Authoring Exhibitions with Judith Clark

Judith Clark, Professor of Fashion and Museology at LCF, is reinventing how we engage with fashion in museum spaces. Known for her innovative exhibition-making, such as If You Know You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence, Judith turns fashion displays into an immersive and experiential journey. With collaborations with designers like Hussein Chalayan and Christian Lacroix, Clark has continuously explored fashion’s relationship with history and modernity, challenging conventional museology. In this interview, Clark discusses her distinctive approach, from creating atmospheric experiences with Loro Piana’s tactile fabrics to redefining the concept of taste in fashion through The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined. Through her work, Judith Clark invites us to reconsider what fashion is and how it can be experienced and understood in museum settings.

hube: As a Professor of Fashion and Museology, how do you perceive the evolving relationship between fashion and art in the context of museum exhibitions?

Judith Clark: I think the conversation has shifted beyond recognition—it used to be a question asked about classification, or conceptual power, or the degree to which one or other was perceived as more commercial and so on; now there is a more nuanced dialogue within museum culture that allows the boundaries to be more porous. I look to the history of exhibition-making, and I take one of its forerunners to be installation art to inform my work so that the relationship you mention shifts beyond the object to its ability to be re-contextualised. We can move on via re-description, and for me, that is about re-presentation, quite literally.

h: You’ve described yourself as an exhibition-maker rather than a curator. Could you elaborate on this distinction and how it influences your approach to fashion exhibitions?

JC: I trained as an architect, so I work in the round, so it would be impossible for me to see an exhibition as a list of objects without using the opportunity to harness other associative (spatial) possibilities. This means that I am always considering which elements from my research become a prop, a motif, a surface, lighting, styling and so on. It is like building a detailed 3D essay that links the objects to a broader visual culture. Creating more experimental versions of this is central to my current work. It strays into a debate around the curator as an author or artist. I feel it is disingenuous to think of an exhibition setting as being neutral, but degrees matter, and I find this aspect of it interesting.

h: What was your overarching vision when curating If You Know You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence, and how did you aim to encapsulate the brand’s century-long journey? 

JC: The exhibition is about six generations of a family, an intimate story, and also a very big story if you think of the Maison’s reach now; there is, within it, the story about finding the finest fibre and the intimate work of breeding individual animals, and the complex processes of production: the story zooms in and out in time and space, and I found that really compelling as an element of the exhibition brief.

h: Loro Piana is renowned for its exceptional materials. How did you approach showcasing the tactile and sensory qualities of these fabrics within the exhibition space?

JC: Loro Piana was an ideal project around which to think about representing a story via means other than objects and text. The softness, the lightness, the light-heartedness, as well as the serious and compelling quasi-allegorical quest in the title, all lend themselves to ideas around atmospheres and about attention to every tiny material decision (I lined the walls in cashmere, for example, and gradually the floors as well, so the visitor was in a softer and softer space, quieter and quieter.) The story morphs from archival museology to enveloping the visitor – it also allowed the exhibition to mirror the century via changing attitudes to museum practices and expectations—from ideas around looking to more experiential practices.

h: Given Loro Piana’s long-standing relationship with Chinese cashmere producers since the 1960s, how did you integrate this cross-cultural narrative into the exhibition’s storytelling?

JC: I wanted to work explicitly with this relationship from the start—the exhibition reflects a strong and enduring relationship with China. I found various, I hope, poetic ways to reflect this through the notion of distance throughout the exhibition. I will give you two examples from the first and last rooms. First, upon entering the exhibition, you are standing in a room that resembles an Italian museum with masterpieces borrowed from the Pinacoteca di Varallo, local to Loro Piana’s HQ, as a homage to the host museum which borrows international museum art collections. The wall opposite the entrance has within it a panel of loosely woven textile that allows the visitor to look through to mannequins wearing dramatic silhouettes. Placed beside the mannequin closest to the panel is a scale model of Inner Mongolia—in miniature form, it looks further away and is blurred and softened by the textile—the blurring of details that occurs at a great distance. This is what exhibition-making can do; it can add rhetorical emphasis to an idea. The visitor sees where they are going but not yet in focus. The second example is the last room, which has a film projected onto eight screens. The film intersperses the footage from the collection and transport of fibre from China to Italy and the many hands it passes through with footage of the making of the exhibition—again zooming in and out from landscape to model. I commissioned the eminent composer Guo Wenjing to create a soundscape for the space that mixed traditional Chinese bamboo instruments with an Italian compositional structure, which he did with a small musical ensemble. The doubling runs through the exhibition.

h: In looking into Loro Piana’s archives, were there any unexpected discoveries that influenced the direction or themes of the exhibition? 

JC: I loved going to the archives, and I also loved being in the wonderfully green landscape that runs alongside the Sesia River and the surrounding mountainous region near Varallo, where the archive is situated. I discovered the incredibly rich cultural history of the region. There are a number of fantastically beautiful objects in the archive, from sample books that are so huge they are like a Borgesian library in themselves to fragments of colour variants that are hard to distinguish with the naked eye. But I think it was touching the garments that I remember most vividly.

h: What interactive or experiential elements did you incorporate to ensure visitors not only viewed but also felt and understood the essence of Loro Piana? 

JC: I remember being amused when I was asked to exhibit Loro Piana, as it is a house that is associated with discretion. How does one exhibit discretion? The task was to keep the visitors’ attention, not overwhelming them but intriguing them. There are hybrid silhouettes that show the material intricacy possible with their savour faire, shown, not spoken. It is all to do with the care and attention to detail—I felt if that were tended to, something of Loro Piana would come through.

h: In The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined, you explored shifting perceptions of vulgarity in fashion. How do you believe contemporary fashion continues to challenge or redefine these boundaries?

JC: The idea of the Vulgar is always imagined in relation to shifts in taste, but as we know, it is declared at any given moment as an absolute. The Vulgar exposes the scandal of Good Taste was written by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and inscribed on an emblem at the entrance of the exhibition—that summed it up. We worked against expectations. Fashion, by definition, works at those boundaries and too often polices them. If you think of the origins of the word, it is about sharing, and it is about the common good. Fashions can only exist if there is consensus.

h: Having collaborated with designers like Hussein Chalayan and Christian Lacroix, how do these partnerships shape the narratives you build within your exhibitions?

JC: Both have changed the way I thought and think about fashion, without a doubt. I have called upon them personally in very different ways to participate in projects or lend designs to be included in shows. But it is looking at their work that has been so important to me. It is interesting they are the two examples you chose as they work so differently—as I have collaborated with many designers—but your intuition is absolutely right. When I started working with fashion, they were a constant reminder of something: an attitude to history and the spectacular potential of its recoveries (Lacroix) and treating it as a kind of laboratory (Chalayan).

h: As you reflect on your career in fashion curation, what new themes or concepts are you eager to explore in your upcoming projects? Are there particular narratives or mediums you haven’t yet discovered but are interested in pursuing?

JC: I opened a gallery in 1997 in Notting Hill to install small exhibitions of dress, and I still run an experimental studio alongside my academic work and professional/museum work. This is to make sure that I am testing ideas continuously, often now via hypothetical exhibitions built at 1:12 scale. Those projects can be quick fire model or prop making, or can be months and months of research and crafted objects created collaboratively.
An example is a project that I started a few years ago looking at the Judgement of Paris myth; it looks at a story that has been represented within art history over and over again and has within it fashion’s basic question around competing attributes. A recent example took on the form of a ring I designed that was shown at the MAXXI in Rome last year; before that, a set of 12 elongated metal ‘nails for a hut’ each the profile of a nymph’s hair curl, exhibited at Atelier Amden on a Swiss mountainside. I am currently working on a book that articulates some of the themes running through my work and a solo show in Perth, Australia, for next year. The second half of your question is important, yes, finding different ways of representing potential exhibitions and working out my own artistic idiom.