October 8, 2024 - April 26, 2025 Tiger's Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future Part I
Fashion is a unique cultural form. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when a host of factors including industrialization, resource extraction, and colonial expansion enabled a quick succession of style and silhouette, fashion has relentlessly pursued the idea of the “new.” Theorists have defined fashion in the Euro-American system as change. Indeed, to remain relevant, fashion must outdate itself. To drive consumers to purchase new goods, last season’s styles must appear undesirable and unfashionable. This premise has become a crisis in the climate of ultra-fast fashion and micro-trends, which rely on exploitative labor, social inequality, and environmental destruction.
To create new styles, fashion often turns to the past. It is frequently said that fashion is cyclical. When a trend falls out of style, it is bound to eventually become fashionable again. This is perfectly illustrated by the low-rise baggy jeans, microskirts, and wrapped sunglasses that were dormant for decades before being awakened with the revival of Y2K style currently flourishing in the fashion landscape.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) used the image of a tiger leaping through time to capture the way fashion pulls from the past to create anew. Fashion was a perfect metaphor for Benjamin’s critique of European industrial modernity: that the new is actually “the eternal return of the same.” In other words, fashion’s obsession with change, novelty, and innovation is merely a repackaging of the past. To Benjamin, this realization was charged with a revolutionary potential that could awaken society from the dreamworld of modernity.
Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future draws on a range of time periods and styles to investigate the echoes that reverberate across fashion history. The exhibition is organized thematically. Within each theme, garments from different time periods are juxtaposed to illustrate material and stylistic “leaps.” The accompanying exhibition text draws attention to the differing social and cultural conditions behind each leap. This context, which extends the notion of the tiger’s leap from the surface of the garment to its underlying meaning, ultimately proves Benjamin’s point that fashion is a modern “measure of time.”
