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.

- ALISON S.COHN

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 organisations 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.