Fashion Lives - A New Exhibition at the British Library.

I was invited by the British Library to devise and curate this exhibition promoting the new recordings of the National Life Story Collection, collected by the Library’s Sound Archive under the title ‘The Oral History of British Fashion’. Fashion is increasingly exhibited world-wide, and a range of scholarly exhibitions in Europe and the USA have established its significance as a vital constituent of modern material culture. ‘Fashion Lives’ was part of this continuum but was the first to be organised around sound as opposed to material objects, and the curatorial challenge was to make a visual exhibition based on oral history recordings from major participants in the last 50 years of the British fashion history. Rather than illustrating these tapes literally, using the orthodox method of exhibiting surviving dress on mannequins, I only selected printed material culture drawn from fashion archives and the library’s collection. The exhibition thus challenged the pre-conception of what a fashion exhibition should contain by using sound without recourse to conventional dress display techniques. To make my curatorial programme visually intelligible, I commissioned fashion practitioners rather than exhibition designers to work on particular elements of the display, which I was responsible for co-ordinating in the space. These included a wallpaper design by fashion designer Eley Kishimoto, photography by Gareth McConnell and graphic design by William Hall.