This boldly titled exhibition isn’t about powerdressing: shoulder-padded business suits are elbowed into the corner of a 1980s display dominated by pictures of Princess Diana. Instead, as this decision suggests, it’s about the powerful women who swapped pouring the tea for pouring themselves into anything from beaded cocktail dresses to twinsets to chiffon tea gowns.
The news-grabbing side of the exhibition comes at the end, with massed ranks of indentikit white manniquins wearing dresses donated by their owners: an icongruous collection where what broadcaster Kirsty Wark disarmingly describes as her “bellhop suit” and Miriam Gonzalez’s £30 red Zara dress stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Princess Charlene of Monaco’s dove grey Akris gown, specially commissioned from the designer to suit the exigencies of her jet-setting lifestyle. Together, the dresses are oddly uncompelling — draped over angular, too small dressforms like shed snakeskins which don’t retain any of their slithered-off owners’ powers.
It’s a distinct kind of power that co-curator Donna Loveday is chasing here. The exhibition documents the garment choices of politician’s wives, royalty, businesswomen and female fashion designers: women with purchasing power, as well as worldly influence. This gives it an uncomfortably aspirational feel, an artier cousin to the celebrity pages of Tatler.
But like a oil baron’s wife with a social conscience, this exhibition has something of an identity crisis. Before you reach the ranks of latter day businesswoman’s garb, there’s a whistlestop tour of 20th century dress history, for which veteran fashion historian Colin McDowell, was responsible. It houses another story struggling to get out, one of women shaking off heavy clothes.
We start with a display of corsets — ribbed and rigid as beetles’ shells, or poignantly tiny in bridal silk. These are followed by early sportswear: riding dresses, bathing dressess and tennis clothes all providing lighter alternatives to endless petticoats. They’re shown alongside a grumbling of media attention, either debating the propriety of showing ankles at tennis or using the nakedness of the Ancient Greeks to justify skimpier swimwear. There’s a stunningly pleated example of William Morris’s advocated “artistic dress,” too — all healthy linen and no boning — and one of Amelia Bloomer’s very modestly proposed but almost entirely rejected female trousers.
Its pace is dizzying — not least because under Zaha Hadid’s hectic design, it’s split into wedge-shaped sections outlined in neon green perspex and lit with shoals of fluorescent lights. The refreshing side of the unscholarly curation is that the clothes are lit brightly and seen close to, sometimes even without glass.
Fashion exhibitions are known for lacking the rigour of other schools of design or social history, and McDowell’s curation here doesn’t buck the stereotype. When we get to the suffragettes, there’s a fascinating satirical hankerchief that imagines a world run by women. But although the exhibition text explains that the suffragettes tried to escape this backlash by feminising themselves beyond criticism, there’s a frustrating lack of detail about their love of creating strong visual spectacles as well as pillar box blazes. A large floral creation is labelled “suffragette’s hat” without explanation of who wore it, where to, and how an immense picture hat would stay on a protester’s head.
Technical descriptions are missing, too: although not everyone will care if a slip is made from silk or acetate, without design information you lose the sense of these clothes as designed objects, not artefacts of the rich and famous. This sense is compounded by the presence of a bank of reproduction costumes worn by Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep in the film Suffragette — since it’s not even out until October 2015, it feels uncomfortably like a plug.
The exhibition relies again and again on Vogue editorials to showcase trends, and is out of its depth when fashion runs free from elite designers. This is demonstrated most clumsily in a tiny case designed to illustrate the 1990s, which features a 1992 fashion feature called “Grunge and Glory”, a single tartan Dr Marten boot, and two Spice Girls posters.
The present day is demonstrated still more eccentrically, with several examples of H&M clothes from different designer collab ranges, some with the tags still on. In an era where the ordinary consumer has so much power — from Pinterest to streaming fashion shows to blogging to Instagramming to street style — it’s shortsighted to choose as empowering an example of a famous designer handing her designs down to the masses for slightly cheaper prices.
The show’s message is a kind of manifesto in favour of female empowerment through consumerism. But it hasn’t examined it in any of the fairground mirrors that dot the exhibition. Yes, women are no longer required to wear power suits, but the pitfalls as well as the pleasures of enforced display are not examined. There’s Madonna in her Gaultier cone bra, and a carefully preserved magazine page of a certain Wonderbra ad, telling a narrative of sexual empowerment that effaces the workplace sexual harrassment and omnipresent male gaze that helped prevent women from venturing outside the typing pool. We hear Jackie Kennedy complaining that she could only spend the thousands of dollars that media critics attributed to her Paris shopping sprees if she wore sable underwear. But the exhibition follows similar lines of thought when it plays a clip of Margaret Thatcher discussing why she picked a navy dress to the UN during the Falklands War — to be comfortable, presumably there was no question of dove grey. And although a fine display of corsets opens the exhibition, its narrative of empowerment ignores the fact that the elaborately clinging jersey dresses that finish it are surely worn with latterday corset: Spanx.
Too often, the history of 20th century fashion ends up feeling like a history of brands: as ever more obscure fashion houses are having their names bought up and revived, a link to the past is distinctly marketable kind of prestige. But this exhibition replaces their voices with something still more deadening than fashion advertorial: the clothes are reduced to celebrity trophies or historical artefacts of absent real power. Fashion’s alchemy of fusing practical design with fine craftsmanship and aesthetic beauty or even art, are silenced: an odd choice for a Design Museum to be careless of the skill of these designers.
Women Fashion Power runs at the Design Museum until the 26th April 2015: read more here.
