Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

“We're Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the

Museum and the Academy

Peter McNeil

To cite this article: Peter McNeil (2008) “We're Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the
Museum and the Academy, Fashion Theory, 12:1, 65-81

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175174108X269559

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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 Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style 65

Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 65–82

DOI: 10.2752/175174108X269559
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2008 Berg.
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“We’re Not in
the Fashion
Business”:
Fashion in the
Museum and the
Peter McNeil Academy
Peter McNeil is Professor of Abstract
Design History at the University
of Technology, Sydney, and was
recently appointed Professor of This article examines relationships between the museum fashion exhibit,
Fashion Studies at Stockholm viewing publics, and historians. It takes as a case study AngloMania:
University. His anthology Shoes:
Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, held at the Metro-
A History from Sandals to
Sneakers (co-editor Dr G Riello) politan Museum of Art, May 3–September 4 2006, as an example of
was published in 2006 (Berg). a possibly new type of exhibition merging art-historical research with
He is currently writing a series
contemporary styling and viewing practices.
of monographs on the couturier
as “design intermediary.”
peter.mcneil@uts.edu.au KEYWORDS: fashion, museology, fashion studies, eighteenth-century
dress
 66 Peter McNeil

In 2006, two very different international conferences were held on the

topic of fashion. In February, Valerie Steele’s annual symposium at
the Fashion Institute of Technology was entitled “Museum Quality:
Collecting and Exhibiting Fashion and Textiles.” It aimed to explore the
notion of “quality” in fashion, with appeal to curators and collectors,
and took as a subtext the idea that the fashion exhibit might also possess
certain “qualities” making it distinctive. Most paper-givers addressed
collections, collecting, artifacts, or museological concerns. Later that
same year Stockholm University launched their new department of
Fashion Studies, funded with a large donation from the Erling-Persson
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Family Foundation designated for research and education in fashion,

and conducted the symposium “Fashion Studies: Perspectives for the
Future.”1 Despite the very long tradition of ethnographic and folkloric
study of dress in this region, the Stockholm program focused less on
the material attributes of fashion, and more on differing sets of theories
and abstractions. Both conferences provided particular cross-sections
of scholarly activity and debate in the field. Each conference included
some appropriately heated and polemical moments, although the
Stockholm event was more polite and subdued than the one held on
Seventh Avenue. Speakers at both events included reference to scholarly
publications, popular media, and exhibitions, indicating the enormous
charge that fashion currently enjoys in the mass-market. As one of the
major “frames” for understanding both historical and contemporary
fashion, this article will focus upon some of the debate surrounding the
fashion exhibit conducted in the museum. It will take as a case study
AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, held at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 3–September 4 2006, as an example
of a possibly new type of exhibition merging art historical research with
contemporary styling and viewing practices including Net-based and
podcast activity.

Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT): “Museum Quality:

Collecting and Exhibiting Fashion and Textiles”

Perhaps the most interesting debate that took place at Valerie Steele’s
FIT conference “Museum Quality” was not the one registered in the
papers, but as so often happens at conferences, the one that fell between
the spaces, misunderstandings, and occlusion of unscripted commentary
and at question time. Two controversial matters arose during the course
of the conference, which suggests one of the challenges faced by the
curator and scholar of fashion in framing fashion for the viewing and
reading audiences. Most fashion exhibits in museums, local-history
societies, historic houses, and other public collections either emphasize
the formal “beauty” and architectural potential of clothes, or they
emphasize readings derived from social history, material culture, and
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 67

local history, whether that be military orders or a regional craft base.

Should the emphasis within an exhibition revolve around highly wrought
scholarship and new suggestions for methodology (certainly the case
with the major research project resulting in the Victoria and Albert
Museum’s 2006 exhibition and publication on the Renaissance domestic
interior At Home in Renaissance Italy (Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis
2006), which included a significant section of textiles and clothing, with
text by Elizabeth Currie)? Should the ideas in a fashion exhibition be
portable and “universal,” or regional and highly specific, creating new
understandings of peripheral settings? Dr Alexandra Palmer’s paper
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“Untouchable. Creating Desire and Knowledge in Museum Costume

and Textile Exhibitions” included a trenchant critique of the exhibition
Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Barrel Apfel Collection, held at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. The exhibition, which displayed
the clothes and promised gifts of accessories to the museum of the style
maker, collector, founder of the company Old World Weavers, and
personality Iris Barrel Apfel, Palmer argued, did not contextualize the
woman’s dressing, her profession, where or why she dressed as she did,
where she went, where she shopped. Palmer cited various Canadian
enthusiasts of fashion who had asked her why they had never heard of
her. They read the social pages in society and fashion magazines and
subscribed to Women’s Wear Daily. They were puzzled that they had
never heard of Mrs Apfel, especially as her style was so significant that
she had her wardrobe on display at the Metropolitan Museum.2 Palmer
was well placed to comment on exhibits about identity and individual
dressing, as her postdoctoral research is a type of creative historical
anthropology about the relationship of high fashion and the inter-
war elites in what was in fact regional dress, Toronto society before
globalization (Palmer 2001). Palmer noted in her presentation that in
Canada of the 1940s and 1950s, society dress might signify religion
as well as class, and that notable Jewish women were excluded in all
sorts of ways, real and suggestive, by the social magazine and registers
of the day. She pointed to a different social experience and a different
way of socializing for Jewish and non-Jewish communities. This was
misread by an outraged audience member to infer that Dr Palmer had
no understanding of Mrs Apfel and of Jewish women—“Jews are social
too” was the audience retort. This creative misunderstanding pointed
to the very problem or challenge of fashion in the museum. Audiences
frequently personalize and internalize exhibits of popular culture, even
if the garments were made hundreds of years ago, a particular problem
that bedevils those of us who also teach young undergraduates dress
history.
Concordance at conferences can be deadly and the disparities are
really the interesting spaces to watch. The second notable debate that
took place at FIT’s “Museum Quality” in New York concerned the form
that fashion exhibitions should take, their very interpretive apparatus.
 68 Peter McNeil

Professor Lou Taylor argued passionately that fashion must be grounded

within a material culture matrix such that its power as an active shaper
of social forms, society itself, would be recognized by both the general
public and the community of scholars. Her presentation inferred that
recent prominent and more impressionistic exhibitions might damage
the precarious position that has been established for fashion as a highly
significant historical process and type of evidence. The suggestion was
that the more experimental options might lead to the marginalization
of dress studies as entertainment or as a modernist, ahistorical, and
formal experience, with the ghosts of Cecil Beaton and Diana Vreeland
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hovering at the edge.3 (Valerie Steele had opened the proceedings with
discussion of Mrs Vreeland’s dicta that exhibits of costume must be
theatrical and dramatic.) Professor Taylor cited her own approach in
the creation of the Messel exhibition, which was presented as a research
project with an exhibition and book outcome (de la Haye et al. 2005;
McNeil 2005). Professor Taylor, recognizing the presence of London
College of Fashion/Victoria and Albert Museum Research Fellow Judith
Clark in the audience and as a part of the speaking program, presented
an informal summary of Clark’s Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns
Back (MoMu/ModeMuseum, Antwerp, 2004–5, and subsequently
Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, 2005), which did not support the curatorial approach. Taylor
had already published a stern critique of this “artefact-disrepectful”
show, in which Clark’s focus on a very cerebral installation-like viewer
experience, disavowal of material culture concerns such as provenance
and use, and her deployment of genealogies or relationships of dress
which were not grounded in teleological history, Taylor suggested, might
do a disservice to fashion in the museum.4 “There was a lack of respect
here for the selected clothes, for the work of key, innovative designers
and for the generations of makers and wearers of these garments”
(Taylor 2006: 17). Genealogies are a perfectly legitimate way to consider
the transmission of ideas or forms. It is how many designers are trained
to think. For example, they really do not care about the specificity of
Marie Antoinette’s emotional state upon entering the French court.
They want to re-experience how she felt and what color she wore. This
is anathema to the historian who wishes to suggest that there is no
possible relationship between Marie Antoinette and the fifteen-year-old
girl of the twenty-first century, that Marie Antoinette’s snuff cannot
be Kirsten Dunst’s contemporary vice. This type of network could be
constructed using Clark’s Foucauldian visual mapping: “Genealogies are
always infinite. Each section is just one possible route, a way through
to a different future. But links can be arbitrary or intended. Different
connections are always possible” (Clark 2004: 110).
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 69

“Fashion Studies: Perspectives for the Future”

Later in 2006, Stockholm University launched their new department

of Fashion Studies, funded with a large donation from the Erling-
Persson Family Foundation designated for research and education in
fashion, and conducted the symposium “Fashion Studies: Perspectives
for the Future.” A range of historical, psychoanalytic, and sociological
positions were presented, with many of the papers crafting their
argument from multiple positions. Valerie Steele’s “Fashion, Art and
Life” discussed the idea of “fashion intelligence,” in which there are
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no “rules” but the syntax must be understood nonetheless, which has

replaced older codified concepts of how to “wear” fashion and to
“do” fashion history. The connection between wearing and writing
was apt for an academic conference funded by the garment industry.
Elizabeth Wilson’s paper “How Do We Understand Fashion?” argued
for “increased understanding and collaboration among the various
sections of the fashion world.” She also commented on pressing political
matters such as the Muslim critique of fashion and their challenge to the
idea that display is desirable. Choice, as Wilson, pointed out, is a very
Western concept. She concluded with the provocative comment that
Western fashion can no longer be the “default” position—that “we”
have fashion and everyone else has “dress.”
The Swedish conference conveners appeared to position fashion
studies as more closely affiliated to cultural studies, film studies, queer
and feminist theory, which also reflects the curriculum at the University
of Stockholm which has been designed for the impressive intake of more
than thirty MA students. The new program commenced in late 2006
adjacent to and with the supervision of the film theory expert Dr Louise
Wallenberg as well as the notable dress scholar Dr Rebecca Arnold. At
the inaugural conference, papers were presented on Hollywood cinema
by Stella Bruzzi; fashion and the image by Malcolm Barnard; fashion,
gender, and travesty in “post-feudal” fashion by Barbara Vinken. The
art-historical and iconographic tradition was not represented, although
several of the paper presenters including this author were trained in
that school. Joint papers by Caroline Evans and Rebecca Arnold on
the methodology of two projects concerning women and modernity,
the early twentieth-century fashion show (Evans) and mid-century USA
sportswear (Arnold); and another by this author and Giorgio Riello
on artifact-based studies of shoes (“For Serious Pedestrianism: Fashion
and Footwear in History”) suggested that fashion scholars feel the need
to explore the collaborations that have always been a part of scientific
inquiry. They also suggest the reshaping of the academy and its funding
as the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise and its Australian “copy”
the Research Quality Framework reward collaborative and more
ambitious research projects than individuals can undertake in limited
time frames.
 70 Peter McNeil

A note of controversy was introduced into this well-organized

and polite proceedings by Patrik Aspers, whose paper “Fashion in
and out of Societies” examined the study of fashion “when society is
differentiated into smaller more or less autonomous social units called
configurations.”5 Aspers’ “configurational analysis,” which used
“goth” subculture as an example, was highly critical of current fash-
ion research methods, although most present would agree with him
that “fashion is constitutive of societies.” He argued against the idea
of a “fashion theory” and cited Simmel as an example of a theorist
whose explanatory power would be valid today. Aspers noted that we
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cannot focus on the garments themselves, which would discount the

antiquarian, the art historical, and the material culture approaches.
Although he is more than correct that fashion studies sometimes runs
the risk of fetishizing artifacts, some of his other published work
indicates that the sociological study of dress, a most important strand
of fashion research, sees “fashion studies” as bankrupt. In another of
his papers, “Encounters in the Global Fashion Business. Afterword”
(with Lise Skov), Aspers and Skov argue that fashion design is about
mediators and is drawn from three contextual spheres, “other actors in
the same network, art worlds and consumer markets.” The essay then
states: “This point—that creativity does not reside in the individual—
corrects the conventional idea of fashion studies, namely the myth of the
creative genius” (Aspers and Skov 2006: 805). That fashion studies has
continued the romantic claims of what I call “dictator designers” and
privileged the couture would rattle most of the contributors to Fashion
Theory, although perhaps Aspers sounds an interesting volley here that
some writers still rely on fuzzy argument and alluring pictorial claims.
Like Lou Taylor, Aspers suggested that fashion research must have an
appropriate “method” or continue to be trivialized within scholarly,
government, and other policy sectors.
An issue that plagues fashion as taught in design schools is the constant
struggle between formalists and modernists and those interested in social
readings of dress. I see in this in my daily working life with fashion
students, who struggle to reconcile form with meaning. Even the 1950s
is such a distant horizon to them that any contextualization seems
shocking. They seem to want to retain the pure untainted experience or
myth that still drives a part of their career choice, the great individual
and their conception of the fashion industry as primarily a creative zone
(rather than an economic or even exploitative one). It is perhaps that
faux driver that Aspers has correctly noted. Whether some designers
“tortured” fabric less than others is another matter, one more about
knowledge of designing that is understood by curators but not by
many academic scholars whose understanding of fashion is image, not
material based.
Asper and Skov’s critique of fashion studies as relying too heavily
on the analytical perspective of the “purely economic or purely
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 71

aesthetic or cultural” rather than “the inter-relation of production and

consumption” would land most exhibits of fashion in the acid bath
(Aspers and Skov 2006: 807). I will conclude this article with analysis
of AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s major exhibition of
May–September 2006. This reading indicates the particular problems
faced by the display of fashion in the museum, particularly contemporary
fashion. It also revisits the idea of Clark’s “genealogies,” as well as some
of the earlier curatorial projects of the late Richard Martin and Harold
Koda (Clark 2004).
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AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British

Fashion

As late as 1981 that most anglophile of periodicals Country Life had

to explain to its readers that furniture in the style “à l’anglaise” was
“a result of the cross-fertilisation of ideas between English and French
designers” (Davis 1981: 110). Aileen Ribeiro made this important
topic of Anglo-French interrelationships the subject of much of her
significant fashion research in the 1980s and 1990s (Ribeiro 1988,
1991, 1995). The 1760s and early 1770s was still a time of great emula-
tion of things French; the Anglomania that was developing in this
period would reverse the pattern of emulation somewhat, although
the quality and aesthetic dimensions of many French goods continued
to render them desirable. That Frenchness conferred a certain type of
status on anything was undisputed; despite the fact that England and
France were at war nearly every second decade, fashion dolls which set
the mode for women got through trade embargoes and French goods
were smuggled across blockades.6 The English spoke in horror of their
coin flowing across the channel, filling the coffers of merchants who
were shifty and unscrupulous. Mercantilism, prevalent from the mid-
sixteenth century, encouraged government intervention in regulating
the economy. Mercantilists were concerned with the generation of a
surplus of exports in the balance of trade and the maintenance of high
levels of bullion. However, although Paris set the modes, they were not
consumed slavishly or passively by everyone. The English made choices
and assessments; Mary White appended her album of fashion for the
year 1787 with comments such as “Disgraceful to English taste,” a
fascinating survival of the selective consumption of fashion goods
(Donald 1996: 90).
The term “Anglomania” (anglomanie), which was widely used in the
eighteenth-century periodical press to refer to broad-brimmed men’s
hats, pastoral modes of women’s dress, as well as simple unmounted
mahogany furniture, was first made popular in late-twentieth-century
usage by Vivienne Westwood, whose collection of Fall/Winter 1993 of
 72 Peter McNeil

that name clearly inspired the title of the Metropolitan show. This name
continued to be used for Westwood’s diffusion fashion range as well
as her commercial perfume, whose publicity claims that it expresses
“the duality of a woman picking up the best of different cultures.”7
“Anglomania” also holds the sense of an “obsession” or orgasmic
frenzy that is fitting for the fashion media as it suggests a crazed interest.
Whether Westwood or the Metropolitan Museum of Art also intends
it is as a joke on the cult of Englishness post-1980 (rather than post-
1780) is unclear. In the New York exhibition, AngloMania was used as
a shorthand for a particular type of Britishness in fashion characterized
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by playful historicism (Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Manolo

Blahnik, Christopher Bailey, Philip Treacy, Stephen Jones, Shaun Leane)
as well as dissent (Malcolm McLaren and Westwood in her punk phase;
Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan), with the dates 1976–2006.
Most of these designers, especially jewelry designer Shaun Leane, cross
these lines of historicism and subversion. The exhibition continues ideas
established by Richard Martin and Harold Koda in their exhibition and
publication The Historical Mode: Fashion and Art in the 1980s (FIT
1989–90), in which they argued that “An unremitting modernism—a
long-standing cult of the new—has seemingly come to a rapprochement
with memory and an alliance with history” (Martin and Koda 1989:
15).
Anglomania has now entered contemporary parlance, in part
due to the publicity machine of Vogue magazine, which featured the
stunning clothes worn by partygoers at the spectacular opening night.
A new designation of the term—AngloMania—was constructed for
the exhibition, one which marks it as a more contemporary expression
but also artfully distinguishes it from the term found in historical
sources and the Vivienne Westwood marketing. Just as English and
French fashion were dialogic in the eighteenth century, AngloMania
functioned as a pendant to Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture
in the Eighteenth Century, the exhibition of eighteenth-century French
fashion held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) from April
to September 2004. AngloMania also proposed a different concept
of historical time and a different relationship between a historical
tradition and the contemporary fashion marketplace. Unlike Dangerous
Liaisons, AngloMania mixed British fashion of the past thirty years
with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prototypes, rather akin to
Judith Clark’s Spectres (Clark 2004). The show proposed to consider
the way in which British designers “have looked to past styles with an
appetite that is as audacious as it is rapacious.”8 The curator Richard
Bolton used the garments and their staging to suggest themes such
as the significance of historical fashion precedents for contemporary
design, the long-term impact of national English “traditions” such as
pastoralism and gardening, fashion practices such as dressing-up, balls,
and dandyism, and the theatricality inherent in clothing as disparate
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 73

as punk or Westwood’s couture collections. This ambitious task was

made possible by placing the garments in the context of already densely
coded and furnished English period rooms, rearranged for the purposes
of the exhibition, or as the publicity noted: “A dialogue between the
past and the present is established by engaging the function, decoration,
and iconography of The Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries.”9
In presenting over two years firstly a French- and then an English-
themed exhibition the MMA was creating a conversation which had
a historical basis—the potential to consider the Anglo-French fashion
relationship during the ancien-regime. But it also had a symmetry in
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terms of marketing. The meaning of these exhibitions is complicated

by the fact that in both cases the opening event and accompanying
publications were supported by luxury brand Asprey (for the French
exhibit) and Burberry (for AngloMania) and publisher Condé Nast and
each hosted in turn as “The Party of the Year at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art Costume Institute Benefit Gala.”10 In using the term AngloMania
(anglomanie), which refers to the French nation’s “seduction” by
soft, informal styles of English sporting and pastoral dress, did the
exhibition in fact reinforce a notion of innate French superiority? Or,
in staging the English show as the finale, had English style triumphed
in the imagination and the contemporary marketplace? What role did
the fashion worn by the celebrity visitors on opening night—styles
by Alexander McQueen and John Galliano—working-class, English-
trained male designers now working for French houses—have on
shaping popular conceptions of contemporary style? Did AngloMania
suggest that the English nation now triumphed in style matters, or was
it necessary to filter it through a French lens? References to sponsor
Burberry’s reinvention of the company as youthful and directional were
clearly evoked. The show featured only those designers who remain at
the forefront of marketing and media interest: thus Zandra Rhodes’
1981 Elizabethan-style collection was not included nor the neo-rococo
work of Elizabeth and David Emanuel.
Dangerous Liaisons had integrated posed and dressed mannequins
surrounded by evocative props of the same date in a narrative structure,
arranged in the Jayne Wrightsman French galleries (McNeil 2005).
AngloMania, on the other hand, dispensed with any narrative and
staged a series of tableaux in the newly restored English period rooms,
which interconnect in more direct and intimate ways than the French
galleries. In the English suite, apertures and doorways lead the visitor
from a rococo space such as the Kirtlington Park Room (1748) to a
reconstructed Robert Adam salon in the Lansdowne House Dining Room
(1766–9). In the 1950s, curatorial decisions were taken not to replicate
like spaces, so “Kirtlington Park” ceased to be for dining as it would
compete with the Lansdowne. The effect of this was to make the visitor
feel that they really pass through a mansion, whereas the Wrightsman
rooms feel like a movie set. The irony of Vivienne Westwood’s Queen-
 74 Peter McNeil

ish Ensemble from the Harris Tweed collection (Fall/Winter 1987–8)

or Alexander McQueen and David Bowie’s collaborative Union Jack
Jacket (distressed fabric, 1996–7) achieved their ultimate point once
positioned in the grandeur of these furnished surrounds of the highest
bon ton. Because one could see different facets of the English period
rooms simultaneously, one could create a private set of narratives.
Tableaux are designed to be taken in quite quickly as general effects.
This seemed to be a new type of exhibition for dissemination in new
media, as if it were for the Net-generation, the sort of thing my fashion
design students would enjoy. Like Dangerous Liaisons, it was also a
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show that was very effective when activated by properly lit photography
in the accompanying publicity, but AngloMania was much more about
an immediate impression, image, and mood. It looked superb in the pod
broadcast on the New York Times site—like the fashion Oscars. There
was even an official Metropolitan Museum of Art podcast and audio file
of John Rotten discussing fashion and society, and a CD AngloMania:
British Pop Music 1976–2006 was retailed by the museum.
AngloMania was more abstract and conceptual than Dangerous
Liaisons, in keeping with the styling and the topic—a brief which was
not easily discernible without the program or a fashion knowledge.
Whereas Dangerous Liaisons was entered past a gesturing courtier, the
visitor to AngloMania passed beneath a roughly stitched Union Jack,
its fabrication a reference to punk, tradition, and subversion, echoed in
the beautiful watercolor rendering of flags designed as pre-publicity by
Kinmonth Monfreda. Two male figures stood at the opening: a courtier
with hair styled like an eighteenth-century “fribble” (an extreme
macaroni), who perched on an artful but rough wooden tumbril, and a
punk opposite astride a modern industrial scaffold. The mannerism of
the caricatured eighteenth-century hair matched the “real” stylization
achieved in the 1970s by punk. The opening sequence, then, set up a
dialogue between men, which marked an important part of the exhibits,
and not gallantry, as in Dangerous Liaisons. Much of the weight of the
fashion narrative in this exhibit was carried by men and by menswear.
The exhibition mixed up servant and master in interesting ways as well
as the “gender dimorphism” theme of fashion history, played out in
ideas of uniform/uniformity (including spectacular livery) and hunting
dress, versus the opulence of women in ball gowns.
Whereas both exhibitions were markedly spectacular and theatrical,
AngloMania was styled more like a contemporary défilé or Barney’s
shop window than an eighteenth-century-genre painting. It did this
remarkably successfully and in so doing created installations that
permitted the viewer to re-imagine both clothing and spaces in new
ways. Into this stately home were introduced accessories such as brilliant
over-sized abstracted flower hats by Philip Treacy after his Spring/
Summer 2000 collection (Padhiopedilum Philippinense Orchid Hat)
and his Fall/Winter collection 2001–2 (Venetian Mourning Hat). They
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 75

were installed above eighteenth-century Spitalfields silk dresses in order

to underscore the English cult of nature and pursuit of botanical themes
in textiles. English and French silk designers used botanical studies
to develop naturalistic floral brocaded silks, and the new “florists”
flowers—carnations, anemones, hyacinths, polyanthus, tulips, and
ranunculus appeared on dress. Symbols of a transient life, we now read
them as both real blooms and embroidered motifs (McNeil and Leong
2005). That clothes before the twentieth century did not have a type of
modern “unity,” being composed of separate but related elements such
as stomacher, sleeves, cuffs, was one suggestion I took away from this
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contemporary intervention. The Hussein Chalayan dress Afterwords

(Fall/Winter 2000–1) surrounded by strewn rose petals was a stunning
comment on the contrived naturalism of the English garden.
Elsewhere, mannequins in hunting clothes and contemporary fur
fashion accompanied animals including a horse marching across table-
like forms in dining rooms; they were literally put on a pedestal, which
seemed like both the dining table that might have populated a later
version of such a room, but also elevated them like haughty aristocrats.
The conjunction of real fur in the contemporary Burberry Prorsum coat
with archaic hunting was quite a riposte to the PETA anti-fur lobby. The
curator also worked with the spectacular color palette and draperies
of the portrait paintings in the room. There was even an “upstairs,
downstairs” mood, with a stunning Worth gown trailing up and away
from the servants, evoked by contemporary “rag” dresses such as the
artful Scrub Woman (Medea collection), by Hussein Chalayan, Spring/
Summer 2002. Exhibitions contain many subplots, and the inclusion of
this Worth gown was also a nod to a significant new South American
collector and his private museum.
Perhaps the most extraordinary room was the Croome Court
Tapestry Room (1771) hung with Gobelins tapestry of the highest pink
tone featuring birds in their reserves. The most Francophile space in the
English rooms here received the most extravagant dress (Paris-made),
and the most imaginative treatment. The room, the only one into which
one could not enter, was viewed through two spectacularly dramatic
roped doorways, and was occupied by a single black gown, Maria
Luisa (dite Coré), Spring/Summer 1998, Christian Dior Haute Couture
by John Galliano (British, born Gibraltar) crowned with a spectral
bird-like head, facing a console table brimming with Meissen ceramic
birds. Tippi-Hedren-like bird noises garnished the room. Surrealist
fashion practice, Max Ernst, gala dressing, and Hitchcock were evoked,
rather like a visual form of the late Richard Martin’s writing about
fashion. Harold Koda has expressly stated that the new curator Andrew
Bolton has the “intellectual rigor” of Martin and is learning to “slowly
understand the nature of our [USA] public” and their viewing habits
(Drier 2006: 114). The styling was worthy of any of the best scenes of
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which was not released at the time
 76 Peter McNeil

of the exhibition, although Coppola attends the Costume Institute’s

Galas.11 The Croome Court Room had participated as a contemporary
installation before: it had featured on the April 1986 cover of Artforum
with a section of tapestry replaced by General Idea’s Le Fin (1985). This
Anglomania tableau was, in effect, an art installation.
AngloMania demanded a high level of viewer engagement with
both currents of contemporary fashion and historical concepts.
Another example of curator Bolton’s intelligence and a nod to Richard
Martin’s superb writing on menswear occurred in the playful room
of men’s suiting, arrayed in the Lansdowne dining room. Courtiers,
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dandies, and punks from different centuries fraternized in this Adam

space. Against the chill neoclassical statuary, which had been lit to
project august silhouettes on the ceiling, new heads were introduced
to the assembly in the form of punks with spectacular headdresses of
cigarettes and newspaper made by Stephen Jones. The placing of the
Duke of Windsor’s blue-black tailcoat and vest by F. Scholte (British,
1938) in a room with punks and dandies was very clever, as the Duke’s
choice had been all about image and styling; he had preferred a blue-
black evening suit as for the purposes of 1930s flash photography a
true black would not have looked as well. This ensemble created the
sense of both a real and imagined dialogue of men’s fashion across time.
It was an effective tableau indicating that masculine status used to be
demonstrated through extravagant clothing and was a class privilege,
not effeminate. The mannequins also looked rather like the bored kids
in aristocratic settings who feature in recent Burberry advertising. The
inclusion of the Duchess of Cornwall’s wedding hat by Philip Treacy on
a console next to the mannequin representing the Duke of Windsor was
a visual pun startling in its audacity; the current Prince of Wales may or
may not enjoy the allusion to men who give up their thrones for more
or less stylish women.
Purists were upset regarding the juxtaposition of garments of differing
periods and styles, with accessories and styling that their wearers could
never have imagined. However, the exhibition seemed to have learned
from Dangerous Liaisons that verisimilitude will lead to a waxworks,
and it should be noted that the objects inserted into the “period” rooms
are often of the “wrong period” or affiliation anyway, such as the gilt-
wood chandelier of 1715 in the Kirtlington Park Room of 1748, or
the dining rooms chairs by Adam’s rival James Wyatt, which he would
never have countenanced in his Lansdowne space. Perhaps Bolton had
fun with the English idea of country-house accretion, dressing-up boxes,
and the slight chaos and frenzy that accompanied some of the tableaux,
like contemporary fashion advertising referencing drug taking.
Harold Koda’s comments on American audiences need to be taken
into account in assessing this exhibit. Museums such as the Musée de la
Mode can deliver exquisite formal experiences supplemented by cerebral
and suggestive catalogs that demand even more of the viewer. They
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 77

suggest that the viewer should go home and further digest the argument,
the materials on view, continuing their engagement with the show. As
Koda notes, Europeans will queue to read “tiny handwritten letters”
and this author has frequently observed young French people debating
the footnotes in scholarly tomes as they exit a show. Such a scenario is
much harder to imagine in the American or Australian context where
the aura of entertainment and leisure drives a large part of museum
planning and marketing. “We’re not in the fashion business” said an
American father and son as they declined entry and passed quickly by a
welcoming guard at AngloMania. We frequently discount the opinion of
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the general public but perhaps they sensed a world of exclusive fashion
that was not theirs in the already opulent setting of the period rooms.
Historical fashion has been understood and reinterpreted in large part
through representation such as painting (Figure 1). This is a product of
the last one hundred years of fashion history sanctioned in the early
compilations which had line drawings, later “improved” with color
as printing improved, codified in models such as François Boucher’s A
History of Costume in the West (1965 in French; 1966 in English), re-
edified in the Courtauld MA in the History of Dress model, one that my
teachers were trained in. Now we are being asked to understand fashion
through contemporary photographic and styling impulses. The key
difference is that the artifacts are not “speaking for themselves” as they
are mute anyway. Elsewhere, in the catalog for Dangerous Liaisons,
Bolton wrote that his aim was to “associate disparate phenomena
into a legible gestalt” (Koda and Bolton 2006: 12). AngloMania then
was part of the tendency to recast creatively the eighteenth century
for today’s audience and market. Even the taste for new opulence in
interior decoration and the current shift from mid-century modern to
new historicizing modes plays a role in the understanding and staging
of the Metropolitan show.
The argument produced within AngloMania was primarily one
generated via taste and aesthetics. Despite having some historical and
no sociological analysis, its argument about contemporary fashion was
valid. In AngloMania we learned more about how designers make use of
oddments of the past in generating ideas for contemporary collections
than we did about anglomanie or British fashion generally. Westwood’s
use and extrapolation of surviving garments and artifacts from the
past—including images from high art painting, caricature, and prints
that distill something about a period—was indicated as strongly here as
in her own retrospective, which has traveled around the world for the
past few years. Her own position presented in interviews, that Western
fashion is a dialogue between England and France, between draping and
tailoring, is another possible suggestion of the show. The exhibition also
continued the legacy of Richard Martin’s tenure at the museum, whose
work on fashion had always emphasized that “Fashion is possessed and
haunted by its acute sense of time” (Martin and Koda 1989: 15).
 78 Peter McNeil

Figure 1
This previously unrecorded
original drawing for a French
fashion periodical indicates
the type of striking spatial
enclosure made by a polonaise
skirt around the body. Pierre
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Thomas Le Clerc (1739–85),

“La Gouvenesse,” watercolor
drawing, for Gallerie des modes
et costumes français dessinés
d’après nature, gravés par
les plus célèbres artistes en
ce genre . . . (Paris, les Srs
Esnaults et Rapilly, 1778–87).
Collection Martin Kamer.

Conclusion

AngloMania, informed by scholarship but delivered via the styling

and media devices of the twenty-first century, indicates the competing
demands of fashion delivered in the academy, the marketplace, and the
museum. Fashion Theory has attempted since its publication to address
wider audiences and consider the interrelated role of these sectors
including contemporary designers and designing. This, rather than the
ideological positions that have been alluded to in other costume journals,
is its defining position. The Fashion Theory title was clearly polemical
and designed to shock the complacency and hostility of academies that
refused to countenance the study of fashion, or to render it a Cinderella
 “We’re Not in the Fashion Business”: Fashion in the Museum and the Academy 79

of popular culture studies. It also occurred at a point of a type of lift off

for the field, when a generation who had trained in courses such as the
Courtauld MA or who had pursued anthropology and popular culture
in the 1960s and 1970s were mature, confident in their often difficult
workplaces, and publishing monographs. It also coincided with the
explosion of interest in lifestyle, museum going, and fashion as a part
of late-twentieth-century commodity culture. Although the editor and
advisory board have never suggested that there is such a thing as “fashion
theory” (as there is feminist theory, or queer theory), the title and the
approach of the contributors have tended to point toward a creative
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amalgam and bricolage—maybe even a patching or a cobbling—to

push forward the field. Ten years on, with Berg announcing a boxed set
and re-issue of Fashion Theory—hopefully not like boxed music from
the 1980s—there remains a remarkable divergence of positions within
this journal. Although its editor has taken a particular stance elsewhere
on particular problems—such as whether there is “fashion” in early
Asia—this problem and many other pressing issues are not yet resolved.
There remains so much basic debate to take place about fashion.
The dress and costume versus fashion debate is particularly germane,
as dress is generally specific and regional, whereas fashion implies a
template that often is generated elsewhere. Scholars at Stockholm’s
Fashion conference such as Barbara Vinken argued that there is no
fashion before modernity—only luxury. Modernity is a term not used
by economic historians, so does that mean they are excluded from the
study of fashion? Let us hope that fashion studies does not become a
type of internal sniper’s activity nor an entente cordiale. Fashion studies
is ideally placed to capitalize on the enormous popular media interest
in dress, lifestyle, and fashion, most of which is marketing led and
unreflective. It is an opportunity to influence public intellectual life.

Notes

1. The donation coincides with a major rebranding of the H&M fashion

range for men and women; recent campaigns for the very reasonably
priced clothes feature the singer Madonna. It is in part the expansion
and success of H&M that has provided the funding for this new
academic initiative.
2. These concerns were largely addressed in the subsequent publication
Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel, in which Iris Barrel
Apfel writes her own hyperbolic foreword, “A Word, or Three, or
Four,” one of the more arch and self-deprecating pieces written by
a “woman of style.” In this it becomes clear that the exhibit must
have also functioned for Mrs Apfel as a type of self-curatorial “retro-
spective” activity with which the playful Metropolitan Museum of Art
curators were complicit. The exquisite photography of Eric Boman,
 80 Peter McNeil

which repeated the manner used by him previously to illuminate

the shoe design of Manolo Blahnik, was impressive for the clarity
it gave to the materiality of Apfel’s collection and rearrangement
of fashion and accessories, many customized by her. The foreword
includes photographs of her residence containing numerous
collections of disparate objects arranged in color harmonies, which
also function as exotic bricolage (Boman 2007).
3. For an excellent assessment of Vreeland’s stance regarding fashion
in the museum, its necessity to connect the objects with “powerful
personalities” and the aristocracy, with comments on the particu-
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larities of US audiences, see Drier (2006). In this interview, Koda

refutes critics of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and states that the public is now in advance of academics
when it comes to looking at fashion.
4. This review makes clear that the subsequent book publication
Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back (Clark 2004) did not trivialize
the fashions. It points to the constant challenge for the display of
fashion in the museum rather than on the page.
5. Author’s notes from the conference proceedings and Patrik Asper’s
PowerPoint presentation. See also Aspers (1999).
6. The English and French were at war in 1689–97, 1702–13, 1743–
8, 1756–63, 1778–83, 1793–1802. On the role of war in fostering
social cohesion, see Colley (1996: 18–19, 57, 339).
7. Website escentual.co.uk.
8. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anglomania website.
9. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anglomania website.
10. At the stage of writing this article, the accompanying publication
was not available; this repeated the pattern of Dangerous Liaisons,
in which a more detailed publication was released subsequent to
the opening. This is an understandable result of the fact that the
styled tableaux had to be photographed in situ much later than
shots of artifacts, but it had the unfortunate result of fracturing
the connection between visual and intellectual experience of the
exhibitions.
11. Thanks to Dr Alexandra Palmer for her ongoing dialogue with me
about fashion styling and film.

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