In the 1980s the themes of decline and death introduced new content and a revolutionary aesthetic into the world of fashion. Fashion morphs into a mirror that puts us face to face with our own mortality.
As a discourse diagonally opposed to that of nip and tuck, fashion emphasizes the passing of time, shows itself in love with transience and flirts with death. Identification with “life as it really is”, melancholy as an attitude and bold formal experiments used to be the preserve of art until then. Now they have been appropriated by art. Clothes made of human hair and black feathers have made it to the catwalk; tattered clothing is suddenly fashionable and a death’s head a trendy accessory.
This exhibition, including the work of Célio Braga, Birgit Jürgenssen, Delaine Le Bas, Alexander McQueen, Märta Mattsson, Daniele Tamagni, Juergen Teller, Walter Van Beirendonck and Bernhard Willhelm among others celebrates beauty and pain, poetical moments and dark humor. It presents fashion designers side by side with artists, haute couture and street fashion, photographs, videos, sculptures and installations. It aims to be inspirational, moving and contradictory, while at the same time weaving a thematically tight net.
LOVE & LOSS: Fashion and Mortality
March 13 – June 7, 2015
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz
