Fashion City or Museum of Fashion? Exploring the Mutually Beneficial Relationship between London’s Fashion Industry and Fashion Exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Datos Bibliográficos

ID13100511
AutoresBethan Bide (0000-0002-5531-7190, University of Leeds, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen7
Número1
Páginas217-234
Fecha de publicación2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2021.1923405
OpenAlexW3174244966
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas35

As the commodity chains supporting the fashion industry have become ever more global and complex, so the work of constructing and maintaining the reputations of fashion cities such as London has also needed to evolve. Museums have played a key role in this process through their dissemination of discursive narratives about the places, spaces, and people that constitute London’s symbolic fashion capital. Taking the Victoria and Albert Museum as a primary case study, this paper explores how changes to the networks and processes of the fashion city in the decades following the Second World War were connected to the growth of fashion within the museum. Looking at two key exhibitions: Britain Can Make It (1946) and Fashion: An Anthology (1971), it traces how the museum responded to processes of deindustrialization and cultural change by bringing the city’s commercial fashion cultures into the museum space, resulting in the museum becoming an important site for the fashion city. Finally, it asks whether the legacy of this process has resulted in increasingly narrow and homogenous fashion exhibitions that have the potential to harm London’s fashionable reputation by excluding many of the diverse networks and places that make the city’s fashion culture unique

Archaeology · Art · Business · Clothing · Commodity · Deindustrialization · Exhibition · Fashion design · Fashion industry · Media studies · Narrative · Reputation · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · History · Museology