Items: Is Fashion Modern?
Editors: Paola Antonelli & Michelle Millar Fisher
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Year: 2017
Scope: Photo research & permissions
Buy: Museum of Modern Art
Items: Is Fashion Modern? presents 111 items of clothing and accessories that have had a profound impact on the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To show the breadth of the impact of these items, we worked with the catalogue team to secure and license over 350 images that demonstrate key moments in the evolution of fashion through time through archival images, fashion photography, film stills, and family photos.
The catalogue accompanies the first fashion exhibition to be mounted at MoMA since 1944. An essay by curator Paola Antonelli opens the volume, highlighting the museum’s unique perspective on fashion and exploring the latter's role in the changing international landscape of design. The 111 texts that follow trace the history of each item in relation to cultural forces past and present, touching on labor, marketing, technology, religion, politics, aesthetics, and popular culture, among many others.