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From the beginning of the 1980s, Germano Celant curated a series of exhibitions on Italian art and culture, aimed at enhancing Arte povera no longer as an international trend but as an Italian heritage. Together with design but also with cinema, architecture and other creative and productive sectors, fashion played (or should have played, for curator’s purposes) a strategic role that this contribution aims to illustrate. The juxtaposition of works of art with objects of a different nature responded to a previous cultural and curatorial model, which Celant adapted for his very specific purposes. The significant new expansion of the Italian fashion and design industry in the 1980s helped generate interest in Italian creativity, including contemporary art and exhibitions. If on the one hand, this led to a virtuous circle of mutual support, on the other it also inevitably ended up leading to some shifts in meaning.

This article studies five shaped panels of Duchesse de Bruxelles lace, part of the collection of the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp. These handmade panels were created c. 1900 but never fashioned into a gown and, consequently, never worn. The first part of this article uses an object-based approach to examine how the panels might have looked if they had been constructed into a gown, what type of gown this would have been, to what occasions it would have been worn and by whom. In 2021, the renovated MoMu reopened with, in addition to its space for temporary exhibitions, a permanent display showing highlights from the museum collection. This unconstructed gown being a highlight of its historical lace collection, the museum is currently considering how to best exhibit it. The second part of this article therefore examines different display possibilities, ranging from a full reconstruction, to a deconstructed display, to the possibility of replication — all the while keeping in mind the ethics of conservation-restoration and display, and what it means to exhibit fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]