Fashion exhibitions in the Netherlands: between visual spectacles and community outreach

Recently fashion exhibitions have been blossoming in Dutch museums to the extent that they verged on becoming a trendy phenomenon. Because of this upsurge in popularity we, as academic scholars, decided to devote a seminar to this subject in the context of the Master Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The purpose of the seminar was to find out whether the popularity of museum fashion exhibitions had influenced the fashion collecting and presentation policies of the museums in recent years. The museums we studied staged a whole gamut of fashion exhibitions ranging from visual spectacles to community outreach projects. Although, these various fashion exhibitions cater to an increasingly diversified audience, they all have become attuned to the overall cultural environment audiences are living in, which is predominantly a visual culture of which the spectacular, the sensorial, and the participatory are key constituents. Dutch museums are very much in line with, even at the forefront of, museological movements that try to meet the challenges of the future. This is mainly due to the ever-growing influence of the neoliberal cultural policy on the one hand, to the open and experimental climate that has been pervading the Dutch museum world since the 1950s onwards on the other.