The Incredible Whiteness of the Museum Fashion CollectionIn the small group of high-culture institutions that venerate the art of fashion, Black designers have been largely overlooked. BySept. 29, 2020It would have been one of the most glamorous events of Paris Fashion Week. On Oct. 1 the Palais Galliera, the Paris fashion museum, is scheduled to reopen after a two-year and almost $10 million renovation with the blockbuster exhibition “Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto,” the first Paris retrospective of the designer’s work (hard as that may be to believe). But just as extraordinary is another, much less glamorous reality: Of those 200,000 objects, according to Miren Arzalluz, the director, only 77 pieces of clothing were created by Black designers (and only seven Black designers are represented). There have been specific shows on Black designers, such as “Willi Smith: Street Couture,” currently on view at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, and “Black Fashion Designers,” a 2016 exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Source: New York Times September 29, 2020 21:56 UTC