Ephemeral Matters: A Deep Dive into Fashion’s Hidden Archives
The National Museum in Oslo’s exhibition, "Ephemeral Matters. Into the Fashion Archive," offers a unique perspective on the fleeting nature of fashion. Rather than showcasing garments, the traditional focus of fashion exhibitions, this display shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked "ephemera" – the supporting materials that surround fashion creation and dissemination. These include invitations, show programs, press releases, lookbooks, catalogs, invoices, and even receipts. While crucial during the design and launch of a collection, these items are frequently discarded after their immediate purpose is served. The exhibition, however, elevates these ephemeral objects to the status of significant cultural artifacts, demonstrating their potential to reveal new insights into the fashion industry and its history.
This compact yet comprehensive exhibition, featuring approximately 500 items within a single room, draws inspiration from fashion scholar Marco Pecorari’s acclaimed book, "Fashion Remains. Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive." Pecorari’s work challenges the conventional hierarchy within fashion archiving, arguing for the significance of ephemera in understanding the broader context of fashion production and consumption. The exhibition highlights six carefully selected archives, each with a distinct focus, including the Palais Galliera fashion museum’s archive in Paris, online booksellers Diktas and Rare Books Paris, and the Queer Zine Archive Project in the USA. These diverse archives share a common thread: they are driven by passionate individuals dedicated to preserving materials often deemed secondary by the museum world.
The exhibition design evokes the atmosphere of an archive, with pull-out drawers brimming with fascinating treasures from fashion’s past and present. These drawers hold a captivating array of items, ranging from an invoice from Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, Rose Bertin, to highly sought-after invitations from the contemporary fashion house Balenciaga, signed by current designer Demna. This juxtaposition of historical and contemporary ephemera underscores the enduring importance of these materials in understanding the evolution of fashion. The meticulously researched and aesthetically compelling presentation convincingly positions ephemera as a significant cultural heritage, capable of providing fresh perspectives on fashion as both a creative industry and a cultural phenomenon.
"Ephemeral Matters" also draws attention to the relative lack of research within the fashion field, particularly in a Nordic context. Curator Hanne Eide, in collaboration with Pecorari, has unearthed materials from the National Museum’s own archives that await further exploration. These archival boxes contain documents from Molestad & Co., a Norwegian department store that, similar to NK’s French Dressmaking Department in Stockholm during the first half of the 20th century, custom-made reproductions of Parisian haute couture garments for local private clients. These documents offer a glimpse into the local adaptation and consumption of high fashion trends.
Furthermore, the exhibition introduces the recently opened International Library of Fashion Research (ILFR), a unique library and archive focused on ephemeral fashion materials from the 1970s onwards. Founded in 2020 by fashion publicist Elise By Olsen, the ILFR is based on an extensive private collection of ephemera belonging to a New York-based graphic designer. Through a collaboration with the National Museum, the archive is now accessible to the public, housed within the museum’s premises. Visitors can freely browse books, magazines, and press materials from influential fashion houses like Comme des Garçons, Helmut Lang, and Martin Margiela, as well as the graphic design agency M/M Paris.
The ILFR’s presence within the National Museum creates an unparalleled resource for exploring the evolution of fashion communication over the past fifty years. This combination of a thought-provoking exhibition and a readily accessible archive of ephemeral materials has transformed Oslo into a unique research destination for fashion scholars and enthusiasts worldwide. The exhibition’s focus on ephemera not only enriches our understanding of fashion history but also encourages further research and exploration within this often-overlooked area of fashion scholarship. It serves as a call to action for museums and archives to reconsider the value of these seemingly transient materials and their potential to illuminate the complex and multifaceted world of fashion.
