The Items that Stayed Behind
Celebrating MoMA’s Newest Fashion Acquisitions
For the next few weeks, we will be publishing a series of interviews in conjunction with Items: Is Fashion Modern? and the related free online course Fashion as Design. Though the exhibition closed in January 2018, the course will continue to be active, serving as a platform to invite new dialogue around questions raised by the exhibition. Enroll in the course at mo.ma/fashionasdesign
Items: Is Fashion Modern? was The Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition of fashion design since 1944. Curated in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design by senior curator Paola Antonelli and curatorial assistant Michelle Millar Fisher—along with a team of which I was also a part — Items underscored that you can’t tell a comprehensive history of design without fashion playing a central role.
Items brought together more than 300 objects, including works borrowed from the collections of more than 135 individuals and institutions. We estimate that over 588,000 people visited the exhibition over its 118-day run. The exhibition has come and gone, and while we have said goodbye to many wonderful garments and accessories, a few key works have found a place in MoMA’s collection, forming the core of a new acquisition category. While fashion acquisitions were few and far between prior to 2017, Items presented an opportunity to introduce strategic fashion milestones, ensuring that the Museum’s holdings reflect a more complete account of modern design, and enabling future Museum audiences to appreciate fashion’s critically important place in design history.
Museums are defined, in large part, by the collections they build and care for, and we are immensely proud that fashion will forever be a part of MoMA’s. In celebration of this, what follows is some brief stories behind a handful of these acquisitions.
Speedo
A humble masterpiece
The Australian company Speedo was an early innovator of competition swimwear, and by the mid-20th century they had become the undisputed leader in the industry. In the 1920s, founder Alexander Macrae developed a more streamlined swimsuit by modifying the straps to cross, racerback style, and incorporating new, synthetic materials. The form allowed for greater range of motion and did not catch water as easily, while the material allowed suits to get smaller and tighter, hugging the body with less resistance. Competitors embraced these changes — races are won and lost by hundredths of seconds, so increasing hydrodynamics is valuable to competitive swimmers — but they were adopted with much controversy.
In the 1932 Olympic Games, Australian swimmer Clara Dennis was nearly stripped of her gold medal for competing in a women’s version of the innovative Speedo, deemed immodest and inappropriate because previous versions of women’s swimwear had included modesty skirts and shoulder coverings. Though the 1920s had ushered in a more relaxed attitude toward swimming as a leisure activity, women’s bodies were (and remain today) fraught ground for debating ideas of etiquette, personal choice, societal norms, and morality.
It wasn’t until the 1968 and 1972 Olympics that mass-market versions of the Olympic competition Speedos were developed for the public. The Speedo now in MoMA’s collection, a commemorative version of the suits worn by Canadian athletes in the 1976 games, highlights that moment when technical innovation and a shift in public discourse propelled the suit into the mainstream.
Not only does the acquisition of the Speedo swimsuit serve the purpose of incorporating fashion into the collection, it also contributes to the repository of “humble masterpieces” in MoMA’s collection — objects timeless and quotidian, functional and elegantly indispensable. Even though Paola Antonelli began using the term “humble masterpieces” in 2004, as the title for an exhibition, one could argue that MoMA has, since its founding in 1929, celebrated the humble masterpieces of design. The 1934 exhibition Machine Art, for instance, celebrated industrial monuments such as ball bearings, propeller blades, coils, and calipers, and the acquisitions from that show set the stage for further explorations down the line. Indeed, two series of annual exhibitions, Useful Objects of American Design under $10.00, which began in 1939 and was presented for almost a decade in various manifestations (and with varying price brackets), as well as the Good Design exhibitions that ran from 1950 to 1955, demonstrate how intimately design is woven into the fabric of our lives, while often going unnoticed.
Adidas Superstar
Fashion as Design
Though the Adidas Superstar was launched to the public in 1969, its now iconic form derives from vulcanized rubber shoes that were introduced in the 1870s. Companies like Liverpool Rubber Company in Great Britain and Candee Rubber Company in the US are frequently credited as the earliest adopters of vulcanized rubber for footwear. Their shoes were designed for specific uses: lounging on the beach, playing croquet, or competing on grass tennis courts. Like its antecedents, the Adidas Superstar was made specifically for basketball; the rubber toe protected its wearers’ feet while also reinforcing the entire shoe. By 1970, many professional basketball players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, were playing in the shoe.
It has since fallen out of favor as the footwear of choice on the courts, but in the 1980s the Superstar found new devotees thanks to the burgeoning, diverse cultures of hip-hop and streetwear. The shell-top toe that once created protection for basketball player’s digits also made it the perfect shoe for break dancing. Members of the hip-hop group Run DMC were some of the first artists to adopt streetwear for performance clothes, and the mainstream success of their 1986 hit “My Adidas” secured the Superstar’s status as an enduring cultural icon.
Like many works in MoMA’s collection, the Adidas Superstar succinctly encapsulates the iterative practice of design. Typologies that had existed for centuries were progressively refined in the 20th century through an innovative use of both old and new materials — think for example of the designs featured in the 1995 exhibition Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, which highlighted the innovative applications of material technologies in design. Other designs demonstrate a changing language of form, catalyzed by new materials, functions, aesthetic choices, or sociopolitical environments, acting as lenses through which we continue to expand our understanding of and engagement with the world around us.
Seated Pantyhose
Frontiers of Design
Welsh designer Lucy Jones has explored innovative dressing solutions for differently abled bodies since 2015. On the occasion of Items, the curatorial team commissioned her to overhaul the design of tights for wheelchair users; her refinements draw from the history of tights’ development. Panti-Legs (an early version of tights, also now in the collection) were developed when Allen Gant, Sr., of Glen Raven Mills, North Carolina, noticed how difficult it was for his pregnant wife to connect her stockings to her garter belt. Gant’s subsequent design eliminated the garter belt altogether by connecting stocking and underwear, and along with it, the discomfort and inconvenience of separate pieces.
In reimagining tights for wheelchair users, Jones expanded upon this precedent of designing for those previously underrepresented in fashion by putting the seated body at the forefront. Jones added zippers with loop pulls to each side of the garment to streamline dressing from a supine or seated position and help those who have difficulty gripping the waistband.
In addition to the new form, each of the multiple fabrics incorporated into the design play deliberate roles. From the waist to the knee, Jones used a heavyweight fabric to form a dropped crotch, stabilizing and supporting the legs from splaying apart. The fabric in the buttock region allows for more stretch, catering to size variations and fusing accessibility with comfort in a seated position. The material is designed to help prevent skin breakdown, pressure sores, and hypertension. Jones’s design gives prominence to the technical innovation and continued development of this specific typology, as well as the important category of design for differently-abled bodies.
MoMA’s design collection has always encompassed both the current avant-garde and speculative designs that provoke questions about possible futures. In addition to Jones’s new design, a number of prototypes were commissioned for Items when a particular typology warranted a reimagining for today, galvanizing an untrodden path through the use innovative materials, pioneering approaches to manufacturing or design techniques. Many of these prototypes, as well as innovative garments like the Gore-tex jacket (crucial in textile development for its new material technology), are now part of MoMA’s collection. These future-facing acquisitions combine technical and aesthetic merits with a particular focus on ethical relationships between fashion, wearers, and the wider environment.
Collecting and presenting contemporary design demands continuously adapting and refining criteria, and some of these tenets have previously been outlined by Paola Antonelli. Though the above are just a few of the works acquired from Items, as a whole these new additions expand the scope of MoMA’s collection to include fashion, embracing a field of design that has long been absent from the Museum. Fashion finds new resonance among the thousands of works collected by the Museum since 1929, and these items create a strong foundation for a new collecting category that will invigorate its program for years to come.
Enroll in the online course Fashion as Design to learn more about these fashion objects and others.
