REVIEW //Fashion’s Fragmented Reflection: MoMu’s Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror – Fashion & the Psyche
ModeMuseum (MoMu), Antwerp
8 October 2022 – 26 February 2023

MoMu’s Mirror Mirror – Fashion & the Psyche traces the seams that bind fashion, the body, and the subconscious together. The exhibition, curated by Elisa de Wyngaert (a Courtauld alumnus), tackles and translates abstract themes of self-image, body fragmentation, and uncanny human replicas. Unlike contemporary fashion exhibitions, Mirror Mirror exposes what lies beyond – or beneath – clothing itself, disrupting and surpassing visitor expectations.

The viewer is first confronted with Dirk Van Saene’s sculpture I Feel Perfectly Terrible (2021). Swallowed in darkness, a human-like figure stands alone with its head in its hands. The uncanny form’s disproportionate body is encased in a timeless suit. With its melancholic title and defeated posture, Van Saene’s work represents the experience of being immaculately dressed and mentally unstable, marking a discord between exterior and interior. This sets the tone for the exhibition, embodying fashion’s impact on bodily experiences and the human subconscious.

The first section, ‘Reflection’, explores how contemporary fashion designers mould, conceal, and distort the body to disrupt beauty ideals. Yet Mirror Mirror goes further, never shying away from delicate discussions about mental health. Avant-garde designs that accentuate or fragment the human form are sensitively tied with body dysmorphic disorder. The highlight of ‘Reflection’ is Comme des Garçons’s 1997 Spring-Summer ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’ collection. Each of designer Rei Kawakubo’s garments feature padding in typically un-accentuated body parts, such as the stomach or back, to create warped proportions. Kawakubo disrupts anatomical expectations, whilst dismantling unattainable beauty standards traditionally communicated by the fashion industry.

Throughout ‘Reflection’, garments are isolated by glass partitions, causing your own ghoulish reflection to be mirrored back to you as you move through the space. These glass membranes insert the visitor into the narrative, forcing them to contemplate their own ephemeral body. Mannequins are crowned with custom wigs designed by hairstylist Cyndia Harvey, imbuing each mannequin with a unique personality. Ironically, perhaps intentionally, this attempt to animate the mannequins objectifies them into sculptural, uncanny human hybrids. Most importantly, Harvey’s ornate wigs celebrate the history and artistry of Black hairstyles that have been rejected and appropriated by the fashion industry.

This follows into ‘Replica’, which welcomes visitors into a life-sized ‘doll’s house’, inhabited by an army of uncanny human surrogates. Unlike ‘Reflection’, ‘Replica’ orchestrates a dialogue between the past and present to convey the historic fascination with life-like but lifeless human replicas. An eighteenth-century miniature fashion doll outlines their early context. Transported across Europe, their sole purpose was to exhibit contemporary fashion, and not to captivate – or be captives of – children’s imaginations. In harsh contrast, sculptures resemble discarded dolls that are too horrifying to play with, lurking at the back of the ‘doll’s house’. Hans Bellmer’s wooden sculpture La Demi-Poupée (1972) is an anatomical nightmare: pursed lips on a penile head, one breast, one arm and one leg with articulated roll-joints. This doll wears nothing but a black choker, a bow on its hairless head, a greying sock and an infantilising Mary Jane shoe. Bellmer’s ‘half-doll’ is perched on the wall of a narrow corridor, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, as if guarding a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, innocence and trauma, human and inhumane.

Curator de Wyngaert also evaluates the role mannequins play as surrogates of the human form, instead of just props to display clothing. Whilst acknowledging their uncanniness, de Wyngaert seeks to disrupt the ‘thin, white mannequin, with Caucasian facial features’, which is the norm in museums[1] This typicality is challenged by a singular mannequin of fashion collector Michelle Elie, commissioned by curator Dr Mahret Ifeoma Kupka for the 2020 Museum Angewandte Kunst exhibition Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.[2] Custom-made and 3D-scanned to accurately replicate her features, Elie’s mannequin is more than just an inanimate dummy. Instead, it solidifies her position as an influential Black woman in the fashion world. De Wyngaert acknowledges and reinforces the role mannequins play in the subconscious of museum visitors, to move towards a ‘more inclusive, self-aware and decolonial future for institutions’.[3]

The final chapter, ‘Avatar’, exposes fashion’s acceptance of, or attempt to keep up with, the digital realm. Mirror Mirror highlights the fraught relationship between the self and our artificial presence as we navigate a progressively sinister and dehumanising digitised life. ‘Avatar’ builds on the themes established in ‘Replica’, leading visitors to draw their own links between dolls, mannequins and digital avatars. This exposes the human tendency to remove ourselves from – and duplicate – the self, which pre-dates the digital era. In the final room, the exhibition ends as it started: a lone figure exuding heavy solitude. Ed Atkins’s video Ribbons (2014) is projected onto huge screens. The partially nude digital avatar is rendered from the artist’s own body, punctuated with tattoos. Unlike Van Saene’s silent, sorrowful, suited sculpture that introduced Mirror Mirror, Atkins’s avatar strives to engage with his audience. It is this, and not his disarming state of undress, that isolates him. Surrounded by empty glasses and half-smoked cigarettes, Atkins’s replica delivers a deadpan plea to ‘help me communicate without debasement’. It is a desperate attempt to form a connection between the trapped digital self and his fleeting audience who bask in his artificial light.

Given that Mirror Mirror begins and ends with a sombre human replica, it is tempting to think that the exhibition was unable to answer the profound questions it posed. Mirror Mirror does not have the answers, and neither does it pretend to. Instead, it opens and sustains debates. MoMu encourages visitors to form their own understanding of how designers and artists empower through clothing, celebrate bodily diversity, and disrupt limiting beauty standards. Mirror Mirror’s self-awareness and confrontation of fashion’s problematic nature elevates this display above the blockbuster retrospective fashion exhibitions to which we are so accustomed. MoMu holds a mirror up to fashion, shattering pre-existing notions, while disrupting visitors’ expectations.

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