Trading Style. Weltmode im Dialog – Weltkulturen Museum
Frankfurt am Main, 07. 11. 2012. – 31. 08. 2013

Text: Brigitta Bugya

Man and women with face painting, Dél-Afrika, 1930, and the models of Cassetteplaya, 2011-12, fotó: Alis Pelleschi

The Frankfurt-based Weltkulturen Museum opened its anthropological collection for contemporary design and art, as well as a project area joining the museum building suited to host atelier programmes based on this collection. This initiative could not have been more suitingly scheduled as tribal culture and art has burst to surface with a rush in the past few years as shaped by the hands of artists and designers all over the world. Works on display at the present-day exhibition blend ceremonial clothes from all corners of the globe with contemporary design practice. Although their starting point was thus highly similar, they grasped the complex correlations of beauty, style and social status in strikingly different ways. The ancient clothes and their accessories feature a vocabulary which is reinterpreted by the 21st century now: they show in today’s format the role of fashion in creating identity and carry the stylistic features of belongingness to subcultural groups, which is, in other words, the individual eccentricity and ambition to uniformisation.