The Rise of Fashion Museology: Korean Fashion Exhibitions 2013–2022

Dress collections for ethnological or anthropological placement in cultural history museums have significantly shifted to the present-day fashion museology context in art museums, which offers spectacular visual effects and experiential analyses to convey more critical and reflective narratives of history through the lens of fashion. Enticing wider audiences with breaking records in number of visitors, fashion exhibitions in recent decades have mushroomed not only in big museums in metropolitan cities, but also in any scale of cultural institutions around the globe.

Concurrently, the growing international influence of Korean popular culture throughout global media known as the Korean Wave (hallyu) has drawn the attention of museums to Korean fashion, both historical and contemporary, marking a notable emergence of new global flows of culture in the history of fashion curation. This presentation will trace the eight exhibitions on Korean dress and fashion for the past decade across Europe and the United States within the shift of the museum practices, and recount the exhibitions’ approaches, themes, objects, and further problems that each exhibition left in the field to reconsider.

Dr. Minjee Kim is a historian specializing in the dress, fashion, and textile history of Korea. She lectured for numerous cultural institutions and colleges in the US, Canada, and South Korea, including in her full-time faculty position at Jeonju Kijeon College and adjunct positions at Seoul National University and Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She has served on the Board of the Costume Society of America, Western Region since 2018, and joined Tracing Patterns Foundation as a research associate in 2022. She translated 2,000 Years of Korean Embroidery, Geumbak: Korean Traditional Gold Leaf Imprinting, and Traditional Children’s Clothing in Korea, and co-edited Dress history of Korea: Critical Perspectives on Primary Sources (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Some of her lecture recordings are available to view here.

Image Credits:

Main image (top): Korean Fashion: From Royal Court to Runway installation view, August 20–December 22, 2022. The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum.

Korea Now! installation view, September 19, 2015–January 3, 2016. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Photo © Korea Craft & Design Foundation.

Learn more about the Textile Arts Council.