MODAM MUSEUM AND SCHOOL OF FASHION
Location: Milano, Italy
Year: 2005-2006
In 1999, Claire Wilcox,
curator of Textiles and Dress at London’s V&A Museum, curated an exhibition
called “Fashion in Motion”. The exhibition was a radical break from the
tradition of modelling. Wilcox had runway models walk through the museum as
everyday life. The idea was to remove fashion from our view of it as an object
of consumption to the context of the everyday.
Fashion is time dependent, not only from the material of costume in motion to the seasonal changing of styles in time. A traditional museum building and traditional exhibition program attempts to stop time: to remove objects from the context of everyday life. Our proposal attempts, like Wilcox’s exhibition, to put fashion in the museum back in motion. Therefore, instead of separating the functions of teaching and exhibiting, our project suspends this difference by literally suspending a runway, a red carpet, as the exhibition space, which runs through the length and section of the teaching spaces.
On this runway, everyday students, live models, animated videos and visitors move through the work and teaching spaces, where they can be seen from above and below as an everyday event. The same idea of fashion in motion can be seen in the building itself. Instead of being seen as an object in the landscape, the building is a fabric itself, a landscape with the folds and pleats of a piece of cloth, torqued against the static forms of the adjacent building complex. As fashion repeatedly breaks from established boundaries, so too does this building break from the boundaries of site and object to become a vortex, only here, instead of spiraling outward, this museum creates a centripetal vortex that pulls its being and program into a centric energy that animates the interior.
Fashion is time dependent, not only from the material of costume in motion to the seasonal changing of styles in time. A traditional museum building and traditional exhibition program attempts to stop time: to remove objects from the context of everyday life. Our proposal attempts, like Wilcox’s exhibition, to put fashion in the museum back in motion. Therefore, instead of separating the functions of teaching and exhibiting, our project suspends this difference by literally suspending a runway, a red carpet, as the exhibition space, which runs through the length and section of the teaching spaces.
On this runway, everyday students, live models, animated videos and visitors move through the work and teaching spaces, where they can be seen from above and below as an everyday event. The same idea of fashion in motion can be seen in the building itself. Instead of being seen as an object in the landscape, the building is a fabric itself, a landscape with the folds and pleats of a piece of cloth, torqued against the static forms of the adjacent building complex. As fashion repeatedly breaks from established boundaries, so too does this building break from the boundaries of site and object to become a vortex, only here, instead of spiraling outward, this museum creates a centripetal vortex that pulls its being and program into a centric energy that animates the interior.
Concept
Drawings
Model photos
Images
