July 27, 2010
Ronald Stoops
'Phantasmagoria: The Amazing Lost and Found', photography by Ronald Stoops. Featuring an evening dress by Christian Dior, 1955. Museum no. T.118-1974 24 February - 8 May 2005 Spectres sets out to reveal the shadows and experiences that form a 'fashion memory' in contemporary dress. In showing the hidden, yet haunting, connections between recent fashion and its past, it uses pieces drawn from avant-garde designers, from the V&A fashion collection and from the archive at ModeMuseum in Antwerp. Set up as a series of fairground attractions, Spectres invites the visitor into a labyrinth of associations: a shadow lantern throws silhouettes, enlarged maquettes look like games for grown-ups, rotating cogs make and break patterns. In creating this experimental show, fashion curator Judith Clark invited fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo to provide the drawings, avant-garde jeweller Naomi Filmer to create mannequin prosthetics and fashion theorist Caroline Evans to lend quotations that evoke the complexity of dress today.
