Luxury fashion’s relation to our shared, day-to-day realities can often feel trivial due to designer clothing’s unavailability to mass audiences. Yet with its latest exhibition, MoMu Fashion Museum Antwerp aims to decipher how contemporary fashion designers are using dress to navigate ideals around beauty, self-image, and identity: how design can be used as a vehicle to study our collective psyche.

The show, titled Mirror Mirror – Fashion & the Psyche, is a joint exhibition with Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent. At MoMu, curator  Elisa De Wyngaert positions the body centre stage, dividing the show into three sections. The first focuses on how we see ourselves and how we observe others. Avant-garde designs from Issey Miyake, Noir Kei Ninomiya and Comme des Garçons – finished with wigs by hair stylist and artist Cyndia Harvey – illustrate how such brands toy with silhouette to create fashion that take up space between the body and the garment; serving as protective harnesses for the body through proposing new proportions that combat restrictive beauty ideals. Like Rei Kawakubo’s SS97 Lumps and Bumps collection, for instance, which saw the designer challenge all we knew about anatomical symmetry, bringing power to the wearer through obscure garment construction.

“Fashion can play an important part to enhance or hide certain parts of the body. It’s okay to use garments to feel comfortable with who you are, you don’t need to change or to alter your own body, you can just create a new one,” says the curator. “I tend to focus on how garments protect you, and let the body be the body.”

One of Wyngaert’s most interesting observations is the conceptual fragmentation of the body in fashion advertising – where a camera focuses on simply a leg, or a model’s torso. This is obviously done for commercial purposes, to draw attention to a particular product. Yet as Wyngaert points out, those suffering with body dysmorphia also fragment their own bodies into small sections, accentuating parts of themselves they want to improve. Wyngaert illustrates this through pairing 1990s fashion advertisements alongside Emerald City by Genesis Belanger; a sculptural piece that dots flesh-coloured curtains with misplaced body parts.

The second part of the exhibition focuses on dolls. Wyngaert was particularly fascinated by the ambiguity between life and death that comes with dolls, and how both fashion and art has used dolls and mannequins as “meaningful carriers of different messages”. Highlights include 14th century fashion dolls which were toured around Europe with designers to sell collections to elite shoppers, as well as Victorian doll-inspired Simone Rocha dresses and pieces from Viktor & Rolf’s AW99 Russian Doll collection, which saw the couturiers build a series of looks on a model live on the catwalk like a reverse babushka doll. Belgian fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck built a snoring Sleeping Beauty doll especially for the show, and Martin Margiela donated a barbie doll he made clothes for when he was aged 13 (in sewing the sleeves of a miniature suit jacket, the aspiring designer would use his grandma’s white thread, which would become a Margiela trademark down the line).

John Miller’s 2020 film What Is a Subject? – which features a white male mannequin repeating the words “It is me” – sees the exhibition touch on how the white male body has been wrongly positioned as the cultural default, countered by the work of editor Michelle Elie, who cloned herself 50+ times to create mannequins to exhibit her vast Comme des Garçons collection – a direct response to the lack of Black mannequins used in exhibition spaces.

Moving through to the final section, the physical body is left behind as Wyngaert ventures into the digital realm to study how avatars have infiltrated fashion. She describes the avatar as “a human surrogate”, and uses a glass box dotted with screens to demonstrate the brands who have first embraced digital bodies. Like Prada and Louis Vuitton – both have turned protagonists from the Final Fantasy video game series into campaign stars – and Balenciaga, where Demna joined up with the team behind Fortnite to envision a fashion show within a video game for the brand’s Fall 21 collection.

Whether it’s female cyborgs or hyperreal virtual influencers, Wyngaert begins to decipher how digital bodies being fed into the general fashion context will impact our ideals around self-image; pixel-perfect bodies come with yet more unrealistic beauty standards. But as the line becomes blurred between what’s real and what’s not – the likes of Lil Miquela have entire identities built for them by men behind screens  – will virtual influencers have a responsibility to mirror our own ideals? Or propose new ones entirely?

Photography courtesy of MoMu. ‘Mirror Mirror – Fashion & the Psyche’ at MoMu Fashion Museum Antwerp is open until February 26, 2023.

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