In this week’s blog, Costume Society member Lottie McCrindell reviews the Dress Poetics exhibition that took place at the Schloss Nymphenburg, in which she exhibited a poetry-dress collaboration with fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. Following her review, Lottie discusses what the exhibition means with Zandra.
In the baroque setting of Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace, Dress Poetics gathered artists, writers, and fashion designers to explore the dress as artistic and poetic form, and as bearer of cultural meaning. Curated by artist Hannah Schmutterer, the exhibition invited creatives to contribute a dress and a text for the accompanying publication, edited by poet Jessica Lim. Schmutterer’s open brief sparked a remarkable variety of interpretations, emphasising the many registers through which a dress or the idea of a dress can signify. Among them was my own poetry-dress collaboration with fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, Time Dressed in Reverse Lilies, 1972–2025 — Rhodes’ first exploration into poetry.
Walking around the palace on our opening day, Thursday 28th August, I imagined the dresses that have passed through its halls and gardens, evolving from the fashions of the 16th century, when the Nymphenburg was built, to those of today. Such dresses carry stories of women’s lives across centuries, their fabrics woven with broader sociopolitical histories.
Dress Poetics showcased 19 works in total, spanning sculpture, fashion, textiles, installation, painting and print. The works explored dresses’ relationship with a wide range of themes, including but not limited to memory, gender, fairy tale, violence, architecture, womanhood, justice and temporality. Organised as a single continuous installation in the Nymphenburg’s Geranium House, Dress Poetics marked the first time this location has hosted a fashion and textile focused exhibition and the first time curator Hannah Schmutterer has presented there.
Alongside her curatorial role, Schmutterer exhibited a dress artwork in the show, ‘she’s a crook who was caught’, reworking a dirndl blouse, apron and nightdress into a single suspended garment. Trained in both fashion design and fine art, her practice combines dressmaking with sculpture, performance and poetry to examine dresses as carriers of memory and as sites where the aesthetics of femininity are continually negotiated. Curating Dress Poetics represents a significant moment for Schmutterer as it intersects with the start of her PhD at TU Darmstadt where she is investigating the dress as poetic form within contemporary artistic practice. When I asked Schmutterer why dresses and why Dress Poetics now, she explained:
‘My background is in fashion design and I would always make dresses. There is something inherently dramatic about dresses. I am interested in everyday dresses but also how they appear in fairy tales, folklore, films, popular culture, literature, art… Dresses are symbolically charged objects with their own distinct language and sociopolitical histories. The idea for the exhibition really began with an installation I created during my masters in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2019, where dresses became characters in a performance. Now, in Dress Poetics, there are different dresses and characters, expressing different narratives.’
Crossing the threshold of the Nymphenburg’s Geranium House into Dress Poetics, visitors found themselves at the head of a long gallery, where dresses hung from a skeletal scaffolding structure that cut down the centre of the room. Sunlight filtered through woven blinds and latticed windows to the left, casting shifting shadows across the floor and walls as it interplayed with the suspended dress forms.
From the top left corner of the scaffolding hung Tuuli Turunen’s The Shadow Dress, a black silk gown whose train extended shadow-like across the floor. Opposite, hung a white silk slip worn by Cora Gilroy Ware’s grandmother beneath her wedding dress in 1950. This opening pairing — shadow and slip, absence and trace — evoked how dresses, like lyric poems, inhabit the boundaries between interior and exterior, private and public, between what we hide and what we perform.
Looking down the gallery’s opening view, Rosalind Wilson’s Now You See Me immediately caught the eye — a patchwork of vivid tarpaulin draped across the far end of the scaffolding. Dressing the exhibition structure itself, her piece drew a conceptual line between dress and architecture as scaffolding transformed into body and tarpaulin into dress.
Reaching the far end, you could turn back and peer through small frayed holes in Wilson’s work, catching fragmented glimpses of the displayed dresses and visitors moving among them. Hand-stitched in red, the title ‘NOW YOU SEE ME’, announced itself across the tarpaulin’s surface. From this vantage, the exhibition became a layered interplay of concealment and revelation, framing dresses as costume and disguise, a means of shaping how bodies appear or slip from view.
In Munich’s centre, I kept noticing scaffolding wrapped in trompe l’oeil printed fabrics, their surfaces mimicking the building facades under construction. Poet Lisa Robertson, in her essay ‘Doubt and the History of Scaffolding’, describes the scaffold as ‘a pause, an inflection of passage. It accommodates us in a shivering,’ implying how scaffolding functions as a temporary structure that holds us in a fragile in-between.
Dresses, too, are temporary coverings. Victoria Chang captures this beautifully in her poem ‘The Thread’: ‘all the/ seasons just dresses, / things to put on and take off.’ To suspend dresses on scaffolding is to foreground their ephemerality as architectures of bodies and culture, always subject to change.
Schmutterer’s decision to display the dresses on scaffolding also brought gendered associations into play. Scaffolding, with its use in construction work, is typically coded ‘masculine’, whilst dresses are traditionally coded ‘feminine’.
Daddy Bears took a critical look at constructions of gender as she presented a mass-produced ‘College Girl’ costume still in its plastic packaging. Her accompanying poem, made from found text listing and describing schoolgirl costumes, exposed how ‘femininity’ is packaged and sold, with lines such as: ‘School Girl Sexy Costume Cosplay Talk Nerdy to Me Dreamgirls’.
Whereas Daddy Bears’ costume was pegged like merchandise, Hira Khan’s Fight or Flight hung heavy on metal chains. Reworking riot gear — a shield, vest, and helmet — into softer objects, Khan powerfully confronted the global rise of state and male violence. Just as Schmutterer set metal against textiles, Khan juxtaposed the aggression of military equipment with the intimacy of fabric and adornment. The helmet stood out: its front veiled with red roses and beads, referencing the sehra worn at Indian and Pakistani weddings, its back adorned with a long braid of black hair. Dress designed to intimidate and dominate was subverted with the language of union and love.
Nowadays we encounter riot gear in the immediacy of protest but, more often, through digital screens. That digital flattening was commented on by Cristin Richard through the construction of her piece Flat Earth, a dress of natural fabrics with the hem, collar, and sleeves sewn shut. Standing before it, I questioned whether I have seen more dresses in the flesh or flattened on digital surfaces.
One afternoon inside the exhibition, Schmutterer overheard a male passerby dismissively remark: ‘Oh, apparently my grandmother’s dresses are art now.’ His throwaway comment pointed to the art world’s resistance in recognizing fashion and textiles as artistic mediums. By invoking the grandmother, he situated dresses within the domestic, historically coded as feminine and excluded from ‘high art’.
Dress Poetics challenged the hierarchies that seek to confine dresses to wardrobes. Suspending dresses from scaffolding, it staged them as active frameworks through which gender, power and subjectivity are negotiated. The exhibition emphasised that the poetics of dress is not only decorative and identity-based, but structural, scaffolding our shared sociopolitical relations, shaping how we live together, how we imagine what might yet be built.
Schmutterer expressed how there is more to imagine and build with Dress Poetics as she plans for it to travel: ‘I would love to restage Dress Poetics in a bigger space, bringing in more artists, writers and fashion designers. I see Dress Poetics as a series where new dresses and characters will emerge. We are currently exploring venues in Detroit and Augsburg.’
Back in London from Munich, I returned to the Zandra Rhodes studio and archive, where I work as Zandra’s Personal Assistant and Studio Manager, and sat down with Zandra to reflect on what being part of Dress Poetics means. Before recounting our conversation, I will provide some context on our piece.
Alongside Zandra’s ongoing design projects, we are deeply immersed in archiving her vast collection of garments, printed textiles, accessories, drawings, fashion films, kodatraces, silk screens and press cuttings. Fashion history is alive in her studio and time is continually folding, unfolding, refolding, enfolding, folding-up, folding-out, folding away. When Schmutterer invited me to be part of Dress Poetics, I knew I wanted to collaborate with Zandra to express the poetics of her archiving project.
Our poetry-dress collaboration, Time Dressed in Reverse Lilies, grows from an archiving experience involving the rediscovery of two long-forgotten trunks filled with garments Zandra and her design team handmade throughout the 1970s. Its body is a Zandra Rhodes evening dress from one of the trunks, screen-printed with her ‘Reverse Lily’ design. Inspired by the design and history of the dress, the archival experience, and Zandra’s life and art, I and Zandra each handwrote six lyric tags. Attached to the dress with pearl beaded safety pins, they form a constellation of verses that can be read in multiple, shifting sequences. Spectrally suspended, the dress extends its wingspan like a moth or butterfly. Between past and present, making and remaking, fashion and poetry, Time Dressed in Reverse Lilies, offers a meditation on time, memory and metamorphosis.
Image courtesy of Lina Mendoza.
Lottie: Was this your first exploration into poetry?
Zandra: Yes, in a design and exhibition context so Dress Poetics really feels like a new adventure!
Lottie: What is your relationship with poetry? Are there any poets or poems that particularly inspire you?
Zandra: I was born in 1940 and grew up when memorizing poetry was part of school life. I can still recite many of those poems by heart. I and my late best friend, the fashion designer David Sassoon (b.1932) would often walk around London reciting Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ together. David was actually related to the famous war poet Siegfried Sassoon! I have always been especially drawn to the Romantics.
Lottie: How do you feel about being part of Dress Poetics?
Zandra: Wonderful! To have one of my historical dresses interpreted through poetry is a marvellous new experience. It is brilliant that the exhibition emphasises how fashion is not always just functional, but it can be lyrical, layered with meaning.
Lottie: Many of your print names have a poetic quality. How important is language in your design process and in fashion more broadly?
Zandra: Language is immensely important. A Zandra Rhodes print doesn’t just exist visually… ‘Field of Lilies’, ‘Lace Mountain’, ‘Conceptual Chic’…the words frame how you see the textile and in fashion, language shapes fantasy!
Lottie: Dress Poetics asks us to think about ‘dress as poetry.’ What does that phrase mean to you personally?
Zandra: When you dress, you compose yourself. You write your own poem on your body for the world to read.
Lottie: Do you enjoy working across different art forms? What do you gain from collaboration?
Zandra: Fashion is hugely collaborative. You are always working with stylists, curators, models, photographers…each bringing something unique. Whether for a collection, exhibition or editorial, collaboration weaves different forms together to tell a story.
Lottie: Dress Poetics challenges resistance in recognising fashion and textiles as art forms. Over the course of your career, have you noticed attitudes shift in how these disciplines are valued within galleries and museums?
Zandra: Absolutely. When I founded London’s Fashion and Textile Museum, part of my mission was to push against that resistance and give fashion and textiles the recognition they deserve. It has been wonderful to see how far things have come. Today, major museums around the world regularly stage fashion and textile exhibitions that examine these disciplines as art forms, but dress as poetry, that’s new to me!
For more insight into the Fashion and Textile Museum, founded by Rhodes, revisit reviews of exhibitions held at the museum in some of our previous blog posts.
Image courtesy of Lina Mendoza.
