NEW YORK, NY.- In December of 2017, The Museum of Modern Art will present Items: Is Fashion Modern?, an exhibition that will consist of a selection of 99 garments and accessories that have had a strong impact on history and society in the 20th and 21st centuries, and continue to hold currency today. The exhibition will examine the way in which these wearable items are designed, manufactured, distributed, and used, while exploring the wide range of relationships between clothing and functionality, cultural etiquettes, aesthetics, politics, labor, economy, and technology. Designs as well-known and transformative as Levi’s 501s, the Casio watch, and the Little Black Dress, and as ancient and culturally charged as the kippah and the keffiyeh, will allow viewers to explore numerous issues to which these items have contributed, produced, and shaped over many decades.

The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Michelle Millar Fisher, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design. This is the first exhibition in which Antonelli—whose previous exhibitions at MoMA include SAFE: Design Takes on Risk (2005), Talk to Me (2011) and, most recently, the online project Design and Violence (2014–15)—has addressed design as it relates to fashion. MoMA’s collection includes such featured items as Nervous System’s 4-D-printed Kinematics Dress (acquired in 2014), the Fruit of the Loom T-shirt featured in Humble Masterpieces (2004), Issey Miyake’s A-POC Queen Textile (1997), and a beautiful Mariano Fortuny Delphos dress (1907).

Antonelli states: “While MoMA has defined the history of modern design in so many ways, this history cannot be written without recourse to fashion. This is an area of design practice that MoMA has historically shied away from because of perceived 'anti-modern tendencies,' and its celebration of ephemerality in particular. However, fashion is a fundamental part of the history of modern design that provides a lens with which to better understand culture, society, technology— in other words, humanity. Just as we have in past exhibitions confronted individual and collective relationships with new technology, violence, science, and safety, we want to explore the world using the items that we wear as our guides. It is exciting to make public the research that we have been pursuing for some time, and which will help us rethink our curatorial practices and wider design discourses.”

Each of the 99 items will be explored along three tiers: archetype, stereotype, and prototype. In the exhibition, each item will be presented in the incarnation that made it significant in the last 100 (or so) years—the stereotype—accompanied by contextual material tracing back to its historical archetype. In some cases, when innovation, opportunity, or necessity call for it, the item will be complemented by a new commission, or prototype. The exhibition title—Items: Is Fashion Modern?—reprises the question that architect and curator Bernard Rudofsky raised with his 1944 MoMA exhibition Are Clothes Modern?, which is the only other time MoMA has fully addressed this field of design.

To generate initial discussions around this project and to jumpstart the process in anticipation of the 2017 exhibition, Antonelli and Millar Fisher will gather key designers, curators, critics, scholars, activists, and entrepreneurs for a two-day, invitation-only event in May 2016. On the evening of May 15, four speakers will address the question “Is fashion modern?” and discuss how the designs we wear shape us and reflect the worlds we inhabit, dissecting contemporary experiences of and attitudes towards items in global circulation. On May 16, MoMA will host an “abecedarium” that examines 26 garments and other iconic elements—one from each letter of the alphabet. A roster of presenters will explore each assigned item in seven-minute vignettes, resulting in a taxonomy of design’s relationship to fashion in past, present, and future incarnations. The presentations will begin with A (for "Air Jordans," for which the respondent is Tinker Hatfield, Vice President for Design and Special Projects at Nike) and end with Z (for "zipper," tackled by Troy Patterson of The New York Times’ On Clothing column). Both events will be live-streamed on MoMA.org.