Vestir mundos [Dressing Worlds] looks at fashion design as a practice that transforms the spaces we inhabit. This exhibition brings together leading designers who have redefined contemporary dress, pushing beyond its traditional boundaries in response to twenty-first century social and environmental challenges.
Their practices explore new modes of production through the revival of traditional crafts and collaboration with artisan communities and their heritages, as well as with urban collectives and co-operatives whose resurgence has, since the start of the century, been driving alternative forms of productive organisation. This experimentation ranges from manual techniques and natural materials to biomaterials developed from fungi and bacteria.
In their intimacy and collectivity, these practices address different forms of loss and reconstruction. Some respond to the dismantling of the industrial fabric and the disappearance of technical skills, traditional crafts and ways of working; others explore how clothing enables us to negotiate personal grief, accompany life transitions and construct new forms of identity.
Dressing, in these works, is a way of taking a stand against accelerated consumption, the offshoring of production and the growing disconnect between garments and those who make them. Each piece is a manifesto affirming discrete local languages. They underline the fact that what we wear on our bodies expresses how we relate to one another and how we inhabit the planet.
Created primarily around the archives of the Fundación IDA (Research in Argentinian Design), the exhibition is completed by loans from the designers themselves and recently acquired works from the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires Collection. The collaboration with IDA brings two growing collections into dialogue, highlighting the value of archives as active tools for constructing, preserving and transmitting the identity of Argentinian design and its cultural and material legacy.
Designers:
Tramando (Martín Churba)
Trosmanchurba (Martín Churba and Jessica Trosman)
Vero Ivaldi
Vicki Otero
Cora Groppo
12NA (Mariano Breccia and Mercedes Martínez)
MANTO (Clara de la Torre and Diana Dai Chee Chaug)
Roxana Liendro
Nous Étudions (Romina Cardillo)
Juliana García Bello
Therapy Recycle and Exorcise (Mariángeles Aguirre and Paula Aguirre)
Milagros Pereda
The Museo Moderno Team
Curation: Franco Chimento and Raúl Flores
General Co-ordination: Noelia Magnelli
Exhibition Design: Iván Rösler
Production: Julieta Potenze
Installation Co-ordination: Germán Sandoval
Technical Co-ordination: Guillermo Carrasco
Fundación IDA (Research into Argentinian Design) Acknowledgments
President: Raúl Naón
Director: Mariel Szlifman
Fashion Advisors: Sebastián Rodríguez