In this week's blog, curator Ruth Egger walks us through her curation a virtual exhibition, 'Fashioning Bodies and Gender. A Journey through Time at the Fashion Museum at Ludwigsburg Residential Palace' highlighting a selection of dress from the collection of Landesmuseum Württemberg. Ruth gives an insight into how the objects on display explore the ever-present relationship between gender, fashion, and body image, resulting in a fascinating accompaniment to the Costume Society's ongoing study of menswear this year.
Ever since I started working as an assistant curator at Landesmuseum Württemberg (Württemberg State Museum) in Stuttgart, I was fascinated by its fashion museum at Ludwigsburg Residential Palace. Thus, I was thrilled to curate a new virtual exhibition of the museum. Spanning dress history of 250 years, our Google Arts & Culture story ‘Fashioning Bodies and Gender. A Journey through Time at the Fashion Museum at Ludwigsburg Residential Palace’ offers worldwide access to a selection of highlight objects from the fashion museum.
The fashion museum at Ludwigsburg Residential Palace is a branch museum of Landesmuseum Württemberg. It was opened in 2004 in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of the palace. Built after the model of Versailles, Ludwigsburg Residential Palace is known as being one of the largest original baroque palaces in Germany.
The fashion museum displays around 700 European costumes and accessories of men, women and children. The tour is arranged chronologically and discusses key themes of the respective eras. When the museum was opened, the exhibition spanned a period from about 1750 to 1970. Recently, I had the chance to refurbish the last display case in the exhibition which now presents costumes and accessories from 1970 to 2000. With the completion of the 20th century, the exhibition now provides an all-round view of 250 years of fashion history.
To make the exhibition and rich collections more accessible, I proposed to create a virtual display on Google Arts & Culture. The Landesmuseum Württemberg has been using this platform since 2020 to promote recent exhibitions and its vast collections. Since Google Arts & Culture stories are meant to provide short “snackable” content, it was necessary to boil down the extensive topics presented in the physical exhibition to one main question.
In consultation with my colleagues we decided to go for a recurring topic in the exhibition which are aspects of gender and body modification. The crocheted ‘nude suits’ by textile artist Katharina Krenkel build the ideal starting point and key image for the exhibition. They epitomise the question of gender identity. Starting with these ‘nude suits’, the virtual exhibition continues with posing the question how people have constructed their masculine or feminine identities over 250 years and by which means they have modified their bodies to conform to social norms.
The exhibition illustrates how men went from wearing pink suits and high heels in the eighteenth century to restrained clothing in muted colours during the nineteenth century. Since the Swinging Sixties, some fashionable extravagances made their way back into the male wardrobe. The presentation shows various ways how women have created the often-coveted hourglass figure. On the other hand, women wearing ‘reform sacks’ around 1900 and later even trousers gave rise to heated debates about femininity and gender roles.
Finally, we pose the question to what extent modern unisex-clothing reflects a growing gender equality while arguing that the ways of modifying the body are nowadays increasingly ‘internalised’. Corsets, petticoats or shoulder pads can be used to shape bodies from the outside. Today, all sexes additionally strive to shape the seemingly perfect body through diet, fitness or even plastic surgery. To illustrate this last point, we specifically acquired ‘sizers’ for breast implants.
We hope you enjoy your virtual journey through 250 years of dress history and some of the highlights of our fashion museum. Further objects from our dress and textiles collections are accessible via our Online Collection. If you are visiting the Stuttgart region, you are very welcome to visit our fashion museum at Ludwigsburg Residential Palace.
To see the virtual exhibition for yourself, visit https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/landesmuseum-wuerttemberg.
In case you missed Ruth's previous blog for the Costume Society, make sure to catch up here.
Author Biography:
Ruth Egger is an assistant curator at the department of Art and Cultural History at the Landesmuseum Württemberg (Württemberg State Museum) in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2019, she completed a Master’s degree in Art History: Dress and Textile Histories at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She holds a BA in History and a Master’s degree in Celtic Studies from the University of Vienna, Austria, and previously worked as a costume maker at the Salzburg State Theatre. Ruth’s main research interests are sixteenth to nineteenth-century dress history and textiles, construction techniques and makers, as well as further discourses related to fashion. She can be found on LinkedIn.
