Introduction
Fashion exhibitions are getting increasingly popular in recent years, inspire of the hostility towards fashion in the realm of academia. There are apparent conflicts and differences between academics and curators, regarding the role of the museum and the place of “fashion” in popular culture. Still, museum professionals observe fashion exhibitions to a new branch of the entertainment industry 1. The structuralist and post- structuralist approaches carry their perspective to understand a dressed body and offer different insights. Structuralism understands the body as a socially placed object while phenomenology looks at a dress as an embodied experience 2. The chosen piece of fashion for discussion in this paper is the Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, day suit, wool bouclé, 1966, France, which was a gift of Eleanor K. Graham. One of the two identical suits in the exhibition is an original by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Coco Chanel, the fashion designer, is famous for her trademark suits and timeless designs. The piece is exhibited at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in an exhibition called “Faking It: Originals, Copies, and Counterfeits”. What inspired the exhibition is the rise of legal cases in the fashion industry in recent years. The highlight of the show are the two identical Chanel suits; one is original, and one is the licensed copy.
The current piece of wool day suit shows a reflection of menswear idea that the designer borrowed to create women’s attire. The outfit is just the right choice for the women in the post-war era that were discovering their independence.
____________________1 Steele, Valerie. 2008. Museum quality: The rise of the fashion exhibition. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 12, (1): 7-302 Entwistle, Joanne. 2015. The fashioned body. Cambridge: Polity
Chanel introduced the soft knit as the new fashion fabric in wool that created softer and lighter clothing for more comfort. The day suit in shades of brown, beige and black, and made of wool offers greater comfort and look along with adding more confidence to the wearer. Wool is known to be a soft and flexible material, and the fitted sleeves of the jacket and a well-fitted skirt leave a polished and sophisticated look. The dress emphasizes the natural body shape rather than distorting it, and thus making the women look and feel more feminine. The women of those times were looking for the greater freedom of movement and more comfort and knitted fabrics in wool became highly popular with women. This is one of the historic pieces by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Entwistle, Joanne. 2015. The fashioned body. Cambridge: Polity Link
Steele, Valerie. 2008. Museum quality: The rise of the fashion exhibition. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 12, (1): 7-30
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