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MOMU Antwerp

Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th Century Silhouette

MoMu  investigates the changes to fashion’s approach to the body

 Taking place at MoMu in Antwerp, the ’Game Changers – Reinventing the 20h Century Silhouette’ exhibition investigates the work of the great Cristóbal Balenciaga and how this great couturier changed fashion’s attitude towards the pre-existing fashion shapes and how the body moved when wearing those clothes. His innovation was all about a different sense of freedom for women as well as about architectural volumes, unknown until then, and started from the studies on the body by great couturiers like Madeleine Vionnet, Coco Chanel, Paul Poiret during the beginning of the twentieth century. Thanks to these great couturiers the perspective towards forms and shapes changed and opened the road to a creative vein which was later carried out by Japanese designers like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and, later still, by Belgian designers like Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester. The central figure of the exhibition remains though Cristóbal Balenciaga, seen as a key figure between these two periods as he made possible that some innovative ideas appeared again about forty years after his famous evening capes and dresses which were defined by the international press as “architectural forms”. These top designers went beyond the feminine silhouette to create innovations that go beyond the world of fashion. Theirs is research on femininity and on how women move. Thanks to this approach, fashion became more than just a trivial sequence of trends transforming itself into a way to give shape to the body, to the space around it, to movement itself, changing even its own “vocabulary”.Open to the public from March 18th to August 14th.

CollezioniDonna n.170 a/w 2016/17
www.momu.be

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