The Zaha Hadid-designed Women Fashion Power exhibition opens at the Design Museum today.
The show
focuses on 25 high-profile women from politics, business, culture and
fashion who have personally contributed outfits and interviews to the
show.
The exhibition examines how these women have used fashion
“to define and enhance their positions in the world” according to the
Design Museum.
Zaha
Hadid Architects’ design is structured around two central hubs or
“explosions”, one holding an exploratory fashion timeline and the other
the Arena of Power, which focuses on the 25 women.
The explosion
concept is an evocation of the power and energy of fashion and Hadid’s
practice says: “Each fragment of the explosion is employed as a mode of
display” highlighting both individual pieces and a sense of
cohesiveness.
Suspended mirrored panels “accentuate the sense of fragmented energy” and forge connections between the displays.
ZHA
says: “Thus, visitors experience the exhibition akin to how we
experience fashion on a daily basis – as an endless series of visual
fragments, each one communicating the distinct personality and desires
of the individual, yet collectively defining a visual language that
embodies the ideas and attitudes of their time.”
Clothing,
photography, archive footage and interviews have been used to tell
individual fashion stories in the Arena of Power and Hadid has worked
alongside co-curators Colin McDowell – a fashion expert and commentator –
and Design Museum head of curatorial Donna Loveday across the
exhibition.
Loveday
says that all of the women in the exhibition were chosen as they are
“leaders in their field” and that “they understand the clothes they wear
are part of the way they communicate with the world”.
The
exhibition also examines the last 150 years of women’s fashion as an
immersive visual timeline, taking visitors on a journey “from the
restrictive bone corsets of the 19th century to the statement Louboutin
heels of today” the Design Musuem says.
Hadid
is also one of the subjects of the exhibition and features alongside
the likes of Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti, director of the
Serpentine Galleries Julia Peyton-Jones, fashion designer Roksanda
Llincic and founder of Net-a-Porter Natalie Massenet.
The
Design Museum says that Women Fashion Power asks whether it is time to
reassess the role of fashion in the public sphere – “not a frivolous
distraction, but an essential component of the working woman’s toolkit”.
(Wed, 29 Oct 2014 | By Tom Banks, Design Week)
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