¡°Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion?¡± at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, does not privilege particular designer brands, though they are there: Chanel, Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Comme des Garcons, Vetements. Nor is it simply a chronological survey of historical transitions, though around 90 items from The Kyoto Costume Institute range from 18th-century European court dress to contemporary Japanese street culture.
Fashion is here identified as a game. The rules are not entirely clear, but there are conducts to be observed, codes to be broken, winners, losers and, finally, stylistic exhaustion. The exhibition¡¯s foci are the negotiations between polarities, between participants and spectators; seeing and being seen; equalization and differentiation; individualism and conformism; contexts and their de-contextualization.
For ¡°Photo Notes¡± (1992-2019), Dutch artist Hans Eijkelboom frequented the shopping streets of the world and snapped passers-by. With images assembled into grids, men in one configuration wear the double-denim pairing of jean and jacket. In another, women sport Burberry scarves, or both sexes don yellow vests recently popularized by French grassroots activism. Eijkelboom¡¯s photographic arrangements indicate how fashion archetypes are individualized, and they remind us of what conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher did for architectural design with their postwar ¡°typologies.¡±
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