Neither was it our aim to represent Samant as a unique creative genius and turn his work into
high art. Rather, our aim was to engage in a wider critique of the fashion system, including the
conditions of production. More specifically, our aim was to critique the complicit role contemporary
museums play in creating design heroes and thus serving as a mere instrument of added value creation
for companies, in the form of prestige and recognition. Fashion is primarily big business, not
art, something that museums all too wilfully forget when eager to increase their visitor numbers. As
Marie R. Melchior has also observed, ‘the challenge is that while fashion exhibitions make museums
attractive, they do not necessarily make museums reflective or particularly critical, nor do they transform
museums into a forum for debate’ (Melchior 2014: 13). Indeed, our exhibition had already
identified and was determined to address this challenge. Our mission was to reveal elements of the
dynamics that structure the field of fashion, in India, and the logic that fuels rising inequality. We
wanted to address the direct expulsion (Sassen 2014) of millions of workers in the industry beyond
the borders of ‘good society’ that turns them into second-rate citizens if not internal enemies. We
also wanted to address the powerful discourses and apparatuses that turn those like Samant into
design heroes, while in the process impoverishing others and sustaining hierarchies. What follows
is neither an outsider’s review of a fashion exhibition, nor a value-neutral academic article. Rather, it
is a reflection on a fashion exhibition that I curated and designed and that was firmly grounded in
my ethnography and doctoral research. This research followed the movement of a delicate traditional
embroidery from impoverished villages surrounding Lucknow and workshops in the old town
of this city to high-end designer studios in New Delhi and the wealthy Indian elite clientele (Kuldova
2013a). My reflections are grounded in the experience of making a fashion exhibition, with all the
institutional obstacles and biases common to most western museums. My reflections are alsogrounded in research visits to other museums and fashion exhibitions, as well as engagement with
museum anthropology and museology. The following is to be read as a critical inquiry into current
fashion exhibitions based on these practical and theoretical encounters, and a suggestion of an alternative
to the hegemonic trend. In particular, my exhibition and my approach take issue with what
I perceive as the dominant problems of this field, such as the fraught relationship between fashion
and art (Tseëlon 2012); art as public good vs corporate and private sponsorships; form vs content in
exhibition design; the issue of fashion designers as co-curators; and persistent policies of
infantilization and patronage of audiences