Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

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The Curator's Risk

Maria Luisa Frisa

To cite this article: Maria Luisa Frisa (2008) The Curator's Risk, Fashion Theory, 12:2, 171-180,
DOI: 10.2752/175174108X298971

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2752/175174108X298971

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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 Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style 171

Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp. 171–180

DOI: 10.2752/175174108X298971
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2008 Berg.

Maria Luisa Frisa The Curator’s Risk

Particularly interested in the Abstract
blurred boundaries between art,
fashion, and design, Maria Luisa
Frisa studies the complexity of Fashion curating is the exercise of a critical gaze, which recognizes the
contemporary imagination in all multiple traces, symptoms and fragments that are around us. The article
her projects. She directs Mode
is a reflection of my practice as a curator who doesn’t work in a museum,
(Marsilio), a publishing project
on fashion ideas and figures, is but is involved in staging curatorial projects that produce exhibitions
Director of the Fashion Design and books informed by contemporary trend prediction. It identifies the
degree program, IUAV University
notion of risk as implicit to the working method of the curator.
(Venezia), is Fashion Curator of
Fondazione Pitti Discovery (Firenze),
and curates noteworthy exhibitions. KEYWORDS: gaze, project, critical exercise, phantasmagoria, strategy
[email protected]
172 Maria Luisa Frisa

As I see it, curation is about design, layout, imagining, and constructing.

In my case, curation involves not just exhibitions, but also books, the
editing of publications, the organizing of fashion and communication
events, all of which I do for the Pitti Discovery Foundation in Florence.1
In addition, the fashion design course I direct at the School of Architecture
in Venice affords me other opportunities for curating.
As the curator of a project you are in a position to be able to construct
a different kind of discourse around fashion and to offer new points of
observation; but it also means imagining your own insights and being
willing enough to take a gamble on them. It means accepting a challenge
and the risks that come with it. As a curator you have to take risks,
because you have to put your ideas to the test; by following an intuition
and constructing a project which only becomes a reality when it is
finally complete. It is at this point that it is subjected to the judgment of
others—and this is the point of curation.
If I think about my own education and training, I realize that it has
left its mark on the way I work. I studied art history specializing in
contemporary art at a time when to concern yourself with contemporary
art in Italy inevitably meant you had to be a militant critic. Hence the
importance of direct experience, the need to get involved; the logic of
risk and pleasure, and the awareness that you had to share things with
others as you could not do them on your own. It was a way of imagining
a different kind of life, where it was important to plan with others,
but above all to mix with others; to find a thousand good reasons to
question and undermine the boundaries between your private life and
your professional commitments. A curator is like a film director: you
can have a lot of talent and ideas, but without a crew and all its variety
of professional skills, you will never be able to make a good movie.
All this has left its mark on the way I work, the way I conceive
projects, and it has also influenced my approach to fashion. I gradually
got more involved in fashion precisely because its continual state of
change requires me to constantly shift my gaze, to measure myself
with others, and look around for people who can help me meet the
challenge of displaying fashion while leaving intact its relationship with
the world.
I would like to clarify the point I have just made, which is actually
less scholarly than it might sound. My attempt to keep intact the
relationship between fashion and the world always implies the ability
to create a different story and to offer new points of view in looking at
fashion. So my approach is not an effort to achieve historical fidelity to
fashion, but rather a critical exercise that I believe is a necessary part
of fashion as a process, where fashion is made meaningful by the very
process of its development.
I am fascinated by the relationships between fashion and other
disciplines, and I am fascinated by the way in which a single garment, or
a fashion photograph or a feature in a magazine can immediately relate
 The Curator’s Risk 173

us to the major themes of human consciousness, to dreams, obsessions,

and all the implications of culture and society. I am more attracted to
the violent flow of images than the wonders of form. To succeed in
slowing the flow of images (and here I have in mind Cayce Pollard in
William Gibson’s latest novel Pattern Recognition)2 and in grasping
that particular fragment, that pattern, that clue that will enable you
to confirm a hunch, an idea, and to imagine a story, is the equivalent
(at least for me) of the delight of the water-diviner when he finds water
with his forked stick. In this sense, the way I work is perhaps more like
fashion prediction (using the kind of skills that identify trends and style
directions) rather than formal academic research.
For example, trend forecasting was an important starting point for the
exhibition Uniform: Order and Disorder (Figure 1) that I curated with
Stefano Tonchi and Francesco Bonami in 2001 at Stazione Leopolda,
Florence, and P.S.1. New York. More precisely, the starting point was
a fashion feature by the photographer Carter Smith published in Arena
magazine (No. 101, August 2000). The title of the feature “Fashion Is
Hell, This Season Khaki Is the Color to Die For,” served to introduce
a sequence of images that were a direct but creative quotation from
Steven Spielberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan (1998). And as images they
signified that all manner of military insignia had been dragged out of
their military positions, were devoured by fashion’s creative process and
were now invading the catwalks. At the same time those same images
were being mobilized by pop culture, taken hostage by contemporary
art, and were being used to undermine the language that orders social
and aesthetic signs.

Figure 1
Uniform: Order and Disorder,
January 11–February 18 2001,
Stazione Leopolda, Florence.
Curated by Francesco Bonami,
Maria Luisa Frisa, and Stefano
Tonchi. Installation project:
Gruppo A12.
174 Maria Luisa Frisa

In the exhibition, the visitor was compelled to pass through a narrow

wardrobe hung with real uniforms and come face to face with Jeff Wall’s
giant light box, Dead Troops Talk, a reconstruction of the chilling
reality of death during the war in Afghanistan. They reached the end of
the exhibition after passing along a fixed itinerary made up of objects
that interlaced fashion and popular culture, with thirty iconic fashion
garments exhibited like carvings in low relief on pillars under glass. This
was complemented by the book, a project that paralleled the exhibition
but was independent of it, even in its design (like all of the books/catalogs
of exhibitions I curate), which contained images of photojournalism,
cinema, art, fashion features, and advertising campaigns, brought
together without any kind of hierarchy. The book took the form of a
free interplay between the visual texts in a continuous unbroken flow,
insisting on analogies and contrasts, with further analysis provided by a
central insert containing texts by scholars, writers, and journalists.
In my work the starting point is often an obsession, but a form of
obsession that is indiscriminate about the nature of the objects it deals
with, be they images or clothes. This obsession can focus on the force
of an image, on the edging of a garment, or on a word that sounds
like a slogan. Similarly, this obsession is also manifest in the method
of construction I use for the projects I have curated. They often use
techniques derived from art or film: such as the dadaist idea of the
accumulation of heterogeneous materials, or the technique of massing
incongruent parts as assemblage; or the montage of fragments, which
may then be articulated in a linear way or collapsed into a dense mass.
This is a method of display I utilized for the exhibition Excess: Fashion
and the Underground in the ’80s, (Figure 2), again curated together
with Stefano Tonchi, who is now Style Editor of The New York Times.
He has been a friend and an important partner in working on many
ideas and numerous projects, ever since 1984, when we both founded
a magazine called Westuff, in which we sought to explore certain
tendencies expressed by fashion and other disciplines.
When we worked on Excess, we were interested by the Eighties
revival in fashion, in music, in graphic design, and in politics, but we
wanted to create an exhibition that resisted the idea that the Eighties are
referred to as the “decade of the image.” What we sought to do instead
was to document the glittering variety of a decade that, in my judgment,
was seminal because of the radical changes it brought about in fashion,
music, and in new modes of communication.
In short, we wanted to create a sort of phantasmagoria, formed from
the recounting of lives lived to the utmost, recalling the memories of
sudden deaths and young icons. A mixture, if you like, of blinding light
and utter darkness. It was fortunate that the exhibition was staged in the
old Leopolda Station in Florence. The long nave of the Leopolda Station,
a gloomy industrial cavern, was lined with a series of containers painted
black. Each container served as a box, a casket, and a theaterette. Each
 The Curator’s Risk 175

Figure 2
Excess: Fashion and the
Underground in the ’80s,
January 8–February 8 2004,
Stazione Leopolda, Florence.
Curated by Maria Luisa Frisa
and Stefano Tonchi. Installation
project: Qart.

receptacle contained garments, images, designed objects, magazines,

and videos. Taken as a whole, the containers articulate three parallel
discourses about fashion in the 1980s. The three segments were:
Superbody, Transbody, and Postbody.3
In the display, the containers traced a narrative that the garments filled
with meaning. In each container, the groups of clothes and accessories
were exhibited in a different arrangement, so that they kept unexpectedly
176 Maria Luisa Frisa

breaking the deliberate spatial monotony of the container-crates in

sequence. In addition, the garments in each container introduced a
specific story. For example, in the section Superbody, the different items
of clothing were brought together under the titles of “Shoulders” and
“Structures” to emphasize the principle that fashion offers support and
shelter to both bodies and identities.
In June 2006, I curated, along with Stefano Tonchi and Francesco
Bonami, the exhibition Human Game: Winners and Losers (Figure
3), once again at the Stazione Leopolda, which marked the conclusion
of a conceptual trilogy of major exhibitions devoted to fashion. Sport
as a way of life now shapes the rhythm of our age and “the society
of the spectacle” has found in sport the most extraordinary form of
representation and communication. In the exhibition, the space was
occupied by a golden metal tube, over three meters in diameter, which
stretched out like a wind tunnel. A row of 200 mannequins, of a rather
cheap, nondescript kind, were arranged on a long podium running the
whole length of the exhibition, marking the start of the display where the
creations of fashion designers revealed how fashion has been influenced
by sport and how sport now possesses all the glamour of fashion. The
display demonstrated how sports products have become fully-fledged
fashion brands, and in turn how they influence fashions from street
style to haute couture. Our awareness of this sphere of influence was
confirmed to us by the Fall/Winter 2007/8 collections, which proved
how sports fashion now informs the global styles worn by the citizens of
this world. (This was further confirmed by Suzy Menkes in her review
of the exhibition in the International Herald Tribune; Menkes 2006.)

Figure 3
Human Game: Winners and
Losers, June 22–July 21 2006,
Stazione Leopolda, Florence.
Curated by Francesco Bonami,
Maria Luisa Frisa, and Stefano
Tonchi. Installation project:
Hola.
 The Curator’s Risk 177

Over the last few years, I have not developed a complete theoretical
discourse as a curator, more a strategy of fluid research. It is an approach
that can be considered high risk and perhaps impressionistic; but it is
useful for those who, like me, are interested in reflecting on fashion,
keeping alive the debate for fashion’s many audiences and embracing
the many forms which fashion uses to express itself.
In conclusion, this article has been beneficial in identifying certain
issues that will guide some of my future projects. I sincerely feel that
much work needs to be done to address the roots and the future of
Italian fashion, and it is my aim to remedy those current deficiencies
and shortcomings. I have, in fact, already started on this new quest:
my exhibition Italian Eyes (Figure 4), which dealt with Italian fashion
photography, and the book in the Mode series (a publishing project,
with Marsilio Editore of Venice, focusing on fashion ideas and figures)
by Vittoria Caratozzolo (2006), devoted to Irene Brin, a charismatic,
cosmopolitan, eccentric journalist who, in a certain sense, is very close
to the spirit of Anna Piaggi.
All the same, I feel that my work has only just begun. Sentimentally, I
feel very close ties to the work that I have done, but I also feel the need
to measure myself against a different curatorial dimension that attempts
to observe the unfolding of the time as both past and present together.
A dimension that is unconcerned with the chronology of history, but
determined by the way that fashion bends and guides the forms of time.
As Gianni Versace once said, the new already belongs to us; it already
exists, even before our own past. One just has to learn to recognize it
and try to make something of it.

Figure 4
Italian Eyes: Fashion
Photography from 1951 to
Today, February 25–March 20
2005, Rotonda of Via Besana,
Milan. Curated by Maria Luisa
Frisa. Installation project:
Gruppo A12.
178 Maria Luisa Frisa

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Judith Clark, who helped me find those points of

reflection in my work that this article has tried to capture.

Notes

1. Pitti Immagine organizes in Florence some of the world’s most

important international fairs: Pitti Uomo (men’s clothing and
accessories), Pitti Bimbo (children’s clothing and accessories), and
Pitti Filati (yarns and textiles for the knit industry). The mission is
to outline the scenarios of contemporary fashion and to imagine
the evolution of the global fashion system of the future. Ongoing
attention to rapid changes in lifestyle as well as a focus on leading
players and driving ideas in contemporary culture make Pitti
Immagine a unique protagonist on the international trade fair scene.
Pitti Immagine gave rise to the Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery
as a cultural platform aimed at organizing art and fashion exhibitions
in order to depict the complexity of the contemporary imaginary.
Florence is the city in Italy where important fashion exhibitions have
been held, such as Salvatore Ferragamo (Palazzo Strozzi, 1985),
Roberto Capucci (Palazzo Strozzi, 1990), or La sala Bianca, nascita
della moda italiana (1992), once again at Palazzo Strozzi. These
exhibitions were a reminder that Florence is where Italian fashion
started to make a name for itself on the international scene in 1951,
when Giovan Battista Giorgini began organizing fashion shows in
the Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti. But in all probability it was the
Fashion Biennial in 1996 that landed Florence on the fashion map,
internationally defining this city as being able to reflect upon fashion
as a cultural system and proving that it was the perfect place for
fashion events. Other factors that make Florence so unique in Italy
for fashion exhibitions are extraordinary hosting spaces like the
Stazione Leopolda, Palazzo Pitti, and Palazzo Strozzi, as well as a
broad public made up of many tourists interested not only in art
but also in shopping and architecture; fashion students; scholars;
and a rather vast audience of those who work in the Tuscan fashion
industries such as Gucci, Prada, and Ferragamo, to name just a few.
2. Cayce Pollard is the “cool hunter,” the female counterpart of
Case, the protagonist of another seminal novel by William Gibson,
Neuromancer. Cayce, the continent-hopping heroine-loner, is fascin-
ated by cybervideo footage sent out over the Internet, piecemeal. No
one knows who is making these snippets, or where they are filmed,
or in what order the footage should be arranged; or even why this
strange visual puzzle exists. Thousands of individuals across the
 The Curator’s Risk 179

world begin collecting them, assigning different meanings to them,

trying to unlock their secret. These images, these narrative flashes,
hurled into the porous jumble of the Net, cause such a great stir
and are so enthralling they induce addiction and create close bonds
even among people who do not know one another, but who discuss
and chat about them especially on the Internet. They are attracted
by these low-fi bits of footage, especially for their all-consuming
intensity.
3. Superbody: clothes that construct and model the body. But also a
body that begins to define its own structure with aerobics and the
gym. The garment is designed to give personality and power to
individuals. Padding builds up the shoulders and lends an imposing
and authoritative touch to the female figure. The female superbody is
at ease in the uniform of the career woman as well as in the costume
of the sexy heroine. The fashionable man becomes soft and sensual,
colorful and unconventional. The male superbody is sculptural and
has no fear of turning into a neo-classical gay icon. Transbody:
the desire to be different. To be unique and extraordinary. Being
beautiful does not matter but it is absolutely necessary to be someone.
The body is transfigured to render it unforgettable. Leigh Bowery
is the icon of all those artists in the vanguard, who choose their
own bodies and dressing up as a way of expressing themselves and
fighting their battles. Excess becomes a means of communication and
experimentation. Creativity and individualism are the watchwords
of this moment. Anyone can turn into a stylist, an artist, a designer,
even if it is just for one night. There is no longer a single point of
view and fashion is a seismograph that registers the accumulation
of movements and changes. Postbody: the age of post. Styles coexist
and clothing is the outcome of a reflection on fashion, styles,
history, and traditions. The postmodern body is wired, connected
to the Net, as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In a reality that
is beginning to turn virtual, dress is a mental thing: it clothes minds
and attitudes. Fashion proposes lifestyles that permit everyone to
live different dreams and atmospheres. Citation makes it possible to
use a fragment from the distant past, but also from the recent past,
and transfigure it in the aesthetics of customization and allusion.
Architects and philosophers fuss over the concept of postmodern,
artists describe themselves as trans-avant-gardists, citationists, and
new-new . . .

References

Caratozzolo, Vittoria C. 2006. Irene Brin. Italian Style in Fashion.

Venice: Marsilio Editore.
180 Maria Luisa Frisa

Menkes, Suzy. 2006. “Dynamic Sport: A Play for the Beautiful Game.”
International Herald Tribune September 12 2006.