Please, accept cookies in order to load the content.

You present the Temporary Fashion Museum as an exploration of what a Dutch fashion museum might look like. Which fashion history does it embrace?

I don’t think you can reduce Dutch fashion to a succession of designers such as Dick Holthaus, Frans Molenaar, Jan Arends, Fong Leng, Viktor & Rolf and Bas Kosters. I have great respect for their talent but I think that in the context of a public space such as Het Nieuwe Instituut it is more interesting to look at how fashion has developed in the egalitarian and homogeneous society that the Netherlands wished  to be until the 1970s. For example, in the Temporary Fashion Museum we question the role of garments in relation to different spaces. In the 1950s that was the house with the housewife who made her contribution to the new welfare state. In the 1960s, with the emergence of pop culture, the street became a public theatre. In the 1970s second-hand clothing introduced collage to fashion. These are all expressions of a democratised form of fashion. You then see the rise of the market and the democratisation is translated into a price: clothing became cheaper and more widely available. And today that democratisation is expressed in terms of access to images. We have linked each of these periods to a space: the street of the 1970s, the nightclub of the 1980s, the screen of the 1990s and the laboratory of today. Our story of Dutch fashion is not exclusively about designers or labels. It is about the body, the garments themselves, public space  and you, the user.

Interview by Lotte Haagsma

Temporary Fashion Museum
Guus Beumer
Maureen Mooren

