Fashion in Colors
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Exhibition Design, Branding, and Marketing
“Fashion in Colors” explores color as a design element through 300 years of Western fashion and examines changing perceptions of color through various ages and cultures. Costumed mannequins are installed according to six separate color-saturated schemes (black, blue, red, yellow, multicolor, and white), which emphasize and highlight the cultural, spiritual, and social associations often linked with each color. Both historic and contemporary works are featured in each color section and set against a backdrop of the color corresponding with each grouping. As a result, previously unseen details and structures of the clothing will emerge for the viewer, and similar elements and trends will seem to reappear, often used to different ends, centuries later.
Exhibition Design, Environment Graphics, Branding and Collateral Marketing Design by Tsang Seymour. Lighting by Leni Schwendinger Light Projects LTD. Projects are shown with permission, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Photos courtesy Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum © Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
“…one transition almost counts as installation art. The ceiling of a long corridor following the gallery of multicolored garments is stretched with a pixilated camouflage fabric whose colors and patterns are in constant rhythmic flux, thanks to invisible computerized lighting. Resembling an artificial sky fast-forwarding from night to day and through the seasons, it wordlessly demonstrates a basic principle: color is a variable in which both light and matter collude.”
—Roberta Smith, The New York Times (more)
Exhibition Plans, Floor 1
Exhibition Plans, Floor 2
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