Bide, B orcid.org/0000-0002-5531-7190 (2021) Fashion City or Museum of Fashion? Exploring the Mutually Beneficial Relationship between London’s Fashion Industry and Fashion Exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum. GeoHumanities. ISSN 2373-566X
Abstract
As the commodity chains supporting the fashion industry have become ever more global and complex, so the work of constructing and maintaining the reputations of fashion cities such as London has also needed to evolve. Museums have played a key role in this process through their dissemination of discursive narratives about the places, spaces, and people that constitute London’s symbolic fashion capital. Taking the Victoria and Albert Museum as a primary case study, this paper explores how changes to the networks and processes of the fashion city in the decades following the Second World War were connected to the growth of fashion within the museum. Looking at two key exhibitions: Britain Can Make It (1946) and Fashion: An Anthology (1971), it traces how the museum responded to processes of deindustrialization and cultural change by bringing the city’s commercial fashion cultures into the museum space, resulting in the museum becoming an important site for the fashion city. Finally, it asks whether the legacy of this process has resulted in increasingly narrow and homogenous fashion exhibitions that have the potential to harm London’s fashionable reputation by excluding many of the diverse networks and places that make the city’s fashion culture unique.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Copyright 2021 by American Association of Geographers. This is an author produced version of an article published in GeoHumanities. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | consumption; culture industry; fashion city; fashion exhibition; museum |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Design (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 02 Aug 2021 14:22 |
Last Modified: | 21 Dec 2022 01:13 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Routledge |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/2373566x.2021.1923405 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:176506 |