Essay Draft

By looking at the early collections of Viktor and Rolf and their latest retrospective exhibition ’house of Viktor and Rolf’ can fashion successfully be exhibited outside of a catwalk environment?


Fashion and fine art have always had a close relationship throughout history, and fashion exhibitions have existed for along time, for example, the Victoria and Albert museum has collected clothing virtually since its founding in 1852, however the clothing played a minor role being seen as below other decorative arts such as ceramics or furniture. It wasn’t until 1900 when the first popular fashion exhibition was displayed at the International exhibition in Paris held at the Palais du Costume. It was a retrospective of dress throughout history containing replica dress from ancient Greek an Roman times all the way up to the latest couture of the day. However using a gallery space to portray the concept of a collection is a relatively modern idea.

Curation is about containing objects i.e. framing them. Derrida talks about ‘the frame’ of a work as a parergon literally meaning outside of the work, he considers that how the work is displayed is just as important as the work itself. He suggests the frame which exists outside the object it protects the work also, possibly from culture and society. The frame is in between space telling us where work begins and ends. In terms of fashion the traditional frame would be the catwalk, it is usually risen from the floor maybe for people to view it better or maybe it could be to protect the garments from the viewing public and therefore culture and society. The frame could also be the model. The work is contained on the model and therefore the model provides it some protection from the public, culture and society. In terms of a fashion exhibition the frame is traditionally either a literal frame or a glass case. However some designers do like to challenge this traditional idea and break into the territory of contemporary art installations. As David Wills has put it: ‘whatever
occurs within the frame can only be contained there by a series of framings,
physical, institutional, and discursive, that are held to reside outside it’ (Wills, 1995, 58)

For example Grit and Jerszy Seymour’s collection tape. This collection was based on a new kind of cello tape which allowed users to put together their own clothes without needing the skills or knowledge of a sewing machine. It suggests giving the user freedom and movement in their clothing; therefore the silhouettes used reflect this and are quite loose and free. Their 2003 collection has been displayed all around the world, including Milan fashion week in 2004. The exhibition consists of the garments being hung from the ceiling of a large room on what looks like strips of tape. The garments are hung on coat hangers and then stretched to give the idea of movement in the garments. Jerszy (2007) describes his collaborative collection with his wife as ‘the liberty and spontaneity of just cutting and sticking clothes together, free of any constraint, a new technique - the result of a subverted experiment.’ This is reflected in how the collection was displayed. The ‘frame’ in this possibly being the tape like strips used to hang and stretch the garments.

Throughout their relatively short fashion career Viktor and Rolf have embraced the exhibition format as a way of displaying their work, from their early collections, to which I will be looking at more in depth, to their latest retrospective exhibition. They take the classical format for a fashion exhibit then reinvent it to suit their concepts. They began producing their fashion installations in Europe in the mid 90’s, they soon began to create a name for themselves as conceptual designers within the industry. Unlike conceptual art, conceptual fashion is linked to designers such as Martin Margiela and Yohji Yamamoto for Comme des Garcons and their use of deconstruction in their designs.
‘There is a strong focus on personal artistic development, and we were encouraged to question every aspect of design. A conceptual approach to fashion was bon ton at the time in our group. It was a trend in general’ (Viktor and Rolf, the house of Victor and Rolf, p. 27)

The early collections Viktor and Rolf produced were mainly displayed in galleries. Their first installation being shown as part of the group exhibition L’hiver de l’amour (the winter of love) in 1994. This was a very successful exhibition and the portion that Viktor and Rolf contributed to managed to continue touring the world for several years after, in fact it was last displayed at the reopening of the central museum, Utrecht in the Netherlands in 2000. This contained pieces from their second collection. These were based on historical costume but made out of cream PVC, which according to Caroline Evans (2008: 44) the author of the house of Viktor and Rolf, ‘announced a look that managed to be both formally restrained and surreal.’ The garments were displayed on headless figures which were hung in awkward positions up against a glass wall, making the voluminous fabric press against the glass. I feel that this concept would be near to impossible to recreate in a catwalk environment, the exhibition definitely has a fine art feel to it, however I do feel the garments were still very similar to historical dress and therefore still retain an element of being a more historical display than a truly conceptual exhibition. The frame being quite traditional it either being the headless models or the glass room that contained these models.

The L’apperance du vide installation in 1995 was based on the emerging emptiness in the fashion industry; supermodels were emerging and the designer as a star. The initial inspiration was from gift wrapping and the superficiality of it. They hired out the Galerie Patricia Dorfmann in Paris. This particular installation consisted of five different golden garments hanging from the ceiling, each cast a ‘shadow’ on the floor, the shadow being another wearable garment. The gold garments made from lame were meant to evoke a feeling of overblown extravagance in the fashion industry with trailing ribbons pleats and bows, whereas the flat black shadows made from organza were meant to represent the deflated flipside of the industry. Also in the installation were the names of the world’s leading supermodels listed in gold on the wall and in the background there was a recording of school children reciting this list over and over again, like learning words for a spelling test or the alphabet. The lack of models used for this collection shows Viktor and Rolf’s need to bypass this idea of fashion being about extravagance and superficiality, by bypassing the model all together its taking the garment out of its intended context and making the viewer consider the garment for its concept rather than how it looks on the body. This would have been impossible to do in a catwalk show as it would be only reiterate the idea of fashion being all about the extravagance of supermodels and fame which is exactly what they were trying to avoid. This is definitely one of Viktor and Rolfs most successful installations and quite cleverly gets across the concept of the collection without the need for a catwalk show; it was enthusiastically received by fashion and art critics alike.

I personally feel that this particular installation works so well as it is challenging so much, not necessarily something that the fashion industry does a lot. First and foremost it challenges what we consider a fashion exhibition to be, this resembles more of an art installation with its many different media being used, also going back to Derrida’s frame theory it challenges the what would traditionally be considered the frame of fashion. Is it the shapes the garments are hung over, is it the floor or is it the gallery as a whole?

Viktor and Rolf’s latest exhibition ‘House of Viktor and Rolf’ is a retrospective look at the designers work over the past 15 years, this was shown at the Barbican gallery London from June to September 2008, it took over the entire gallery and consisted of miniature Russian dolls wearing replicas of their key pieces from 1992 till now in a specially commissioned dolls house that the public were allowed to walk around but not enter. The house was an impressive 7m high x 5m wide x 6m deep. There were not only scale dolls and clothing but miniature catwalks, a scaled down version of one of their stores and even a miniature perfume complete with its own add campaign. The rest of the gallery is then filled with life size versions of these dolls wearing the original garments. The doll’s house is a sort of scaled down version of the actual gallery. The exhibitions designer Siebe Tettero said that ‘The idea is to not only create a fantastic show but to make people aware of the space. I always aim to make people conscious of themselves by looking at something else,’ relating this idea back to Derrida this could be suggesting that we as the viewing public could be considered as the frame and whilst in an exhibition environment we should be protected from society and culture and anything that isn’t what is displayed in the exhibition itself. This was probably one of the most innovatively curated and successful fashion exhibitions of the past few years. It had rave reviews and has since moved onto the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

In conclusion the way that Viktor and Rolf have exhibited their fashion installations, in my opinion, has been very successful and shows great potential for other designers who want to exhibit their work in an unconventional gallery context. However I feel that the success of Viktor and Rolfs exhibitions are due in a large part to the type of designers that they are. They are very conceptual as designers and can often blur what people consider to be art and what people consider to be fashion anyway so their work looks quite at home when its displayed in a gallery, and with the subject matter of some of their collections being so complex and conceptual they need conceptual displays to fully get their meaning across. I feel that with more mainstream less conceptual designers it would be harder to display the work in a gallery context and for the exhibition to seem viable.

For example the Matthew Williamson exhibition that was recently displayed at the Urbis in Manchester didn’t seem to me as successful as any of Viktor and Rolf’s exhibitions. It seemed to attempt to display the garments a little more conceptually that the average fashion exhibition, the garments were displayed on a catwalk in the middle of the exhibition whilst other work such as sketch book pages, design sheets and catwalk videos were displayed around it, however because I personally feel that Matthew Williamson as a designer is a less conceptual and more mainstream designer the exhibition lacked the need for an exhibition, it could have easily just been displayed on a catwalk and the same message about his collections would have still been made. In fact if anything having a static exhibition possibly restricted some of his collection. Matthew Williamson uses a lot of floating fabrics which require movement to get the full effect of them; with the garments being static I feel that some of the life of them was lost.

I feel that for fashion to be successfully exhibited outside of a catwalk environment it has to be taken into context. Fashion as a rule has always worked best when displayed in the context of a catwalk show. Clothes were meant to be worn after all, so if the garment is wearable then why not display it with in the context it works best, on a real person moving around exactly the use it was intended for. However I also feel that in the case of more conceptual designers such as Viktor and Rolf a gallery can be exactly what you need to get the whole concept across about your collection, the collections that I have looked at in this essay prove that fashion exhibitions can be successful and taken seriously at the same time.

Basically, in short, the ‘frame’ as a gallery installation heightens the conceptualism of the collection. Putting any collection in a gallery installation will automatically make it more conceptual, which I feel is what Viktor and Rolf wanted with their collections.