Katherine Pogson

Exhibition Review: Fashioned from Nature, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK, 21 April 2018 – 27 January 2019

Fashioned from Nature curated by Edwina Ehrman at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is a Wunderkammer with a conscience.  Spanning four centuries of fashion artefacts, this timely exhibition charts human engagement with nature through a focus on materials, to highlight the environmental consequences of fashion practices worldwide. 

Devised in three sections, the exhibition begins with the period from 1600 – 1800.  Fashion in Europe at the start of this era is shown to be mostly reliant on local materials and industries. Handcraft skills were highly developed, but largely domestic, as the profusely embroidered 17th-century British bed curtains show.  The cachet attached to exotic materials such as silk, ivory and mother-of-pearl, however, indicates the future direction of travel - towards global sourcing and the development of mechanization.

The second section from 1800 - 1900 describes how the Enlightenment-era intellectual pursuit of natural history filtered down to public popularity through lavishly illustrated albums and books.  These in turn influenced not only designs for print and pattern, exemplified by an 18th-century waistcoat embroidered with two different species of macaque but fed a craze for amateur collections of natural specimens such as shells, and even seaweed.  The appetite for novelty is here shown to be closely linked to curiosity to learn more about the natural world.

The development of classification into the professionalization of science through the 19th-century is mirrored in the many exhibits curated in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Natural History Museum.  The Muslin dress encrusted with 5,000 Jewel beetle wings and accompanying interpretation, is a show-stopping example.  The mania for animal-derived ornamentation, is further illustrated through capes of swan’s down and cockerel feathers and a pair of earrings made from the intact heads of Honeycreepers 

This period marked the beginning of organized protests against unethical practices, such as the slaughter of wild breeding egrets for their long ‘osprey’ plumes.  1869 saw the first legislation to protect native British birds. In the same year, a patent method for farming ostriches was lodged in South Africa, (the feathers of this species being harvested without harming the bird.)  The showcases are stuffed, if you will excuse the pun, with details of this kind - each artefact lifts the lid on layers of cause and effect, linking social pressure and unintended, or unattended to, consequences.

The exhibition celebrates human ingenuity expressed through the manipulation of organic substances, from whalebone to pineapple fibre.  It also opens the door to stories of oppression, including slavery, which accompanied the rise of Empire, and persist within the global supply chain today.  In a tantalizing example, “The Putumayo Revelations” of the torture and murder of rubber harvesters in Peru published by Roger Casement in 1912, share a vitrine explaining the ‘fashion revolution’ created by the invention of elastic.  Flavia Amadeu’s ethical wild rubber jewellery in the next section, provides a contemporary coda to this narrative.

Up a staircase dominated by Emma Watson’s 2016 Met Gala ball gown made from ‘post-consumer plastic yarn’, 20th and 21st-century fashion’s engagement with environmental responsibility takes centre stage.  This final floor of the exhibition contrasts the long-standing human urge to adorn - often characterized as shallow - with its potential, as a driver of industry, to be a powerful vehicle for change.

Naomi Bailey-Cooper’s Ahimsa silk dress is decorated with spun glass embellishments suggesting feathers.  This design is inspired by a hundred-year-old head ornament also displayed in the exhibition.  Bailey-Cooper’s work questions our desire to appropriate the qualities of wild creatures through the tactility of fur, and the exotic ‘otherness’ of tropical feathers. 

Slogan-covered garments such as Bridget Harvey’s ‘Mend More Bin Less’ jumper, and placards from recent marches against climate-change, populate an installation on contemporary protest.  Political demonstrations against fashion’s more short-sighted practices clearly have a history stretching back at least a hundred and fifty years.

The consequences of unthinking consumer behaviour are most clearly outlined in the interactive features Fashion Now and Fashion Futures 2030, conceived with the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at University of the Arts, London.  Five wardrobe staples are decoded to foreground the choices implicit in fast fashion, while touch-screen questionnaires explore how fashion landscapes of the future may unfold, dependent on consumer behaviours, and collect data for further research into this important area of concern.

Ingenious design companies address a roster of issues from water use (Tortoise Denim), waste (NUNO) and animal-product alternatives such as the grape skin dress by Vegea, to renewable energy (Burberry) and transparency in the supply chain (Honest By).  This section might be entitled ‘Fashioned with Nature’.

Colourful recycled paper samples produced by the RISE Research Institute of Sweden promote design with different product life-cycles in mind, “acknowledging that disposable fashion forms a part of most wardrobes”, according to the signage.  In an age where social media exposure has caused the phenomenon of not ‘re-wearing’ an outfit more than once, paper garments (first developed for retail after World War One) may seem appropriate when not every made-to-last garment is actually cherished, maintained or wanted.

The variety of approaches illustrated should clarify for a general audience that ‘sustainable fashion’ goes far beyond recycling.  However, I question whether these 21st-century ‘solutions’ significantly address the underlying human appetite for fashion itself.  Cleaning up the supply chain, though vital, will not be sufficient to counteract the destructive impact of the fashion industry on the shared environment. To do this, fashion must uncouple itself from the basic tenet of economic growth. 

The emphasis on technology over behaviour sets up a paradigm in which we fail to challenge notions which put human ‘needs’ above those of the rest of ‘nature’, for access to water, food, shelter, and stable climates. Could unpicking the ways in which humanity conceives of itself as separate from nature provide another way forward, so that our industry can move towards ‘fashioning for nature’?