Cabinet Stories – a new Centre for Fashion Curation and LCF Social Responsibility project

The Centre for Fashion Curation along with the Social Responsibility Team at LCF have worked together on a new project called Cabinet Stories, which launched last month at a London-based prison. The project explores different aspects of fashion, through a series of seven themed exhibitions, organised by curators working in London, and displayed in a cabinet; the traditional form of museum display.

Cabinet illustration by Max Kahlen of Dyvik Kahlen Architects.

The cabinet will tour to different communities across London, and the exhibitions will be displayed one after the other over seven weeks at each location. Curators and fashion practitioners will also deliver workshops to the communities at each place, with one workshop allowing participants to curate an exhibition of their own, which will also be displayed in the cabinet for the final week at each location. Cabinet Stories was devised by Curator Alison Moloney and commissioned along with Jessamine Tierney from the Social Responsibility team at LCF.

More information on the Cabinet Stories exhibitions that will feature:

• Fashion & Sport in 1910 curated by LCF’s Professor Amy de la Haye is an exhibition displaying postcards from the 1910 roller skating craze. It shows the kinds of impractical garments women wore when stretch fabrics weren’t available.
• Unfolding Fashion: Fans & the Art of Advertising by Jacob Moss curator at The Fan Museum, explores how fans were designed to promote consumer goods and leisure activities such as shopping and dining, in the 1900s.
• Clothes as the Story of our Lives by exhibition-maker Jeff Horsley, looks at how clothes, like photographs, remind us of stories from our past, of experiences we had and emotions we felt.
• Little Ghosts by Oriole Cullen, senior curator at the V&A has curated an exhibition looking at items of clothing that were familiar everyday objects 100 years ago, but as time has passed and fashions have changed, they have become strange and unusual.
• Fashion and Fiction curated by LCF’s Alison Moloney, shows how some of London’s most influential designers have reimagined the childhood antics of comic strip icons in their collections.
• Spinning Yarns – an exhibition by independent curator Niamh White, looks at a new generation of young designers reviving lost, forgotten or little used crafts to hand make the fabrics used in their fashion collections.
• The Flat Cloth Cap curated by Professor Carol Tulloch, Chelsea College of Art and V&A explores the evolution of the flat cloth cap as a cultural icon.

After its current location, the cabinet will then go on to two more London communities – a facility providing mental healthcare, and a residential care home for the elderly – before it opens to the public in September, at an east London location.

The Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion researches and develops innovative and experimental ways of presenting fashion and dress to a wider audience. It provides a platform for research, exhibitions, symposiums, workshops and publications. The Social Responsibility Team uses fashion education to provide new and exciting projects that empower, inspire and create a voice for different communities.

Stay tuned to the LCF News blog, Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date with the project.

• Find out more about The Centre For Fashion Curation
• Find out more about Better Lives at LCF