Politics-of-Fashion-Moschino-2014

Now that’s fast fashion: Moschino at the Politics of Fashion exhibition at Toronto’s Design Exchange. All photos courtesy of the Design Exchange. 

The most intriguing exhibition in town explores the surprising, provocative ways that clothes intersect with culture.
Politics of Fashion: Fashion of Politics—at Toronto’s
Design Exchange— features more than 200 pieces, from an "Anarchy in the UK" Sex Pistols T-shirt to a film by the always sartorially subversive Hussein Chalayan. The show is fascinating, in part, because it takes its subject seriously. Too often, fashion is dismissed as the purview of a privileged few, or the respite of the shallow masses who prefer style over substance.
Politics of Fashion offers a more nuanced take: its starting point is that clothing is full of codes, and that we constantly tell the world who we are through what we’re wearing. Clothes can excite and infuriate, attract and repel. Some of the pieces in the exhibition—like Jeremy Scott’s leopard print burka—serve merely to showcase the limited power of shock value, while others—like the sculptural, androgynous creations by Canadian designer Rad Hourani—underline the exhibition’s message that fashion can both affect and reflect change. Bottom line: Self-expression is the ultimate fashion statement.
Click through to see more pics from the exhibition…
(more…)