WhisperRant: Virtual Museums and the Future of Fashion Curation

Fashion curation has gone viral. The latest trend to go digital is that of the exhibition, the dawn of the "virtual" museum, a museum, as the name suggests, that only exists online. While virtual museums have been around since the millennium, it is only now that fashion brands have harnessed its curious power with Valentino Garavani being the first to erect his cyber mausoleum (opened its digital doors to the world yesterday).  Prada, in a collaborative move with artist Francesco Vezzoli, will erect a "24-hour" virtual museum this January (though theirs more a case of a brand sponsoring an artistic endeavour rather than a concerted branded effort as Valentino's and so not the focus of this little rumination) and I'm sure plenty more will be trailing in their wake.  

Sim Style: Valentino's Virtual "Red Room"

While the digitized curation of archive material provides an unprecedented and democratized peek into the world of Garavani's ultra-exclusive recesses without beleaguering the price of a plane ticket to Rome (including the chance to interact with key items up close, find out who wore them, etc), it also presents curators of fashion history and its students with a whole new set of implications about approaching their field in the future, that is to say, the power to "curate" or fashion one's own legacy, the auto-retrospective, can lie in the hands of subjects themselves, not the discerning hands of the "historically-unbiased" curators. 

Savage Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011

Unlike, say the Westwood retrospective at London's V&A or the wildly successful Savage Beauty at NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the houses/designers worked alongside museum curators to create an intersection of experience, these digital museums do not offer that point of convergering expertise, perspectives coming together in dialogue to create a historical and artistic context from which the viewer can draw their own conclusions about the material presented to them.

When asked what most pleases him about the project, Valentino said, “I see it as part of my legacy. I am happy that thousands of students, young designers, and fashion people will be able to see and study my work in every aspect of it, and in a manner easy and accessible for the younger generations. But it is also important to remember things of the past, to review the fashion that has shaped our lives.”

The designer here does not conceal his grandiose intentions of legacy, that is, of having edited his own legacy. And just as fashion has "shaped" his life, Valentino will now shape its afterlife with regard to his own contribution. The whole point of a "legacy" is that it's the inheritance you leave behind, the impression of your work on subsequent generations. And while the desire to control it has always been at the top of creators' wishlists--from composers to artists to poets, you name it--the whole point of the thing is that it is not. It is what you do during your lifetime that determines your legacy after you've gone, to try and pre-program it into the indices of cyber infinity feels more than a bit inauthentic.

 

While on the one hand, a virtual museum eradicates many of the traditional barriers that preclude a designer or artist from sharing their work with a wider audience (budget, research, etc),  on the other hand, the concept could be seen to stray dangerously from the realm of exhibition and education to that of a psuedo-sim avatar populated digital space wherein exhibition and e-tail are flush (i.e. coexisting on a brand's commercial homepage).

I suppose (sorry to return to the throes of Pomo, once again) the scrutiny is to be shifted onto the exhibitions and museums rather than the brands, as theirs is the role in flux. The fashion houses are, at the end of the day, purveyors of sales rather than preservers of society. It's to the museums we should be putting the question: has the role and purpose of curation changed? Of course, the commercialization of curation is not an online only phenomenon, fellow Italian houses Gucci and Ferragamo both funded the foundings of their own brick and mortar museums. But some how, the online environment only serves to underscore the possible consequences of the hyper-realism of self-curation.

As the role of the exhibition evolves in 21st century society, a society that is increasingly obsessed with its own future digitally unlocked and less and less concerned with the past, perhaps curation itself has now become an exercise in postmodernism. As the Postmodern exhibit at the V&A cheekily concludes (with a neon sign pointing to the gift shop and blazing the motto "SHOP"), should we be surprised the fashion curation, having moved into the online space, now coexists with exclusively commercial interests, the link to the "museum" sitting directly beneath (emphasize the beneath) the ONLINE STORE link. 

I suppose the question we really need to be asking ourselves is this: fashion constantly straddles the line between commercial and artistic enterprise, traditionally, the "museum" or exhibition environment was the one in which the former was divorced from the latter and fashion was able to be examined and analyzed in an artistic context alone, is this distinction one we value and what will happen if we loose sight of it entirely?

To download the museum visit: www.valentino-garavani-archives.org