Art worlds apart: An exploration of fashion curation’s legitimation as art within critical reception

This paper explores the artistic legitimation of fashion curation, or the lack of it, within critical reception. It looks into the opportunity space, the use and mobilization of resources, and the framing involved in the legitimation of fashion curation as art, but also the opposition to its artistic legitimation. Alongside the historical account of fashion curation, I conduct a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of fashion exhibition reviews and articles found in influential publications that originate from the US and UK during the last decade, in order to investigate fashion curation’s framing by critics. Fashion is a cultural product that is frequently found in art institutions but at the same time encounters strong dissent over its artistic legitimation. An originally market-oriented genre, widely identified as entertainment, that is increasingly moving towards the broader realm of the arts, but its commerciality and utilitarian nature are seen as the biggest threats to its legitimation, aspects regarded as opposed to other art forms. At the same time, a new discipline has appeared, that of fashion curation; a genre closely related to fashion that emerged through fashion’s entry in museums and the rise of fashion exhibitions. These exhibitions are held in respected museums around the world and attract media attention through reviews and articles. The present thesis explores whether and how fashion curation, given its relation to fashion, may be acknowledged as an art form based on critics’ framing, by addressing the following research question: “How is fashion curation framed by art critics during the last decade, from 2011 to 2021?”. The attention is focused on the critics’ framing because, according to Baumann’ s (2007) theory of artistic legitimation, the role of the artworld agents, including critics, is fundamental in legitimizing a cultural product, since their judgements can inform the way cultural products are perceived by the audience. In order to provide an answer to the research question posed, I apply a mixture of qualitative and quantitative content analysis to analyze 58 fashion exhibition reviews and articles found in influential newspapers and art magazines originating from the United States and the United Kingdom. Quantitative content analysis is used to detect patterns in the way critics discuss about the fashion exhibitions, while qualitative content analysis is employed for the interpretation of the text data gathered. Thematic analysis is used for coding and grouping the data into two overarching themes: Legitimation and Lack of legitimation. Complementary, the historical developments in fashion, which manifest signs of artistic legitimation, or lack of it, are used to arrive into conclusions concerning fashion curation’s legitimacy as an art form, based on Baumann’s (2007) opportunity space and resources factors. Altogether the data revealed the ambiguity surrounding fashion curation’s position in the artworld. The main arguments supporting fashion curation’s legitimacy as an art form are confronted with the considerable number of signs indicating its lack of legitimacy. Overall, it can be argued that fashion curation is not legitimized as an artform within critical reception.