Review of ‘Luxury 2.0: Drape, Structure and Digitality’
School of Fashion at LASALLE College of the Arts
‘Honey, Your Opinion’s Kinda Funny’, one of the meta-publications on 1McNallyFashion.com.
Every year, the School of Fashion at LASALLE College of the Arts stages a multi-disciplinary fashion exhibition in response to a given theme. This year, students from the BA(Hons) Fashion Media & Industries and BA(Hons) Fashion Design & Textiles programmes worked collaboratively to respond to the theme of luxury. Titled ‘Luxury 2.0: Drape, Structure and Digitality’, the show seeks to question what luxury means in today’s context. The exhibition showcases the studio works of LASALLE’s aspiring fashion image-makers, designers, producers, and story-tellers, contemplating the multifarious ways luxury can be understood.
At its core, ‘Luxury 2.0’ is a digital fashion exhibition. Staged both online as a meta-publication ‘:publication’, and physically at LASALLE’s Brother Joseph McNally Gallery, the exhibition exists in two spaces. The former is hosted online at 1McNallyFashion.com, and the latter offers visitors the opportunity to experience the works spatially and in-person.
Installation view of ‘Luxury 2.0: Drape, Structure and Digitality’ at Brother Joseph McNally Gallery. Image courtesy of Weiqi Yap.
The curatorial premise of the exhibition is a timely one. According to McKinsey & Company’s annual ‘The State of Fashion’ report¹, Covid-19 has necessitated a shift in the way luxury operates. The tenets of luxury may have once solely revolved around exclusivity, aspiration, and quality. But today, definitions of luxury have expanded to include digitalisation, the casualisation of dress, and a renewed focus on comfort.
In this exhibition, the students propose a further step: the end result is a deeply personal collection of works that speak primarily to the idea of personal luxuries. The luxury of being at ease with one’s identity, of liberation and knowledge, of freedom and individuality. The theme is explored through the categories of ‘Voice’, ‘Identity’ and ‘Love’ by the fashion media students. Alongside, the fashion design students present their design works under the themes of ‘Traditional/Culture’, ‘Senses’, ‘Fashioning Luxuries’, ‘Human Nature’ and ‘Digitality’.
Digital exhibition ‘Luxury 2.0: Drape, Structure and Digitality’ on 1McNallyFashion.com.
Online, ‘:publication’ is substantial and ambitious in the grounds it covers, and the medium matches the message here. The beauty of digital stems from its ability to contain endless portals. Accorded by hyperlinks, there is an incomparable infinity and rapidity online. The aforementioned themes can be read as the many rooms one would traverse in any large-scale fashion exhibition. In some rooms, one encounters effervescent articles on cancel culture; and in another, a heartfelt portrait of interracial love portrayed in a rapid-fire Q&A. The task to reimagine luxury is by no means a simplistic one. Fittingly then, the labyrinthian potential of a hyperlinked website makes sense for such an undertaking. The rapid clicking—and teleporting—from page to page mirrors the synaptic way young fashion creatives think, work, and collaborate.
“The rapid clicking—and teleporting—from page to page mirrors the synaptic way young fashion creatives think, work, and collaborate.”
Yet, there is a passivity to digital exhibitions. I have been personally resistant and indifferent to digital fashion exhibitions because they do not grant the same intimacy of seeing a garment up close. Museologically, digital fashion exhibitions are a relatively recent development. Largely necessitated by Covid closures and drastic drops in footfall, museums worldwide have pivoted online, making their collections and exhibitions accessible virtually. But even prior to the pandemic, digital fashion exhibitions have long aimed to replicate their physical counterparts.² This almost inevitably falls short.
The strengths of the digital medium are seldom harnessed effectively in digital fashion exhibitions—but ‘Luxury 2.0’ serves as a rare example of a fashion exhibition where its digital iteration outshines the physical. Indeed, there is something precious about the slow, ambulatory pace we adopt when we visit a fashion exhibition in-person. But the contents of ‘:publication’ do manage to slow you down. The fashion films under the sections ‘Threaditional’ and the tongue-in-cheek ‘Luxury Is In the Eye of the BA Holder’ take on an ASMR-like quality, rendering the online visitor experience cinematic.³ The potential of the moving image is leveraged here, positing luxury as something that is plugged into the haptic dimensions of fashion.
Still from ‘4663’, a fashion film by Pang Jiawei, Annalisa Espino Lim, Vanessa Low and Phoebe Liew.
In the physical exhibition, projections seem to be the primary mode of display, with the exception of two physical works hung from the ceiling. Moving 3D renderings of objects and garments made with CLO3D are projected on sheer panels, also suspended from the ceiling. In the context of an educational institution, this is both strategic and compelling. As the demands of the fashion industry continue to change rapidly and unpredictably, fashion students have been forced to adapt and equip themselves with digital-first skills.
3D renderings of garments on translucent panels suspended from the ceiling. Image courtesy of Weiqi Yap.
Elsewhere, a blank, stationary book is placed on a plinth, with changing projections of the students’ fashion photography works, digitally flipped to emulate a tangible A2-sized publication. This operates in conversation with the ‘meta-publication’ online. For the students, the intersection of luxury and digitality lies in the increased access to luxury, made possible by the very presence of the digital space. The fashion design works can be found towards the back of the exhibition, projected onto a wall. Scaled slightly larger than life-size, the projection is a looped video recording of five garments at any given time, displayed on dressmaking mannequins. Meanwhile, online, the same video resides on the website.
Installation view of ‘Luxury 2.0: Drape, Structure and Digitality’ at Brother Joseph McNally Gallery. Image courtesy of Weiqi Yap.
For an exhibition that rests on the potentials of the digital medium, this choice of display seemed to recede into the shortcomings of it—that is, the flattened nature of the screen. The advantage of a physical exhibition lies in the spatial proximity afforded to us—the possibility of touch; the textural information our eyes receive just by looking at a garment’s fabric; the space of embodiment that invites us to imagine ourselves wearing the garment. This could have well been a logistical limitation, where the garments were unavailable for physical display for the duration of the exhibition, but a proxy for the creative process and tangible qualities of the works would have been fascinating to interact with.
“It makes one realise that perhaps, in order for digital exhibitions to yield a comparable—but not identical—level of suspension and escapism, we have to set aside a good hour to trawl through the space, much like we would for an in-person exhibition.”
At times, the way-finding in the physical exhibition could have been more didactic, too. Being staged in Singapore, the exhibition benefits from a visitorship where scanning QR codes has been conditioned into reflex. Placing QR codes around the space, or including opportunities of Augmented Reality might have augmented this ongoing dialogue between the physical and virtual. Nonetheless, the online presence of ‘Luxury 2.0’ delivers the promise of immersion. It makes one realise that perhaps, in order for digital exhibitions to yield a comparable—but not identical—level of suspension and escapism, we have to set aside a good hour to trawl through the space, much like we would for an in-person exhibition.
Notes
For the full report on the effects of Covid-19 on luxury fashion, see The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company, ‘The State of Fashion 2021’.
For a comprehensive study on digital technology in fashion museums and the potentials of digital interventions in fashion exhibitions, see Yeo, Pearline. ‘Exhibiting Transformative Fashion: Digital Interventions to Enhance Display and Interpretation’, Costume, 55:1, 2021, pp. 97-120.
For a detailed analysis of the cinematic qualities of fashion exhibition scenography, see Mida, Ingrid. “A Fashion Exhibition as Cinematic Experience”, Film, Fashion & Consumption, 7:1, 2018, pp. 57-71.
‘Luxury 2.0: Drape, Structure and Digitality’ was on view at Brother Joseph McNally Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE’s McNally Campus through 18 December 2021. Admission is free. More details here.