by Fashion is an integral part of San Francisco’s identity, and fashion is also written in the DNA of one of that city’s flagship cultural institutions: the de Young Museum. In fact, the de Young is a major holder of costumes and textiles, with one of the largest fashion collections in the United States, spanning 3,000 years of human history. Some of the museum’s major holdings, as well as pieces on loan from many fashionable San Franciscans, are on display at the museum’s delightful new Fashioning San Francisco exhibit.
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Fashioning San Francisco is self-consciously a west coast show and tries to separate itself from east coast shows. “We don’t want to be copying the programs of the museums in the northwest,” said Thomas P Campbell, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco. “Here we are in California, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. We want to reflect the physicality of our location and our particular tradition.”
Fashioning San Francisco looks back, drawing in many of the best designers on the Pacific Rim, even as it showcases designs from European stalwarts like Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Christian Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld. Notable western California designers include Frederick Gibson Bayh, a local powerhouse in the 1940s designing for the legendary luxury department store Gump’s; Kaisik Wong, who learned his trade in San Francisco’s Chinatown and is perhaps best known for designs ripped off by Balenciaga for his spring/summer 2002 collection; The Japanese trailblazer Yohji Yamamoto, a celebration of his avant-garde aesthetic; and Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese founder of luxury label Comme des Garçons.
“The collection here is amazingly wide. It includes about 125 countries or cultures,” said exhibition curator Laura L Camerlengo. She added that Fashioning San Francisco is all about bringing fresh, new stories to its audience. “My previous work with the museum gave me the opportunity to think about how to tell wider stories in the stories we tell, rather than the usual and talked about exhibitions and themes.”
These broader narratives are evident in the avant-garde part of Fashioning San Francisco, in the form of dresses like Vivienne Tam’s Chairman Mao, which resembles Andy Warhol’s Mao in the way the famous photograph of the Chinese leader is reshaped into forms multiple. , a priest and a schoolgirl among others. The dress, which was shown for the first time as part of Tam’s spring 1995 collection, caused a range of reactions, from confusion (one buyer speculated that the person in Tam’s dress was her father), to criticism that Tam was making light of a dictator. responsible for acts of terror. .
Part of the fascination of Fashioning San Francisco is seeing a dress like Chairman Mao become less of a contemporary object and more of a moment in the vast history of fashion. We could speculate about where the former owner of the dress, identified in the exhibition as Sally Yu Leung, might have worn it, or we could compare it to an avant-garde offering next to Yamamoto, a ready-to-wear piece since 1995 but much more. traditional in its aesthetics. It’s funny to think of both dresses arriving in San Francisco in the spring of 1995, maybe even wearing them for the same function.
It was at the forefront of Camerlengo’s mind to see these clothes as worn objects, not just pieces of fashion history, as she curated this show. “One of the things I was really interested in was telling women’s stories,” she said. “I hope this exhibition helps tell the story by connecting the clothes with these very important pillars of our community – suffragettes, poets, entrepreneurs, founders of key organizations, such as the free library, Stern Grove, and the de Young Museum .”
Attention is paid to the lives of the women who wore, owned and donated these objects to become part of the de Young’s permanent collection, distinguishing Fashioning San Francisco from other fashion-focused museum exhibitions. Speaking to Camerlengo, she revealed a real passion for weaving feminist tones into the exhibition. This attention goes all the way down to the level of something like the assignment on an exhibition placard, noting that he was often a prey to sexism.
“We were thinking about things like even the simple act of writing a line of credit,” said Camerlengo, “which historically would say ‘Gift to Mrs. so-and-so’. That’s a way to hide a woman’s name, her identity. This provided a great opportunity to display women’s names as their full name. We also say who wore it, which is a great way to put women back into the stories around our collection.”
Camerlengo and her team have completely staged the exhibit, giving it an uptown, night-out feel while referencing many parts of San Francisco through innovative staging of the exhibit’s seven sections. Swanky music that follows the exhibition’s timeline for an hour – about the time it would take a typical attendee to see the show – matches nicely with the exhibition’s visual aesthetics to create a personal and sensual feeling: not the easiest thing to doing inside. of a large art museum. “We really wanted to bring the city into the galleries,” Camerlengo said.
Another fun feature of the exhibit is that it’s partnered with Snap to present “mirrors” that allow attendees to virtually see themselves wearing three of the show dresses, and download photos of them. These mirrors bring a playful energy to the show, and it’s something Camerlengo and Campbell, they told me, hope to bring more and more into shows. “It was really fun to see people interact with it,” Camerlengo said. “I have a four-year-old, and she thought it was the coolest technology she’d ever tried.”
San Francisco Fashion is a satisfying, evocative tribute to a lesser-known but no less important American fashion capital, even if it is often obscured by New York. Camerlengo hopes the exhibition will open – and change – some minds. “I hope that people who watch the show will be excited about San Francisco as a place and the different styles that we have here. I hope people will be surprised and see that San Francisco has always been an international player in the history of fashion.”
