E/Motion. Fashion in Transition

With this exhibition, MoMu looks back on events from the past three decades and asks questions about how fashion can reinvent itself as an industry, as well as the role that fashion designers can play in the future.

Through themes such as the female body, 9/11, identity and surveillance the exhibition looks at how fashion can expose and even anticipate the different emotions running through society. Fashion sits at the very centre of contemporary life, and artists and designers play leading roles in constructing images and meaning in times of fundamental and systemic change. Fashion was in constant dialogue with, and even predicted, different crises and transitions. Like no other medium, fashion can magnify the raw emotions within society. Understanding fashion is a way to understand, and even articulate, both the hopeful and uncomfortable truths of the world. ‘E/MOTION’ looks at the way fashion has been a visual signifier of contemporary instabilities, concerns and emotions.

The exhibition is divided into chapters that function as portals through which social, political and psychological change is explored. All objects – an assemblage of fashion silhouettes, artworks, photography, video and documentation – are presented as symbols, icons or metaphors of their time. Sometimes they offer insights into critically dark truths about the world, whilst others provide humorous portrayals on what it is like to live in the world today.

© MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, photo Stany Dederen

The exhibition wants to inspire and ask questions about the reinvention of fashion as an industry and the future role of designers and artists. Above all else, ‘E/MOTION. Fashion in Transition’, is a story about our dire need for emotion. Fashion is emotion and in motion.