Kinds of Closets: Reimagining the Experience of Fashion Installation

Viewing a museum object from a queer perspective requires understanding its points of departure from the creator’s original concept. In addition to creating new possibilities for the visual experience, this departure is crucial to reimagining the relationships between fashion, museum space, and body politics. In this paper, Marius Janusauskas adopts the position of an exhibitor to reflect on the significance of the body in contemporary fashion exhibitions. How is the body built through emotions and memory? And how might the strategy of presenting a garment “minus the body” potentially trigger affective responses from viewers?

The body plays a crucial role in fashion, as it not only maps categories of culture, gender, race, and age onto the garment but also determines the garment’s lines, length, shape, volume, and pattern by evoking different imaginaries. But what happens when the body and its cultural markers are absent from the displayed garment? Does the latter then lose its sociocultural significance? Or does it transform into something ambiguous and poetic?