DRESS CODE: Are You Playing Fashion?

How did you choose the clothes you are wearing today?

Designer dress or jeans, suit or sweatpants, pullover or uniform—every culture, era and social group has its own dress codes. They set the framework, but each person comes up with their own individual take on the rules.

Sometimes, we choose based on how we feel. Or we make our decision on the basis of the occasion for which we dress or whom we are going to meet. We want our clothing style to express our personality and accentuate our individuality. Our clothes allow us to assume a wide range of personas. Fashion is not just an act of wearing clothes—it is also a performative act of seeing and being seen, which finds particularly clear expression in social media.

Now coming to Europe, Dress Code, the hugely successful exhibition from Japan, presents fashion as a game that underscores the daily transformation as an instrument for the articulation of our personality. On show are fashion classics as well as the imaginative takes on them that fuel the current stylistic pluralism. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary fashion by seminal designers set into an insightful dialogue with contemporary art. It examines different and opposing attitudes to fashion—those of participants and spectators, individualists and conformists. Our choice of clothing is presented as a communicative game that can lead us to a new understanding of our approach to fashion, how we use it and what it means to us.

An exhibition of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Kyoto Costume Institute in cooperation with the Bundeskunsthalle.

Director: Eva Kraus
Curators: Chinatsu Makiguchi (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto), Makoto Ishizeki and Michimasa Ogata (The Kyoto Costume Institute), Eva Kraus and Susanne Kleine (Bundeskunsthalle)
Fashion Lab: Katja Andreae
Press Officer: Sven Bergmann, kommunikation@bundeskunsthalle.de

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