Fashioning San Francisco: celebrating the style of a city
Long an integral part of San Francisco’s identity, fashion is also written into the DNA of one of that city’s flagship cultural institutions: the de Young Museum. In fact, the de Young is a major holder of costumes and textiles, with one of the largest collections of fashion in the United States, spanning 3,000 years of human history. A number of the museum’s major holdings, plus pieces lent from many fashionable San Franciscans, are on display at the museum’s delightful new exhibit, Fashioning San Francisco.
Fashioning San Francisco is selfconsciously a west coast exhibition and seeks to separate itself from east coast shows. “We don’t want to just be mirroring the programs of museums back east,” said Thomas P Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Here we are in California, at the edge of the Pacific. We want to reflect the physicality of our location and our distinct traditions.”
Fashioning San Francisco looks west, drawing in many of the Pacific Rim’s finest designers, even as it showcases designs from European stalwarts such as Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Christian Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld. Featured designers from California westward include Frederick Gibson Bayh, a local powerhouse in the 1940s while designing for the legendary luxury department store Gump’s; Kaisik Wong, who learned his trade in San Francisco’s Chinatown and was perhaps best known for having a design ripped off by Balenciaga for its spring/summer 2002 collection; Japanese trailblazer Yohji Yamamoto, celebrated for his avantgarde aesthetic; and Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese founder of the luxury label Comme des Garçons.
“The collection here is really broad. It spans about 125 countries or cultures,” said exhibition curator curator Laura L Camerlengo. She added that Fashioning San Francisco is all about bringing fresh, new stories to its audiences. “My previous work with the museum set me up for thinking about how to tell broader narratives in the stories we tell, beyond the more typical and well-trodden exhibitions and themes.”
These broader narratives are evident in the avant-garde section of Fashioning San Francisco, in the form of dresses such as Vivienne Tam’s Chairman Mao, which has some resemblance to Andy Warhol’s Mao in how it recasts the famous photo of the Chinese leader into multiple forms, priest and schoolgirl among others. The dress, which premiered as part of Tam’s spring 1995 collection, caused a range of reactions, from confusion (one buyer speculated that the person on Tam’s dress was her father), to criticism that Tam was making light of a dictator responsible for horrifying acts.
Part of the fascination of Fashioning San Francisco is seeing a dress such as Chairman Mao as less of a contemporary object and more as moment in fashion’s vast history. We might speculate about where the dress’s former owner, identified in the exhibition as Sally Yu Leung, could have worn it, or we might compare it to Yamamoto’s adjacent avant-garde offering, also a ready-to-wear piece from 1995 but much more traditional in its aesthetics. It’s funny to think of both dresses arriving in San Francisco in spring 1995, perhaps even being worn to the same function.
Seeing these clothes as worn objects, not just pieces of fashion history, was very much at the forefront of Camerlengo’s mind as she curated this show. “One of the things I was really interested in was telling the stories of women,” she said. “I hope this exhibition helps to upend the narrative by connecting the clothes to these really important pillars of our community – suffragettes, poets, entrepreneurs, founders of key organizations, like the free library, Stern Grove, and the de Young Museum.”
Attention to the lives of the women who wore, owned and donated these objects to be part of the de Young’s permanent collection is something that distinguishes Fashioning San Francisco from other fashion-oriented museum exhibitions. Speaking with Camerlengo, she revealed a true passion to infuse feminist tones into the exhibition. This attention goes all the way down to the level of something like the attribution on an exhibit placard, which, she notes, has often been prey to sexism.
“We were thinking about things like even the simple act of writing a credit line,” said Camerlengo, “which historically would say ‘Gift of Mrs soand-so’. That’s a way of obscuring a woman’s name, her identity. This presented a great opportunity to showcase the women’s names as their full name. We also say who wore it, and that’s a great way to put women back into the narratives around our collection.”
Camerlengo and her team have absolutely nailed the staging of the exhibit, which offers an uptown, night-out feeling while referencing many parts of San Francisco through innovative staging of the exhibition’s seven sections. Swanky music that follows the timeline of the exhibit runs for an hour – about the time an average attendee would take to see the show – joining nicely with the exhibit’s visual aesthetics to create an intimate and sensual feel: not the easiest thing to conjure in interior of a major art museum. “We really wanted to bring the city into the galleries,” said Camerlengo.
Another fun part of the exhibition is that it has partnered with Snap to present “mirrors” that allow attendees to see themselves virtually wearing three of the exhibition dresses, and to download photos of themselves. These mirrors give the show a playful energy, and such augmented reality experiences are things Camerlengo and Campbell, they told me, hope to bring more and more into shows. “It’s been really fun to see people interact with it,” said Camerlengo. “I have a four-yearold, and she thought it was the most amazing technology she’s ever tried.”
Fashioning San Francisco is a satisfying, evocative tribute to a lesserknown but no less important American fashion capital, even if it may often be obscured by New York. Camerlengo hopes that the exhibit might open – and change – some minds. “I hope people who view the exhibit will be so excited about San Francisco as a place and the different style narratives that we have here. I hope people are surprised and see that San Francisco has always been an international player in the field of fashion history.”
Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style is now on show at the de Young museum in San Francisco until 11 August
same frame.” This was a good idea but it was soon superseded by a better one: “I thought, ‘What happens if the images of the past were text – like the whisper of the wind – and I just have to shoot the present day?”
And this is the deceptively simple means by which Occupied City achieves its transcendent power. It combines McQueen’s footage – every one of the 2,000-plus addresses in Stigter’s atlas were shot, although not all made the final cut – with a voiceover by Melanie Hyams, a young British-Jewish actor, who reads out descriptions of each place during the occupation, who lived there, what they did.
Gerrit van der Veen College, for example, is both the school McQueen and Stigter’s daughter once attended and the former HQ of the Sicherheitspolizei, or German security police, the brutal enforcers of the Nazis’ occupation regime. This morning the school is alive with the sounds of ringing bells and rushing teenagers, but during the war, says Stigter, this was “the most feared address in the whole of Amsterdam”.
After seeking permission to enter, Stigter, who is 59, guides us through a locker-lined corridor to classrooms that were once cells whereprisoners awaited interrogation and torture. Today, in one of these classrooms, a history lesson is under way. The words “Hitler’s Ideeen” – meaning “Hitler’s Ideology” – are written on the whiteboard. A few doors down, pupils are watching a scene from The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, a 2008 Holocaust film that has been both championed as a useful educational resource, and criticised for soft-pedalling the culpability of ordinary Germans.
Occupied City contains no such dramatisations, let alone any straightforward didacticism. But its inclusion of certain events – an anti-fascist protest in the wake of farright electoral successes, and the recent replacement of the outdated Monument of Jewish Gratitude with the National Holocaust Names Memorial – do invite reflection. How and when should we remember the darkest times? What does it mean to truly honour the dead?
Amsterdam’s efforts at memorials include the Stolpersteine, meaning stumbling stones or blocks, one of which Stigter points out during our walk. These are 10cm square brass plaques, laid in the pavement and each inscribed with the name of a Nazi victim and the dates of their birth and death. The scheme was conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, butstolpersteine can now be found across mainland Europe. Stigter approves, but has some reservations: “You can put up a lot of monuments, but they become like trees, because people just pass them by without really realising what they are for.”
With Occupied City, McQueen has created a strikingly different way of reconnecting with the past. He talks of “sprinkling flour over this invisible history to make it visible”, and says watching the film is like being at a classical concert: “Because you can’t hold all of it in your head all the time. It’s just too much. Therefore you do drift off and come back in – one projects one’s own history into it.”
The results illuminate the events of the past to a near-hallucinatory degree. Three hours in, you’ll be seeing long-dead heroes of the Dutch resistance once again weaving in between unsuspecting shoppers on Kalverstraat; or keep-fit enthusiasts in Beatrixpark shadowboxing for exercise and in order to fend off uniformed officers of the
Nederlandsche SS.
This, says Stigter, is to do with the brain’s habit of filling in gaps. “The relationship between what you hear and see is not fixed. It changes all the time. Sometimes there’s a very obvious connection, but sometimes there is no direct link.” In drawing our attention to this disconnect, says McQueen, Occupied City highlights a profound absence of meaning. “As you watch a movie, you’re always looking to making sense of it. And sometimes, as with our film, it just doesn’t make sense. How do you make sense of 6 million people being murdered? It’s impossible.”
This question became a practical problem for McQueen, faced with the overwhelming task of editing hours and hours of footage: “It was a lot,” says the film-maker, who decided to start at “the deepest, darkest moment” and then “work out to a certain kind of light”. That initial darkest period he identified as the weeks following the Dutch surrender on 14 May 1940, when a wave of suicides spread across the nation, among them entire families choosing death over life under the Nazis. “It’s a point of darkness where there’s no future. I mean what is that point? It’s a non-point. You’re so without hope that there’s no future for you or your children or anything to do with you.”
Yet Occupied City does find its way back to hope, light and even frivolity — albeit not in any kind of linear-narrative fashion. “It wasn’t a case of dispersing moments of triumph,” says McQueen, looking slightly insulted by the suggestion. “It wasn’t a Hollywood movie. It was just basically living with things as they are, as they have to be.”
This mood derives in part from a quality the filmmakers sought in the narration. “Melanie’s voice,” says McQueen, “is, in a way, an optimistic voice – because she’s not of that period, she’s of now. She has a stake in the future. It’s not a history lesson: she’s maybe one step ahead of you, but that’s it. Just as she’s saying it, she’s acknowledging it herself. Very important.” Scenes of everyday life in the city today also helped. “When I was going around filming,” says McQueen, “it was heavy to think, ‘Oh, this person was shot here, and there’s kids playing hopscotch where a person lay dead.’ It’s very sobering. But it also just tells me what was fought for to get us to this moment, where a child can hopscotch, where people can protest, where people can –”
“– have a bar mitzvah,” says Stigter. “Yes, have a bar mitzvah,” McQueen agrees. They are perhaps thinking of the final, glorious shot of Occupied City in which children – friends of the couple’s son, in fact – joyously spill out of the golden doors of a synagogue.
This is the layered meaning of the film’s title. As well as having once been occupied by an invading army, and now by ghosts of the past, the city – like all modern cities – is occupied in the sense of preoccupied. It’s a breathing, bustling, ever-changing place, where people are sometimes too busy living to think of the dead.
As much as Occupied City is an act of remembering, it also finds something to cherish in Amsterdam’s ability to forget. “I love the fact that these kids don’t give a damn,” says McQueen, “and why should they? They can roll up and smoke their spliff and bunk off school, like we saw outside that school. It’s always the girls, innit? It’s always the girls smoking! And they have a right to do so. So yeah, to be oblivious can also be an act of protest.”
• Occupied City is released in the UK on 9 February