At the Fashion Institute of Technology, designer clothes and accessories evoke the exotic objects coveted by collectors during the Age of Discovery.
All objects illustrated are in the Museum at FIT; all photographs © The Museum at FIT.
Are you curious? Care to be amazed? Then a trip to New York’s Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is in order. On view there until April 20 is Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities, a modern-day take on the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century phenomenon known as the Wunderkammer (German for “chamber of wonders”), where European royals, aristocrats, and scholars displayed their collections of natural and manmade materials that, together, essentially formed a microcosm of the world’s knowledge at the time.
Precursors to the modern museum, Wunderkammern, also called cabinets of curiosities, often included examples of clothing, but that was just a starting point for Colleen Hill, the FIT’s senior curator of costume, who organized the show, drawing primarily from the museum’s wide-ranging holdings. For example, to evoke the appearance of early scientific specimens, she’s arranged an array of small glass jars containing earrings from a number of makers including Ted Muehling and Tiffany and Company. There are also brooches in the shape of bugs, coral, and shells and a luxurious gown by Fortuny, twisted and coiled, as it was intended to be stored to keep its pleats, but here resembling a mollusk. Or, since some cabinets included live animals, often unusual birds, there’s an “Aviary” containing a 1960s Christian Dior bolero jacket of green-dyed feathers and a feathered table by milliner-turned photographer Bill Cunningham, both reflecting high fashion’s centuries-long association with feathers.
On display are marvels of craftsmanship—dress forms, hat forms, and a miniature corset—that correlate to the tools included in historical Wunderkammern, as well as pieces that evoke the early collectors’ interest in the human body, among them a body-skimming 2013 dress by Arzu Kaprol with a skeletal design. Another fascination was with optical marvels such as telescopes, camera obscuras, prisms, and mirrors—evoked at FIT by objects embellished with eye-catching reflective materials or kaleidoscopic designs, such as a 1996 dress by CD Greene, designed for Tina Turner and adorned with rhinestones and small mirrors, or a gown by Jean Paul Gaultier in a phantasmagoric print. Wunderkammern often included a Kunstkammer, a room for art, primarily paintings—and fashion appreciates art, too.
Louis Vuitton teamed up with Jeff Koons to create a line of handbags reproducing iconic works by artists ranging from Titian to Van Gogh, and including the Mona Lisa. Alexander McQueen often referenced famous artworks in his designs, and Comme des Garçons riffs on Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus, which itself was contained in the Kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more—shoes, for instance, which were probably the fashion item most frequently found in historical cabinets, “since they were portable” Hill says, and a “way to represent the ceremonies and customs of cultures from around the world.” On a serious note, while offering an inventive new interpretation of the subject, Fashioning Wonder considers the complex legacy of the Wunderkammer and the role those early cabinets took in othering non-Europeans by including items from explorers who were “discovering”—and colonizing—other parts of the globe.
Beyond enlightening, Fashioning Wonder is designed to amuse and engage the visitor, who can touch objects, guess the identity or function of others, or hear “The Blue Danube” from the music-box handle of a 1950s umbrella—“a detail intended to add a bit of wonder to everyday life,” according to Hill, who adds: “Through their own examinations of the many objects on view, I hope that visitors leave feeling inspired and—most importantly—curious.”
