Framing Fashion Fantasies:  

In the late nineteenth century, new department stores and fashion retailers transformed a stretch of downtown Manhattan between Broadway and Sixth Avenue into a shopping destination known as the Ladies’ Mile. This neighborhood spurred the transformation of shopping from a chore into a pastime, as elegant displays lured affluent customers who peered through the windows into an alternate and elevated reality. Framing Fashion Fantasies: Windows Into … uses its unique space at the 80WSE Broadway Windows gallery to tease apart the fantasies – and anti-fantasies – that are created by designers, produced by the fashion industry, and interpreted by the consumer.

“Fashion acts as a vehicle for fantasy,” wrote historian Elizabeth Wilson. “The performance that is fashion is one road from the inner to the outer world.” Framing Fashion Fantasies presents six vignettes that capture a variety of such roads from private imagination to public performance, roads that carry the wearer across time, space, and identity. Curated by master’s candidates in New York University’s Costume Studies program, the exhibition considers fashion as a means of claiming a role in a preferred reality.

         Two windows, Nostalgia and Otherness, consider the longstanding appeal of both the culturally and temporally “exotic” to the Western imagination. Nostalgia presents two Renaissance revival dresses, one from the 1970s and one from the present day, to explore a persistent fascination with the medieval past. In Otherness, early twentieth-century styles reveal how Western fashion constructed a fantasy of the “oriental” that signaled both the modernity and the cultural dominance of the women who wore it. 

    Escapism highlights runway fashion as the expression of an individual designer’s fantasy, exploring how ASHLYN’s Fall 2022 Ready-to-Wear collection blends inspiration from the past with a vision for a more sustainable future. The American Dream pairs a Juicy Couture tracksuit with a Telfar “Shopping Bag” and Stanley “Thirst Quencher” tumbler to consider the role of consumption in constructing the fantasy of the wealthy, successful, but consummately feminine American dream girl.

         The Myth and The Monster address darker elements of fantasy. In The Myth, mass-market clothing draws on figures from legend to offer the everyday consumer a fantasy, perhaps a hollow one, of feminine empowerment. The Monster, on the other hand, displays high fashion that confronts cultural constructions of the vilified other, embracing “monstrosity” as an act of protest and self-assertion.

         Inspiration, aspiration, rejection: the vignettes in Framing Fashion Fantasies reveal how fashion at all levels engages with individual and collective imagination. Far from idle daydreams, the fantasies considered in the exhibition offer psychological escape, prop up narratives of cultural dominance, solidify into enduring shared mythology, and imagine new social possibilities. Fashion, according to Wilson, is a “performance art” and so a “vehicle for … ambivalence,” a medium that “speaks dread as well as desire; the shell of chic, the aura of glamour, always hide a wound.” Framed by their windows like actors on a stage, the fashion objects on display perform disparate roles but share an instinct to protect the wearer from the wounds of a world too modern, too mundane, or too monolithic in its accepted means of expression. From the runway to the retailer, the mainstream to the avant-garde, fashion renders fantasy tangible. Framing Fashion Fantasies: Windows Into …reveals how fashion objects themselves serve as windows into imagined realities, bringing them almost, but not quite, close enough to touch.