Long an integral part of San Francisco’s identity, fashion is also written into the DNA of one of that city’s flagship cultural institutions: the de Young Museum. In fact, the de Young is a major holder of costumes and textiles, with one of the largest collections of fashion in the United States, spanning 3,000 years of human history. A number of the museum’s major holdings, plus pieces lent from many fashionable San Franciscans, are on display at the museum’s delightful new exhibit, Fashioning San Francisco.
Fashioning San Francisco is self-consciously a west coast exhibition and seeks to separate itself from east coast shows. “We don’t want to just be mirroring the programs of museums back east,” said Thomas P Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Here we are in California, at the edge of the Pacific. We want to reflect the physicality of our location and our distinct traditions.”
Fashioning San Francisco looks west, drawing in many of the Pacific Rim’s finest designers, even as it showcases designs from European stalwarts such as Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Christian Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld. Featured designers from California westward include Frederick Gibson Bayh, a local powerhouse in the 1940s while designing for the legendary luxury department store Gump’s; Kaisik Wong, who learned his trade in San Francisco’s Chinatown and was perhaps best known for having a design ripped off by Balenciaga for its spring/summer 2002 collection; Japanese trailblazer Yohji Yamamoto, celebrated for his avant-garde aesthetic; and Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese founder of the luxury label Comme des Garçons.
“The collection here is really broad. It spans about 125 countries or cultures,” said exhibition curator curator Laura L Camerlengo. She added that Fashioning San Francisco is all about bringing fresh, new stories to its audiences. “My previous work with the museum set me up for thinking about how to tell broader narratives in the stories we tell, beyond the more typical and well-trodden exhibitions and themes.”
These broader narratives are evident in the avant-garde section of Fashioning San Francisco, in the form of dresses such as Vivienne Tam’s Chairman Mao, which has some resemblance to Andy Warhol’s Mao in how it recasts the famous photo of the Chinese leader into multiple forms, priest and schoolgirl among others. The dress, which premiered as part of Tam’s spring 1995 collection, caused a range of reactions, from confusion (one buyer speculated that the person on Tam’s dress was her father), to criticism that Tam was making light of a dictator responsible for horrifying acts.
Part of the fascination of Fashioning San Francisco is seeing a dress such as Chairman Mao as less of a contemporary object and more as moment in fashion’s vast history. We might speculate about where the dress’s former owner, identified in the exhibition as Sally Yu Leung, could have worn it, or we might compare it to Yamamoto’s adjacent avant-garde offering, also a ready-to-wear piece from 1995 but much more traditional in its aesthetics. It’s funny to think of both dresses arriving in San Francisco in spring 1995, perhaps even being worn to the same function.
Seeing these clothes as worn objects, not just pieces of fashion history, was very much at the forefront of Camerlengo’s mind as she curated this show. “One of the things I was really interested in was telling the stories of women,” she said. “I hope this exhibition helps to upend the narrative by connecting the clothes to these really important pillars of our community – suffragettes, poets, entrepreneurs, founders of key organizations, like the free library, Stern Grove, and the de Young Museum.”
Attention to the lives of the women who wore, owned and donated these objects to be part of the de Young’s permanent collection is something that distinguishes Fashioning San Francisco from other fashion-oriented museum exhibitions. Speaking with Camerlengo, she revealed a true passion to infuse feminist tones into the exhibition. This attention goes all the way down to the level of something like the attribution on an exhibit placard, which, she notes, has often been prey to sexism.
“We were thinking about things like even the simple act of writing a credit line,” said Camerlengo, “which historically would say ‘Gift of Mrs so-and-so’. That’s a way of obscuring a woman’s name, her identity. This presented a great opportunity to showcase the women’s names as their full name. We also say who wore it, and that’s a great way to put women back into the narratives around our collection.”
Camerlengo and her team have absolutely nailed the staging of the exhibit, which offers an uptown, night-out feeling while referencing many parts of San Francisco through innovative staging of the exhibition’s seven sections. Swanky music that follows the timeline of the exhibit runs for an hour – about the time an average attendee would take to see the show – joining nicely with the exhibit’s visual aesthetics to create an intimate and sensual feel: not the easiest thing to conjure in interior of a major art museum. “We really wanted to bring the city into the galleries,” said Camerlengo.
Another fun part of the exhibition is that it has partnered with Snap to present “mirrors” that allow attendees to see themselves virtually wearing three of the exhibition dresses, and to download photos of themselves. These mirrors give the show a playful energy, and such augmented reality experiences are things Camerlengo and Campbell, they told me, hope to bring more and more into shows. “It’s been really fun to see people interact with it,” said Camerlengo. “I have a four-year-old, and she thought it was the most amazing technology she’s ever tried.”
Fashioning San Francisco is a satisfying, evocative tribute to a lesser-known but no less important American fashion capital, even if it may often be obscured by New York. Camerlengo hopes that the exhibit might open – and change – some minds. “I hope people who view the exhibit will be so excited about San Francisco as a place and the different style narratives that we have here. I hope people are surprised and see that San Francisco has always been an international player in the field of fashion history.”
Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style is now on show at the de Young museum in San Francisco until 11 August
