Long an integral part of San Francisco’s identity, fashion is also engraved in the DNA of the de Young Museum, one of the city’s most important cultural institutions. In fact, de Young is a major costume and textile owner who owns one of the largest fashion collections in the United States, spanning 3,000 years of human history. Some of the museum’s important items, as well as pieces borrowed from many fashionable San Franciscans, are on display in the museum’s delightful new exhibit, Fashioning San Francisco.
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Fashioning San Francisco is consciously a west coast exhibition and aims to distinguish itself from east coast shows. “We don’t want to just mirror the programs of the museums in the east,” said Thomas P Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “We’re here in California, on the edge of the Pacific. We want to reflect the physicality of our location and our different traditions.”
Although Fashioning San Francisco showcases designs from European stalwarts such as Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Christian Dior and Karl Lagerfeld, it also looks west, attracting many of the Pacific Rim’s top designers. Prominent designers from Western California include Frederick Gibson Bayh, a local powerhouse who designed for legendary luxury department store Gump’s in the 1940s; Kaisik Wong, who learned his craft in San Francisco’s Chinatown and perhaps has a design that was most copied by Balenciaga for its spring/summer 2002 collection; Japanese pioneer Yohji Yamamoto, known for his avant-garde aesthetics; and Rei Kawakubo, Japanese founder of luxury brand Comme des Garçons.
“The collection here is really extensive. It covers about 125 countries or cultures,” said Laura L Camerlengo, exhibition curator. He added that Fashioning San Francisco’s goal is to bring fresh, new stories to its audience. “My previous work with the museum led me to think about how to tell broader narratives in the stories we tell, beyond the more typical and conventional exhibits and themes.”
These larger narratives are evident in Fashioning San Francisco’s avant-garde section, in the form of dresses like Vivienne Tam’s Chairman Mao; This dress bears some similarities to Andy Warhol’s Mao in the way it transforms the famous photograph of the Chinese leader into various forms. , priest and schoolgirl among others. The dress, which premiered as part of Tam’s spring 1995 collection, provoked a variety of reactions, from confusion (one buyer claimed the man in Tam’s dress was her father) to criticism that Tam had underestimated a dictator responsible for horrific acts. .
Part of the fascination of Fashioning San Francisco is seeing a dress like Chairman Mao’s as a moment in fashion’s vast history rather than a contemporary object. We can speculate about where the former owner of the dress, identified in the exhibition as Sally Yu Leung, might have worn it, or compare it to Yamamoto’s adjacent avant-garde collection (also a ready-to-wear piece from 1995, but much more). traditional in its aesthetics. It’s funny to think that both dresses arrived in San Francisco in the spring of 1995, perhaps even being worn for the same purpose.
Seeing these clothes as worn-out objects, rather than simply as pieces of fashion history, was at the forefront of Camerlengo’s mind when curating this exhibition. “One of the things that really interested me was telling women’s stories,” she said. “I hope this exhibition helps elevate the narrative by connecting clothing to these truly important pillars of our community—suffragists, poets, entrepreneurs, founders of important organizations like the free library, Stern Grove, and the de Young Museum.”
Attention to the lives of the women who wore these objects, owned them, and donated them to become part of de Young’s permanent collection is something that distinguishes Fashioning San Francisco from other fashion-focused museum exhibitions. In her conversation with Camerlengo, she revealed that she has a real passion for adding a feminist tone to the exhibition. This attention goes down to the level of a reference to an exhibition banner, which, she notes, often falls victim to sexism.
“We were thinking about things like the simple act of writing a line of credit,” Camerlengo said. “Historically it meant ‘Gift from Mrs. So-and-So.’ It’s a way of hiding a woman’s name, her identity. This is great for women’s names being displayed as their full names.” “It presented an opportunity. We also say who wore it, and it’s a great way to reintroduce women into the narratives in our collection.”
Camerlengo and his team have absolutely perfected the staging of the exhibition, with its innovative staging of the exhibition’s seven sections referencing many parts of San Francisco while also giving the feel of an uptown, night out. Following the exhibition’s timeline, the flamboyant music runs for an hour, the time it would take for the average attendee to see the show, and combines beautifully with the visual aesthetics of the exhibition, creating an intimate and sensuous feel: not the easiest thing to create indoors. A large art museum. “We really wanted to bring the city to the galleries,” Camerlengo said.
Another fun aspect of the exhibit is that it is partnering with Snap to offer “mirrors” that allow attendees to virtually see themselves wearing three of the exhibit dresses and download photos of themselves. These mirrors give the show a playful energy, and such augmented reality experiences hope to add more to the shows, Camerlengo and Campbell told me. “It was really fun to see people interact with it,” Camerlengo said. “I have a four-year-old, and he thought this was the most amazing technology he had ever tried.”
Fashioning San Francisco is a satisfying, evocative tribute to a lesser-known but no less important American fashion capital, even if it’s often obscured by New York. Camerlengo hopes the exhibition can open and change some minds. “I hope people who watch the exhibit get very excited about San Francisco as a place and the different styles of expression that we have here. I hope people will be surprised and see that San Francisco has always been an international player in the field of fashion history.”