The Rise of Fashion Museology: Korean Fashion Exhibitions (de Young Museum)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Dress collections for ethnological or anthropological placement in cultural history museums have significantly shifted to the present-day fashion museology context in art museums, which offers spectacular visual effects and experiential analyses to convey more critical and reflective narratives of history through the lens of fashion. Enticing wider audiences with breaking records in number of visitors, fashion exhibitions in recent decades have mushroomed not only in big museums in metropolitan cities, but also in any scale of cultural institutions around the globe.

Concurrently, the growing international influence of Korean popular culture throughout global media known as the Korean Wave (hallyu) has drawn the attention of museums to Korean fashion, both historical and contemporary, marking a notable emergence of new global flows of culture in the history of fashion curation. This presentation will trace the eight exhibitions on Korean dress and fashion for the past decade across Europe and the United States within the shift of the museum practices, and recount the exhibitions’ approaches, themes, objects, and further problems that each exhibition left in the field to reconsider.

Dr. Minjee Kim is a historian specializing in the dress, fashion, and textile history of Korea. She lectured for numerous cultural institutions and colleges in the US, Canada, and South Korea, including in her full-time faculty position at Jeonju Kijeon College and adjunct positions at Seoul National University and Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.