A juggernaut of a fashion exhibition, Giorgio Armani: A Retrospective, has opened at the Royal Academy in London.
Since its launch at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000, it has stopped off at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The show comes with a lot of baggage. In New York it attracted pages of controversial press coverage. First, because there were rumours that Armani had donated about $15-million to the Guggenheim, a move interpreted by many commentators as a sweetener. And second, because the show questioned traditionalist assumptions about the function of a fine-art museum.
Blake Gopnik of the United States-based Globe and Mail fulminated that ‘the Guggenheim exhibition is a vapid pageant of appreciation for a celebrity designer … more sales pitch than curating. Instead of the serious attention afforded his fellow artists, Armani gets just what he’s used to — a fashion show.”
In The New York Times, Herbert Muschamp appreciated the exhibition’s visual impact, but suspected that ‘importing fashion-world values into a museum’s decision-making process is something else. The transferral of those trade values is not grand at all. Historical amnesia, intellectual pretension, cronyism … sycophancy, bribery, betrayal, all wrapped up in press releases passed off as journalism: these are some of the lubricants that make the wheels of fashion turn.”
There was, indeed, something quite breathtaking about artist and theatre director Robert Wilson dressing Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous spiral ramp in luminous white gauze. The visitor entered one of the iconic spaces of modern American architecture to find it transformed audaciously into a giant garment.
The collection of more than 400 suits, coats and dresses, exquisitely mounted on near-invisible armatures, resembled a gathering of headless angels hovering in subtly lit clouds of pure colour on the incline of a catwalk and were accompanied by the sound-collage of composer Michael Galasso. It was a Jacob’s ladder for the celebrity age.
The conceptual apparatus of the show was less convincing. In keeping with a curatorial style that elevates clothes to the status of iconic art pieces, the exhibits were presented as decontextualised objects for aesthetic appreciation.
Grouped according to style and colour, the creative and commercial development of Armani’s output was impossible to follow. And there was little attempt to inform the audience of the historical, social, technological, economic or geographical contexts that make fashion a subject worthy of sustained study. The overriding impression was of a glossy but ephemeral department-store window.
This clash of cultures and intentions looks set to be replayed in London. Admittedly, British gallery visitors have become more used to contemporary fashion in national art and design institutions, from Versace at the V&A to Philip Treacy and Manolo Blahnik at the Design Museum. Yet there is something rather piquant about the meeting of Armani and the Academy (particularly as its exhibitions secretary, Norman Rosenthal, is on record as saying at the time of the New York show that he ‘personally wouldn’t do an Armani exhibition”).
That the venerable grandfather of British art establishments should open its portals to a dressmaker seems especially shocking. Or does it? In recent years the Academy has come under heavy fire for its apparently cavalier attitude to the sanctity of ‘high art”.
It is a delicious coincidence that, in the American furore over Armani, some commentators linked the Guggenheim’s shameful debt to the designer to a similarly questionable relationship between Charles Saatchi and the Brooklyn Museum, to whom Saatchi donated $160 000 to support the Sensation exhibition, itself a product of Rosenthal’s regime and full of Saatchi’s own acquisitions (their value increased by every inclusion in an international show).
Furthermore, the Academy’s current display of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s collection of Victorian painting has drawn accusations of dumbing down.
However, it could be argued that, in the publicity-drunk era of Damien Hirst, the rapacious values of the fashion world are more relevant to contemporary curatorial and creative practice than outdated hierarchies of artistic production.
Whatever the merits of the hoary old art versus commerce/fashion debate, it is clear that fashion’s precarious foothold in the art and museum world is gaining purchase.
The career of Yves Saint Laurent provides the most potent reminder of how art and fashion have always been uneasy but committed partners. He assiduously maintained a public image as a fragile and tortured artist of clothing.
His most commercial pieces, such as the tailored evening suit for women, pioneered in 1966 as Le Smoking, were presented alongside self-consciously artistic collections that sat more comfortably in the category of theatre design than fashion. They were all deliberate indicators of Saint Laurent’s artistic vocation — promoting his brand and assisting sales.
This strategy was given material clout in 1984, when Diana Vreeland staged a retrospective of his work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The controversy surrounding this show, the first at the museum devoted to a living designer, set a precedent for the furore surrounding the Armani exhibition.
In an uncanny premonition of a trend that would see Armani following BMW and Harley-Davidson motorcycles into the Guggenheim, art critic Robert Storr accused Vreeland of ‘fusing the Yin and Yang of vanity and cupidity, the Yves Saint Laurent show was the equivalent of turning gallery space over to General Motors for a display of cadillacs”.
Fashion curator Fiona Anderson of the National Museums of Scotland echoes the concerns of many that such views do curators and designers a disservice. She draws attention to ‘the contradictions which persist in our culture around perceptions of the fashioned body and the fashion industry. These are starkly apparent in some museums, representing an outmoded ideological battle between high and popular culture —
‘Prejudice, fear and suspicion still surround the status of fashion within many galleries. This sometimes takes the form of fashion being tolerated as a form of entertainment which will pull in the crowds, with no acknowledgement of the serious contribution it also makes to the educational role of the museum.”
More than anything else, however, it is fashion’s slippery nature that helps to perpetuate the prejudice. And exhibitions like those of Saint Laurent and Armani, with their assaults on the hallowed spaces of art that have themselves long since realised the economic benefits of coming on like exclusive boutiques, remind us that culture and commerce are more closely related than some critics would like.
They are perhaps wasting their energy, for, as fashion theorist Caroline Evans argues in her new book Fashion at the Edge, it is in the unsettling realm of contemporary avant-garde fashion that we see Western society’s deepest concerns and neuroses most vividly reflected. The catwalk and the department store vitrine have, in some respects, supplanted the artist’s atelier as a fulcrum for the expression of modernity.
So, though Armani’s reputation as an avant-gardist is questionable, when the doors of the Academy open towards the West End, the show within should set a perfect mirror for those lost souls who value shopping over all other human experiences. —