The few passersby who look up from their smartphones while walking down Toronto’s Bay Street notice a row of alabaster bottoms peeking cheekily through the office-tower window above. The peculiar sight makes them stop, quizzically, although the provocation isn’t intentional.
The mannequins are props for the upcoming Design Exchange exhibit Politics of Fashion/Fashion of Politics, where, once dressed, they are destined to spark conversations. They’ll be wearing examples of how the fabric of social change and cultural activism has long intersected with fashion and style. They still do.
Inside, preparations for the show are under way in the D/X library hall. Sara Nickleson, associate curator and director of collections, explains that the mannequins’ poses, configured by herself and exhibition designer Jeremy Laing, are meant to conjure the idea of an army. They stand at attention, often in groups. The last finishing touches of the curatorial process happen to parallel a designer’s runway collection process: The fashion brigades stand ready in the wings, waiting to be dressed in statement-making pieces, as the curator sees what “meaningful looks” of the 80 they have assembled will work together best.
With a more compressed lead time than usual – just six months – it’s down to the wire (garment loans are still arriving from designer archives, private collectors, institutions and even online purchases). “We’re right now securing items from [New York singer and drag artist] Joey Arias, who has Klaus Nomi’s estate and archive,” Nickleson says, referring to the famous plastic tuxedo the late German countertenor wore during performances as well as publicity shots from the 1970s. Nomi died from AIDS complications in 1983.
Nearby, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust boots speak to glam rock and what it did for gay culture in the 1980s, while a voluminous black Yohji Yamamoto coat demonstrates how “Yamamoto had said that he thought tight clothes were for the pleasure of men and that real femininity comes out when it’s covered up. That really spoke to me,” Nickleson says. The cocoon-like Yamamoto represents one of the three influential Japanese designers in the show (the others are Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons). All are notable for showing avant-garde tattered and torn black clothing in 1980s Paris and, adds Nickleson, for their clothing’s political relationship to the body. “Their take on dressing is radically different from Western ideals. They even talk about gender-neutral clothes rather than unisex clothing.”
One elaborately pleated “dinosaur” dress by Miyake has both a hood and ridged dorsal fin. A black Gaultier man skirt influenced by the Japanese leads into recent examples from Montreal designer Rad Hourani, the first to show a unisex collection at Paris’s haute couture shows. Nearby, a gold box swaddled in tissue contains an Issey Miyake handbag concurrent to Kawakubo’s first Hiroshima Chic collection – a potent political statement made even more so when combined with photographs of the 1945 bombing, which will be plastered on the pillar adjacent to the clothes.
Slated for display in the Design Exchange show, Catherine Malandrino’s 2001 Flag Dress was coincidentally released just prior to 9/11 – and became a patriotic hit.
Nickleson wears purple curator gloves as she shows a reporter around, handling luxurious rarities such as an armoured shoulder piece of brass paillettes by Alexander McQueen especially gingerly. As an example of how organizers have had to improvise even in the last week of exhibition’s mounting, she had originally planned to focus on the political undercurrents of McQueen’s work with tartan. “It references war and the Jacobite revolution and his heritage,” she says. His 1995 Highland Rape and 2006 Widows of Culloden collections specifically take on Scotland’s turbulent political history, periods when wearing Highland kit, an expression of cultural identity, had been illegal and, as tartan historian Jonathan Faiers has studied, Scottish tradition was commodified by the English. “I mean, I found one on eBay for $30,000,” Nickleson says of the plaid, but otherwise surviving examples were already committed to other exhibitions elsewhere. Thus garments like the McQueen shoulder piece (on loan from a private Canadian collector) will instead show his commentary on royalty and the military.
A leather poncho and a floor-length hand-embroidered bathrobe dress by Maison Martin Margiela, meanwhile, incorporate salvaged elements and glamorously address upcycling and sustainability. Their medium is their message, but the exhibit’s conversation about fast fashion is dominated rather more literally with Moschino’s iterations of fast-food worker uniforms and a stylized McDonald’s M, the brainchild of latter-day pop artist and house creative director Jeremy Scott. “He is all about satire and poking fun at the fashion industry and consumerism,” Nickleson says.
At one point, the curator unfurls a terry-cloth towel pinned top to bottom with campaign buttons – the ultimate accessory of democratic fashion. They are covered with slogans for long-ago Art Eggleton, Ed Broadbent and John Sewell campaigns and a legendary Toronto urban-affairs fight (“Expressway No, Transit Yes” and “Fighting the Spadina Expressway”). The buttons come from the collection of a former D/X intern’s mother. “That’s the funny thing about sourcing the way we did,” says Nickleson. “Things came from unexpected places.”
Not least of all are the unexpected boons that have come via guest curator Jeanne Beker. “Every time we met and talked about a new development, she always had a personal story about her relationship with the moment,” Nickleson says of the legendary fashion journalist (and new Globe Style columnist). Beker’s role shaping the exhibition helped secure more challenging pieces, like those from Scott and Hussein Chayalan. “Everyone we reached out to knew her.” (Beker is also creating an audio guide, recording some of her stories, and will host curator tours throughout the run.)
Someone else everybody knows: Margaret Sinclair Trudeau Kemper, whose wedding dress, the one she made herself to marry Pierre Trudeau in 1971, is on a rack, protected by knotted netting and a garment bag. It arrived with another, arguably more important, white dress best explained by a blue scrapbook the lender included with the shipment. “It’s the photo album from Margaret Trudeau’s 1977 trip to the White House, given to her by President and Mrs. Carter; the Presidential Seal is on the front, and it’s inscribed by both.”
The pages show photos of the receiving lines and dignitaries, with Mrs. Trudeau conspicuous in a simple white dress that isn’t notable for its label (it was a Montreal custom dressmaker) but for its length and the all-but-forgotten furor that caused. “Traditionally, women wore full-length gowns to the White House. She was apparently the first woman to wear a calf-length dress, and she had a tear in her pantyhose. And everyone thought it was really awful,” Nickleson explains of the controversy.
Given the scrutiny of politicians and their spouses today, with pundits analyzing the meaning of rolled-up sleeves on the campaign trail and the symbolic implications of a J.Crew cardigan, the Trudeau context is intriguing. There may be no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, but, in this case, the state of the nation’s most famous bedroom was certainly hinted at that state dinner. On one hand, the calf-length dress could simply have been free-spirited Maggie’s modern update on formal expectation; on the other – and especially in hindsight – it could also be read as a sartorial precursor to her impending rebellion, given that the visit was on the eve of her marital split (partying with the Rolling Stones and visits to Studio 54 came shortly after). In addition to five paper dresses from Trudeaumania 1968, pieces from the late prime minister’s own wardrobe (including a Dior cape) are en route.
In the exhibition space upstairs, the windows are whitewashed, for both functional and artistic reasons – it mutes the sunlight, and adds to the overall guerrilla aesthetic dominating a section on political T-shirts, such as the Sex Pistols example from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Seditionaries label or the slogans from Katharine Hamnett’s 1983 collection (including Choose Life, familiar to devotees of Wham! music videos).
The leopard-print burqa by Jeremy Scott is the showpiece that Shauna Levy, president of the Design Exchange, expects to see most on Instagram. “What we’re trying to do is really demonstrate how fashion is a tool for communication,” she says. “We embrace the notion that design is everything and I think that fashion is one of the platforms people most readily understand and identify with.”
A black dress from Hussein Chalayan’s controversial Between collection from 1998 will also be a lightning rod. For that show finale, models emerged in varying lengths of chadors, beginning with a nude one wearing a sliver that covered only her eyes and progressing in varying longer lengths. “Because there was an uproar about it, he has been very quiet about the meaning of his exhibition,” Nickleson says. Did the D/X request a specific length, like the provocative mini-chador? “We wanted to,” she says of the one she had hoped to secure. “But we couldn’t. That [collection] was pre-9/11 and they have since stopped showing it.”
One of the final zones is After Words, which features a video of Chalayan’s 2000 collection addressing immigrant displacement (such as the forced migration of his own Turkish Cypriot family after the upheaval in Cyprus in 1974). When it was first shown, the models stripped furniture of its covers and wore them as dresses, folding the frames into suitcases; the line came on the heels of the conflict in Kosovo and waves of displaced Serbian and Albanian refugees. At the D/X, the installation will relate back to the vestibule’s walls, which will hang with controversial Benetton ad-campaign imagery (including a Bosnian soldier’s uniform covered in blood) by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani.
After walking through the exhibition, attendees who don’t believe they consciously choose what to put on in the morning will find that in itself is a choice. Indeed, even nudity can makes a statement, as the PETA and Femen displays attest. Just ask those mannequins mooning the financial district.
Politics of Fashion/Fashion of Politics runs from Sept. 18 to Jan. 25 at the Design Exchange in Toronto (www.dx.org).
E-mail: natkinson@globeandmail.com