Fashion Exhibitions as Cultural Strategy: Why Heritage Brands Are Turning to Museums

Elsa Schiaparelli arrived in Paris, 1922, with an instinct for the surreal and a willingness to unsettle the language of dress. Establishing her house in the interwar years, she developed a visual DNA defined by wit and provocation. Her collections carried a deliberate strangeness from the outset; where others perfected elegance, Schiaparelli pursued provocation.Her early success—a woollen jumper knitted with a trompe-l'œil bo across the chest—signalled her aptitude for visual play and optical illusion. That instinct deepened through her close relationships with the Surrealists, particularly Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali. Her most famous creation, the lobster dress; a silk evening gown silk-painted by Dali himself—the giant crustacean placed between the legs of the wearer as a representation of sexuality and erotic charge—was worn by Wallis Simpson prior to her wedding with Edward VII. Providing more than mere scandal, the dress managed to collapse the boundary between couture and conceptual art. From there, shoes became hats, skeleton ribs were embroidered into silk, evening coats were embroidered with Jean Cocteau’s double images, shifting under the eye.These designs were deliberate provocations, challenging proportion and expectation, at times leaning towards the uncanny. Grounded in precision and craftsmanship, Schiaparelli wove sculptural excess and dreamery into high fashion. Collections such as Circus and Zodiac reinforced fashion as storytelling over singular seasonal lines.And it is this enduring internal logic that underpins Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a new exhibition, arriving at the V&A in March, joining a wider movement in which fashion is turning to the museum as a site of consolidation. Exhibitions are able to change the way fashion is encountered. Garments are lifted from the body and set on plinths or mannequins, where they stand on their own. Without movement or use to animate them, they can function as pieces of art. In that stillness, the lines of construction come into focus, as do their creators. Details that might blur in the motion of a runway—the individual looping of a seam, perfectly placed beading, pleats gathered at the shoulder of a sleeve—sharpen.In this setting, clothing begins to read less as attire and more as object. The exhibition controls pace and sequence, guiding the viewer through a space in which garments accumulate meaning gradually rather than flash past in a catwalk procession.Viewing early sketches and the story alongside finished pieces brings to light the continuity and cohesiveness of the brand. What might otherwise feel seasonal reads as cumulative, and identity is understood through the eyes of the author.In exhibition space, these gestures sit at the centre of the narrative. Surrealism can be presented as foundational to Schiaparelli’s identity. Absurdity reads as a manifesto, and explains the actions of the house up to the modern day. Under its current stewardship of Daniel Roseberry, the house has amplified this foundational mythology. Surreal excess, gold anatomical jewellery, metallic recreations of the bronchi cast across the chest, sculptural silhouettes and taxidermied feline heads extend the thread of the house’s historical irreverence. The through-line remains distortion, exaggeration and conceptual reverie.When preserved and serialised, the outlandish can temporally gather symbolic weight. Placed in institutional space, that conviction is steadied and placed inside the structured narrative of the brand’s origins. What once felt like an occasional retrospective now reads as a sustained cultural programme.Since 2015, London’s V&A has staged McQueen: Savage Beauty, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams and Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion. The Barbican presented The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier. The Metropolitan Museum has mounted Charles James: Beyond Fashion, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations and Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty. Major houses are occupying prime gallery space, commanding serious curatorial investment and running for months at a time. These exhibitions attract sustained public attention and institutional backing.The clustering of these shows feels deliberate. Fashion is choosing institutional space; the museum, and with it the archive and the curated environment. This is reflective of how value is increasingly located within luxury. Moving through a brand’s world in full allows the house to read as a coherent whole, as the exhibition creates the space for its ideas to unfold across time and for garments to be understood in relation to one another, so that what once felt seasonal gathers into something sustained and cohesive. Institutional AuthorityFashion has always carried symbolic weight. Sitting at the intersection of design, culture and commerce, it has never been solely a matter of pattern cutting and textile printing. A garment can signal taste, cultural knowledge and political affiliation. Historically, even the size of one’s collar indicated class. The grander the ruff, the clearer the signal that someone else was responsible for its cleaning and pressing.What we wear places us within systems of distinction. Clothing can function as both symbol and product; its value shaped not only by its material composition, but from the social meanings attached to it. In sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, fashion capital operates as symbolic capital; authority that builds through recognised distinction. That authority depends on recognition. It accumulates when work is preserved, cited and endorsed.The institutional framing provided by the museum intensifies this dimension. When fashion enters the museum, it enters a space capable of granting symbolic weight. Relieved of its commercial shackles and granted duration, garments are given a new framing. In exhibition space, clothing is not simply shown but situated in a broader cultural field, where its significance can consolidate over time. Immortalising The FounderWithin this environment, brands are able to platform the founder’s vision and the early ideas of a single imagination. Exhibitions organise the house around that figure, placing authorship at the centre of how the brand is understood. Early collections can be revisited as points of origin, and over time the designer’s work gathers authority. It is preserved, cited and returned to, and institutional recognition strengthens that standing, so that the founder comes to hold a lasting and elevated position throughout the life of the house.When early work is gathered and arranged spatially, new clarity begins to emerge. What once moved through the cycle of seasons takes on formative significance, and the archive carries new weight. Sketches, prototypes and early silhouettes are put into view as the first articulations of a house’s thinking, presented as coherent and intentional foundations of its worldview. For Savage Beauty, the Alexander McQueen retrospective, crowds gathered in record numbers at both the Met and the V&A, boosting membership at the former by 17 per cent. Posthumously staged, the exhibition drew thousands, the attention gathering around Lee McQueen as much as around the garments. It read as a moment of recognition for the author as much as the archive.In an increasingly secular culture, brands offer something close to belief. The exhibition can take on the atmosphere of reverence. The archive assumes particular gravity, functioning almost as scripture: a preserved record of the house’s earliest ideas and the forms that first gave it shape.The museum deepens this effect by gathering the work and presenting it as origin, placing the founder’s imagination at the centre of the narrative. Early acts of design continue to shape what follows, and the brand’s beginnings are reaffirmed as the source of its authority. Implications for BrandsAs luxury shifts further into the experience economy, authority depends increasingly on narrative coherence and clarity of origin. Brands operate through environments and symbolic systems that extend beyond the product itself. The museum makes visible how cultural capital converges around founding vision.Brands that smooth their early eccentricities risk weakening their distinctiveness. Founding absurdity can function as insulation, marking authorship and differentiates the house within a crowded field. The archive becomes a strategic asset, acting as a visual manifesto of belief. Exhibition space demonstrates how heritage can be awoken through cultural framing.The question, then, concerns how luxury handles its own beginnings.Does it preserve the distinctiveness of its founding gestures, or dilute them in pursuit of polish and consensus? The museum suggests that cultural authority gathers where origin is treated with seriousness and conviction, even if that origin is grounded in absurdity. In choosing institutional space as its stage, fashion signals towards its own future. Authority now depends on how convincingly a brand frames its beginnings and sustains its distinctiveness. The garment remains central, yet its weight derives from the narrative that surrounds it. The exhibition clarifies this relationship. Cultural weight can consolidate where belief is preserved and origin is allowed to endure.Matter Of Form is a consultancy specialising in brand, CX and digital innovation for timeless brands. For brand world and interaction work, contact us at hello@matterofform.com. Fashion has always traded in story. Today, as heritage houses step into museums with increasing intent, exhibition becomes something more strategic: a way to consolidate legacy, elevate craft and shape perception over time. In lifting garments from body to plinth, fashion reframes itself—less seasonal product, more cultural artefact. Written by MOF Marketing Executive, Hannah Wilks.

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