentiate the role of cultural institutions from spaces of commerce and fashion media let us look for ways of integrating the embodied and experiential nature of our everyday relationships with clothes into the fashion exhibition. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that the increasing collaboration between big brands and big museums both alter and reinforce hierarchies of cultural capital, exclusivity and wealth, might dress in the museum also offer an opportunity to democratise and enliven these sites of power, so that they become spaces for radical affect.

Ellen Sampson and Alexis Romano are co-founders of the Fashion Research Network (London). Dr. Sampson is an artist, curator and material culture researcher, and Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art. Dr. Romano, a historian of design and visual culture, is a Visiting Lecturer at Parsons, the New School for Design.

1. A sampling of these shows include Paris Refashioned, 1957-1968; Black Fashion Designers; The World of Anna Sui; Veiled Meanings: Fashioning Jewish Dress; Present Imperfect: Disorderly Apparel Reconfigured; fashion after Fashion; Counter Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture; Jessica Ogden: Still; and Volez, Voguez, Voyagez – Louis Vuitton. ↩

2. N Thrift, ‘The Material Practices of Glamour.’ Journal of Cultural Economy, 2008. ↩

3. JD Feldman, ‘Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem,’ in E Edwards et al, ed., Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Bloomsbury). ↩

4. Ibid., 251. ↩