The COLLECTOR'S EYE

After a slew of blockbuster FASHION EXHIBITIONS, MUSEUMS are now CLAMORING to BUILD OUT their own COUTURE COLLECTIONS and a handful of WOMEN have been HELPING them FILL the VOID

FASHION IS, BY ITS VERY NATURE of seasonality and constant reinvention, ephemeral. Its fragile fabrications, particularly the embroidery, tulles, and organzas that make haute couture, are easily susceptible to damage. And for the simple and obvious reason that it was historically dismissed as a woman's frivolity, it wasn't seen by museums as worthy of preservation.

Fashion exhibitions at institutions from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to London's Victoria & Albert to San Francisco's de Young have become historic blockbusters, bringing in record numbers of visitors and changing the way museumgoers perceive fashion. Though the first French couture label-the House of Worth, founded by Paris-based English designer Charles Worth-was established in 1858, the inclusion of clothing in the permanent collections of these organizations is a relatively recent practice, beginning in earnest in the 1970s. When museums finally came around to the idea that fashion was worth collecting and displaying, they relied on the donations of a handful of clients of fashion houses and private collectors who had the means and the wherewithal to see (and buy and then preserve) fashion as a way to look at history.

In January of 2024, the de Young museum - will put on an exhibition examining the legacy of the Bay Area's most stylish 20th- and 21st-century denizens, like Jeanne Magnin, Eleanor de Guigné, Nan Kempner, Dodie Rosekrans, and Christine Suppes. The show was made possible in part by Suppes's recent donation of more than 500 pieces to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, which oversees the de Young. Suppes, who founded one of the first online fashion publications, Fashionlines, takes an intellectual approach to collecting.