The Concise History of Dress - Essential

Last week I went to see The Concise History of Dress, an exhibition jointly curated by the dress curator Judith Clark and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. The exhibition mobilizes and utilizes the architecture of the fortress-like Blythe House in Olympia, a vast store house for the V&A and the British Museum collections, with suprising and unnerving installations. Each of the eleven installations explore and challenge notions of how costume and dress inform our perceptions of self/other, dress/body and subjectivity and sexuality. There was a real sense of going 'behind-the-scenes' of Blythe House, from the roof to the basement, and this theatricality continued in carefully choreographed guided tour. There were sudden moments of revelation as rooms were flooded with light and installations were revealed round corners or between rolling stacks.

Each installation came with a definition, written by Clark and Phillips, which took the place of a traditional gallery label (see above for the definition of Essential). These broad and often ambiguous terms were: Armoured; brash; comfortable; conformist; creased; diaphanous; essential; fashionable; loose; measured; plain; pretentious; provocative; revealing; sharp and tight.

When the exhibition guide opened the heavy metal door and flicked on the lights in the room containing Essential, I was met with some familiar images, including a photograph of Hamo Thornycroft's marble sculpture Lot's Wife (1877-78). Perhaps I should have expected it but I was still surprised to find an installation pertaining so closely to my own research on sculpture, dress and drapery, even containing one of the sculptures I've studied.

The photograph of Lot's Wife was hung from a metal grid, the sort used in painting stores, and surrounded by other photographic prints and plaster casts. The collection of images was formed of a mix of classical and neo-classical sculpture and painting with new pieces commissioned specifically for Essential by Judith Clark. For example, Clark commissioned a postage stamp showing a Vionnet dress and a stone carving of a Sofia Kokosalaki dress from 2006, the year Kokosalaki became creative director at Vionnet, this connection shows the enduring importance of classical drapery to our essential ideas of beauty and form.