Exhibiting contemporary fashion as art has become, in the last two decades, the dominant modus
operandi of museums worldwide; of art museums, fashion museums and increasingly also ethnographic
museums. The overall tendency is to display a sanitized version of a designer’s couture creations,
robbed of their social and economic contexts of production, circulation and consumption. The
museums’ lack of self-reflection dovetails with their reception of sizable sponsorships from brands
whose designers are represented in such exhibitions. As I have discussed elsewhere (Kuldova 2015),
the artification (Korolainen 2012; Shapiro and Heinich 2012; Shiner 2012) of fashion is on the agenda
of corporate sponsors of the fashion industry as well. These include the global alcohol industry that in
the process even seeks to turn its own products and their consumption into a form of art and connoisseurship,
along with fashion, turning all into a high life lived as high art itself (Tseëlon 2012).
The recently opened exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – an art and design
museum in Rotterdam – called The Future of Fashion is Now, is indeed a living testimony to the drive
towards artification accompanied by profound decontextualization. Here again, we meet the standard
repertoire of selected designs by people like Martin Margiela, Iris van Herpen, Rei Kawakubo (Comme