For a status-craving aristocrat living 500 years ago, few things impressed guests more than a “cabinet of curiosities.” Often a room or rooms rather than a case or cupboard, these “cabinets” were filled with objects rare, beautiful, and bizarre, from Greek statuary to a preserved human baby’s head (complete with lace cap), from gilded nautilus shells to four-faced clocks. The best of them entertained visitors with the familiar, provoked them with the horrific, and even, should the visitor choose to notice, hinted at novel ways of seeing the world. Such rooms paved the way for modern museums.
Next Wednesday, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York City, returns the favor with “Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities,” an exhibition that focuses on fashion’s presence in historical cabinets.
The museum’s curator of costume and accessories, Colleen Hill, who organized the show of nearly 200 pieces, says few people have studied that presence, but it ranged from Italian shoes to chain mail, to the costumes of Indigenous people. Feathered objects were a favorite.
Hill joined F.I.T. in 2006 and has made a name for herself with more than a dozen exhibitions. (Subjects have included the design influence of the rose and the anxieties inherent in 1990s fashion.) The show that visitors may remember best is 2016’s acclaimed “Fairy Tale Fashion,” which imagined what the characters of 13 classics would have decided to wear, if only they could escape the page and hire the right designer. For The Little Mermaid, Hill turned to a mermaid gown by Rodarte. As she did more research, she learned that cabinet collectors at one point became obsessed with mermaids, which were often, she says, “a monkey’s head rather expertly stitched on to a fish’s body.” Her own curiosity mushroomed, and eventually she decided to make fashion’s role in cabinets of curiosities the subject of her Ph.D.
Still, the new show at F.I.T. is not for doctorate purists. It is, Hill hopes, fun. Much of it is a kind of imaginary modern cabinet of curiosities, informed by Hill’s take on what fashion objects might go into it. Butterflies, for instance. Collections of lepidoptera were a small-scale, high-volume display popular in history’s cabinets (whose fauna also included a vast array of stuffed beasts). For a spring 2019 show that took inspiration from such cabinets, the Athens-born designer Mary Katrantzou created an embroidered and beaded dress decorated with dozens of printed butterflies. In the same year, the British designer Sophia Webster attached embroidered multi-colored butterflies to spiky sandals, seemingly lifting them a few extra inches.
If those sandals come with a dash of surrealism, that’s no surprise. Cabinet creators were obsessed with monsters, along with everyday objects morphing into scary or creaturely things—for them the connection with the unconscious and the irrational came naturally, as it does at F.I.T. A 2013 “skeleton” dress, cut in glowing metallic leather by the Turkish designer Arzu Kaprol, echoes the many human skeletons that populated cabinets, reminders of the transience of life.
Cabinets of curiosities could be joyous, too. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), who controlled large swaths of Europe, may have been sickly, depressive, and unpopular, but when it came to his cabinet he was a mensch. Rudolf went so far as to commission Giuseppe Arcimboldo—the 16th-century painter of human portraits composed of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and twigs—to render him as a huge, happy Vertumnus, the Roman god of plant growth and the seasons. He then placed the painting in his cabinet and loved it—as did Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons. In 2018, she created a dress printed with Arcimboldo’s grinning, overflowing portrait.
“Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities” will be on at the Museum at F.I.T., in New York, from February 19 to April 20
Peter Saenger has written and edited for The Wall Street Journal on such topics as art, art books, museums, and travel. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker
