The Museum at FIT’s ‘Fashioning Surprise’ Is a Trove of Vogue Treasures

Vogue exhibitions are a dime a dozen lately—and that isn’t a nasty factor. They show that museums are opening as much as the thought of fashion-focused exhibits (look no additional than the latest opening of the Louvre’s first couture exhibition), which place clothes design and textile creation of their rightful spot as venerable artwork types. Each infrequently, one exhibition cuts by means of the remainder—and this time, the Museum at FIT’s newest present, “Fashioning Surprise: A Cupboard of Curiosities” is most positively holding the knife.

In “Fashioning Surprise,” curator Dr. Colleen Hill introduces a Twenty first-century viewers to the thought of cupboards of curiosities. Hailing from the early sixteenth century, cupboards acted because the precursor to the trendy museum, a spot the place vacationers and collectors might show gadgets together with anatomical specimens, antiquities, and relics from throughout the globe.

The exhibition begins with an outline of a 1655 cupboard from Danish doctor Ole Worm, by which a Greenlandic fish intestine parka and footwear from Central Asia are seen alongside antlers and looking instruments. This concept of gathering is featured prominently in “Fashioning Surprise”; many designers are, in spite of everything, identified to be magpies (take Karl Lagerfeld, for instance, who notably collected iPods, Twentieth-century plates, and drawings by the French designer Jacques Heim, amongst different ephemera). Within the present, there’s a costume from Mary Katrantzou’s 2019 tenth-anniversary assortment, by means of which she explored “amass[ing] like objects of a selected variety, to file, to review and establish, to guard and cherish.”

From there, the exhibition explodes right into a world of wonders. 200 clothes and equipment illustrate 10 themes generally discovered inside cupboards. The present follows an open-concept design, permitting company to wander and get misplaced among the many gadgets that vary in provenance from 2024 all the way in which again to the seventeenth century.

Curator Hill tells W that she prefers to discover the galleries by beginning with the sections she has titled “Illusions.” “I believe it’s probably the most unknown sort of assortment within the cupboards,” she explains. Whereas trompe l’oeil guidelines the runways proper now, the pattern is nothing new—it wasn’t unusual to search out examples of the inventive approach inside cupboards of yore. “These collections have been instructional, however they have been additionally meant to be enjoyable,” Hill says. In her personal cupboard creation, Hill brings forth a ’50s-era mini bag formed like an umbrella, a pair of fall 2006 Lanvin boots that resemble nude legs carrying pumps, and a Pucci costume circa 1954 comprised of a silk printed to appear like mink—a shock in itself. “I really wrote to the Pucci archive, and I used to be like, ‘Is that this actually yours?’ They confirmed it. You simply don’t consider Pucci doing trompe-l’oeil, a lot much less trompe-l’oeil mink.”

One other standout piece from “Fashioning Surprise,” which pulls virtually fully from FIT’s current archive, is the Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons spring 2018 costume printed with Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus, a portrait of Emperor Rudolph II. “It is a actually particular object to me,” Hill says of the costume, due to its fantastical grandeur, but in addition the truth that the Emperor himself was a collector. “He had an enormous assortment of curiosities,” and the portrait was particularly commissioned for his personal cupboard, she provides.

Subsequent comes “The Senses,” a bit that permits guests to listen to what a few of these objects sound like in movement (in a single case, company can contact a recreation of a 1948 Molyneux costume, made in muslin by FIT graduate pupil Katherine Shark). “Aviary,” “Specimens,” and “Anatomical Theatre” present examples of the commonest type of cupboards of curiosities—taxidermy (or generally stay) birds and animals and anatomical specimens offered throughout a time when the human physique was nonetheless very a lot a thriller to scientists and medical doctors. By means of archival pulls, Hill and her workforce have confirmed that centuries later, these themes nonetheless fascinate the general public, from the grotesque vibe of a rib-adorned costume to the great thing about an intricately beaded Tom Ford design that turns the wearer right into a human zebra.

“Fashioning Surprise” is a spot for exploration. There may be plenty of the acquainted: a Jeff Koons for Louis Vuitton tote bag that includes the Mona Lisa and a Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons padded jersey high. However guests will nonetheless have an opportunity to be launched to the unknown. One part, aptly titled “What Is It?” presents varied style objects with no context, permitting company to make their very own assumptions earlier than revealing their true utilization beneath coated title playing cards. However we wouldn’t dare give away any of the solutions right here and smash the enjoyable. Nor can we need to spoil any extra of the surprises that await in MFIT and Hill’s cupboard.

Fashioning Surprise: A Cupboard of Curiosities is on show on the Museum at FIT from February 19, 2025–April 20, 2025.