Other displays included, for instance, the Spectacle of Excess, about the great Indian wedding; Fake It
till You Make It, about designer copies that are never like a copy; Patrons and Power, about the corporate
sponsorship and patronage in the industry, with special focus on the role of the alcohol industry in
sponsoring fashion weeks; and Dream Factory, focusing on the connections between Bollywood costume
design and the ramp, and several other displays. The exhibition also featured several short movies that
I created together with Arash Taheri and that were edited by Tage Rivas Tollefsen.3
Questions of power: Industry, design and market
Since the days of Diana Vreeland, we have seen an increasing involvement of fashion insiders in
what has become the business of exhibiting fashion, Lisa Loppa from Antwerpen ModeMuseum
(MoMu) being one of the latest additions. Feeding off the prestige of the museum the brands profit,
and the museum is turned not only into a vehicle of corporate prestige, but into a business in its
own right. While the state may have many interests and its own propaganda, be they of the nationalist
or happy multiculturalism kind, for instance, its power over or engagement with individual
exhibitions is fairly limited compared to the direct control designers or sponsors exert over the way
they are represented, censoring statements and publications in the process. This became obvious to
me when discussing loan options for my exhibition with several designers in New Delhi. Most of
them insisted on having full control over what was being published, the context in which their
pieces were exhibited, and what the labels said. Only a few were willing to give me a free hand to
contextualize the pieces the way I saw fit (i.e. Samant Chauhan and Sabyasachi Mukherjee). The
other exhibited pieces by Satya Paul, Manish Arora and Rina Dhaka, were purchased independently
by the museum and now belong to its collections, and the designers were not involved in the process.
While I recognize the value of discussing their work with designers, and indeed that formed a
great part of my research, as a curator I am reluctant to be told what to exhibit, how to exhibit it and
most critically what information to leave out (Stevenson 2008). Such an enterprise can easily become
a mere reproduction of the brand narrative set within the authoritative setting of a museum that to
most visitors is still a neutral institution connected to ideals of education, learning and even ‘truth’.
Thus the institution gives weight and authority to the knowledge that it transmits. While my aim
has not been to present the ‘one and only’ truth, the aim of the exhibition was to transmit some of
the insights gained in my long-term anthropological research. This aim would have been compromised
by the requirement of the designers, regardless of how much I respect their work, to have
total control. Therefore, I exercised my curatorial liberty and created an exhibition largely informed
by my research and, even with Samant, we developed a presentation that was both critical of the
idea and role of designer, while at the same time pointing out the conundrums that designers face,
for instance in relation to their labour force.