Museums as fashion spaces: mediating fashion knowledges through exhibitionary practices

The recent global explosion of fashion in museums has done much to ensure that museums are now key sites in a range of popular, esoteric and academic ‘fashion spaces’. While limited research has explored the spatialisation of fashion, customary and fashionable clothing have long been spatialised geographically through an emphasis on local characteristics of dress. Thinking of fashion spatially at other than inter-country or inter-cultural levels provides a rich dimension to research, yet the tendency has been to focus on spaces of fashion primarily as sites of production, dressing and consumption, or in relation to architecture and world fashion cities. Examining museums as one of the key fashion spaces of the present adds to this research. This paper explores a range of fashion spaces, to consider how museums are just one of many sites mediating our fashion knowledges today. By drawing on a range of alternate physical, social, online and personal fashion spaces, this paper relocates exhibitionary practices and explores the co-creation of fashion knowledges as realised in museums. A range of exemplary examples are contrasted with alternate fashion spaces to examine how museums and galleries are mediating fashion knowledges, and repositions museums as one of the primary spaces for the presentation and consideration co-authored and co-created fashion knowledges in the present.