Fashion vs Museums: invasion or collaboration?
Graphic by Grace Lougheed.
In a Harvard Business School case study from January 2015, “The Blonde Salad” was named “the world’s most popular fashion blog.” The “globe-trotting” founder of “The Blonde Salad,” the Italian Chiara Ferragni, is posed here in front of most world-renowned Renaissance artworks at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy. The photoshoot was for the cover of Vogue Hong Kong’s October 2020 issue honoring the new Hong Kong Museum of Art’s temporary exhibition “Botticelli and His Times — Masterworks from the Uffizi.”
Image via Vogue Hong Kong
According to an article by Isabella Borrelli, Vogue Hong Kong paid the museum’s standard rate and did not interrupt any patrons’ visits to the Uffizi. Moreover, the institution’s official Instagram made the following post about the blogger’s visit, where the Uffizi called Ferragni “a role model for millions of followers - a sort of contemporary divinity in the era of social media.” The museum also wrote that “beauty standards change in the course of time. The female ideal of a blonde-haired woman with diaphanous skin is a very common beauty model in the Renaissance.”
Image via uffizigalleries on Instagram
The caption’s allusion to a Renaissance-era idealized sexualized white woman (as if such an ideal still exists in our contemporary days) prompted many negative comments. Amid the almost 4,000 comments on the Ufizzi’s post, many condemn the museum for adopting a commercial, futile, non-inclusive and sexist attitude towards arts and culture. However, according to a Forbes article on the subject, the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, announced that after the museum’s and Ferragni’s posts (with 21.7 million followers), 9,300 people visited the Uffizi Galleries over the weekend and there was a 27% rise in young visitors.
Recently, museums have been trying to address the common problem of the Stendhal Syndrome (coincidentally also called Florence Syndrome), meaning that many visitors feel overloaded, intimidated and/or excluded when visiting encyclopedic museums such as the Uffizi. One of the strategies is to make the artwork and its content more accessible through easier language, entertaining comparisons (such as funny lookalikes) and events like the Met Gala.
For instance, the First Initiative Foundation (FIF), which invited Ferragni to participate in the shoot, is organizing a series of engaging activities aimed at the local community for the Hong Kong museum exhibition in which they are a community partner. These include, according to Vogue Hong Kong, “expert-led interactive ‘Art Labs’” and “a self-guided itinerary allowing viewers to experience the exhibition through the lens of an alter-ego.” The Ferragni photos at the museum also fit into such a category aimed at public appeal, even though there are those who criticize this practice. For example, in the same Forbes article, teacher and writer Giancarlo Visitilli wrote, “The truth is that we as adults present everything as sugar-coated to our children and students to make it more attractive for them. We make everything easier so that their life is without problems. And that’s wrong,”
In Italy, a highly cultural country full of Roman history and renowned museums, 69.2% of the total population has never been to the Uffizi (according to the Italian Statistics Institute), which is one of the most famous museums in the world. So why is a fashion photo shoot in a museum advertising another museum seen as wrong by many people?
Perhaps the cultural engagement and call for action should be done by the influencers and celebrities themselves in order to avoid associations with big museum institutions, which are often dominated by white male artists.
Image via Rolling Stone
In Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “APES**T” music video (2018), designer clothes such as Burberry, John Galliano, Stephane Rolland, Alexis Mabille and Balmain were worn by the Carters in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. As a result, the Louvre museum reached a record number of visitors in that same year. Just as Ferragni did in Florence, the couple posed and performed with confident body language in front of the world's most famous artworks — produced by a white masculine elite.
What I got out of the video was a statement toward a more inclusive and diverse standard for museums and, overall, for the global art market. Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s art collection is composed of works by contemporary Black artists such as David Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I believe this shows how we should not condemn celebrities for engaging in fashion interventions in museums, but support them as they are able to highlight the need for urgent changes in the art world.
Image via chiaraferragni on Instagram
There is an inherent tendency for celebrities and fashion influencers to use art as a way to elevate their content. Art is interdisciplinary; it entails culture, fashion, history, philosophy and so much more, all in one object! Take a look at other posts by Ferragni and notice how she engages with art in order to promote her content.
The two last posts shown above underscore an explicit fashion/art collaboration with a certain societal goal (in this case elevating women’s status). Ferragni captioned the second post, “Loved working with Francesco Vezzoli on this Vanity Fair issue curated by him about Italian women and their power.”
Throughout history, the connection between art and fashion has always been a pivotal aspect of the visual arts realm. Museums should aim at the highest number of visitors as contemplating the past often gives us creative insights as well as a profound understanding of our contemporary, fast-paced world. In my opinion, celebrities at museums do not portray these cultural institutions as futile, but their promotion rather deconstructs a menacing and elitist image of museums as an exclusive place for intellectuals. These fashion interventions in the art world fueled by social media builds an image that museums are a multifaceted space where everyone, regardless of ethnicity, education and interest, can benefit from.