Virginia Postrel has an interesting column in Atlantic Monthly on the aesthetic purpose of fashion in museums:
The Boston exhibit's comment book records a debate between fans, mostly women, who praise the museum for displaying an "inspiring" and "seldom seen" art form and detractors, mostly men, who decry its descent into commercialism. "What's next? Victoria's Secret's Xmas Collection?" writes one. "People in the museum world complain that fashion is not art, and they think it is unworthy of being in an art museum," says Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "Fashion is really seen as the bastard child of capitalism and female vanity."
Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics. Critics who decry fashion collections are less troubled by the prescribed costumes of dynastic China or the aristocratic dress of baroque France than by the past century's clothes. With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.
Prejudice aside, it's hard to come up with objections to fashion collections that don't apply to other museum departments. Fashion is mass produced? So are prints and posters, often more so than haute couture. Ephemeral? So are works on paper. Utilitarian? So are pots and vases. Customized to an individual? So were suits of armor. As for the fickleness of fashion, the history of Western art is a story of changing styles. And however much critics may despise commerce, many undisputed masterpieces were works for hire. "Paintings were marketable goods which competed for the attention of the purchaser," writes the historian Michael North in Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. Michelangelo and Ghiberti got paid.
Read the whole thing. I don't have much to comment about it, although I agree about how are society tends to denigrate fashion as an economic rather than an aesthetic choice. Frankly it is both.
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In agreeing with the statement "Fashion is really seen as the bastard child of capitalism and female vanity," I appreciate Postrel's assessment: After all, the vast history of Western Art is no more than the bastard child of wealth and religion and the glorification of war, i.e., male vanity. {har :> }
That said, I think she's missing something: Art is a system (sometimes subconscious) for interpreting the 'languages' of different thinking styles (genetically pre-wired neurocircuitry?), and then synthesizing the conversations between peers, even as they span generations and eras. (This is why we can identify stylistic movements as belonging to certain eras -- Art is a form of, and sign of, species synchronization.)
Both art and fashion are also languages of the practitioners. If you can translate them (and you are more of a global thinker than linear thinker), you should be able to tell where we are in the recursive cycles that define human history: Positive or Negative? (Renaissance or Middle Ages?) Yin or Yang?
If you can read the recursive cycles in the history of fashions (an idea which Vonnegut may have been proposing in his rejected thesis), you should be able to measure generational lags (mirroring the lag in certain input/output responses), not to mention charting global weather trends ;>
But then you'd have to consider the possible Ice-Nine- or anti-Ice-Nine-like ramifications of whether recognizing generational lags would be positive or negative. Or, better, what would happen if you could sync a largely positive generation with a largely negative generation on a positive/positive theme?
(Might you eliminate bad teaching perhaps?)
Btw, her criticism of the Met's Costume Institute rings a little hollow -- it's a remarkable use of space considering financial and legal limitations (and I don't feel a need to see every detail of a garment if I trust the curators to point out things important to their concept).