Norman Rosenthal, former chief director of the Royal Academy of Arts, once commented that a fashion exhibition would be staged over his “dead body”. The statement summed up art’s ignorance of fashion, from a curatorial perspective, at the time. Without getting into semantics, the relationship between the authorship of art and the artistic aspect of fashion has long existed (and almost always positive) but it’s only in recent years that a more modern approach to the merit of fashion in a gallery space has been adopted. Especially in our city.
Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) has been a conspicuous addition to the city’s otherwise banal urbanscape. Architecturally, it’s flexible and adaptive, assuming the position of an important civic space. But it also represents a shift in how people locally, nationally and internationally view Brisbane. For years we’ve tried to rebuff the intellectual and cultural stagnation that was assigned to our inner city postcode. But it all changed with the development of GOMA.
Already host to Warhol and Picasso, and following on from last year’s successful Easton Pearson retrospective, Brisbane’s GOMA has scored another major fashion coup. Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones considers the creation of a hat; from the initial stages of inspiration to the final design shown at the salon. Initially a collaboration between London’s V&A Museum and Jones, GOMA is Australia’s exclusive venue for this exhibition. Exciting, because to see one of Jones’ whimsical creations is to witness nothing less than a work of art.
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