Memorabile Ipermoda

The exhibition 'Memorabile. Ipermoda' showcases and explores a series of contemporary fashion objects (clothes, accessories, magazines, books, videos), thus highlighting some of the ques-tions that fashion raises thanks to its ability to be reactive to every prompt, be it social, political, economic or cultural. Memorabile is the unprecedented desire for wonder that currently runs through fashion; the excitement for all those artefacts – clothes – closest to our bodies; the relationship between the ordinary and the extraor-dinary; and the continuous reactivation of fashion and its repre-sentations through social media. 

Ipermoda – which is a direct reference to English philosopher Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects – clarifies the meaning of Memorabile. It expresses the need for all forms of fashion to push its boundaries, occupy the spaces that can give it maximum vis-ibility, and act as an expanded body that invades the screens of our devices and installs itself in our imagination.

'Memorabile. Ipermoda' explicitly expresses the ability of curatorship to 'make history' and render the way in which fashion and its forms represent contemporaneity all the more 'memorable.' The project feeds on the desire for beauty that pervades our time and at the same time reflects the utopian visions that fashion proposes. The themes of 'Memorabile. Ipermoda' include the ever-changing creative relationship with time and archives, the role of Creative Director within large luxury groups, new forms of imagination, design, collaboration, and the no longer postponable challenge of sustainability – especially cultural sustainability. 

The exhibition proposes a series of 'stations' in which clothes build unexpected relationships with each other – for instance, extraordinary pieces of haute couture dialogue with independent fashion items, and objects mingle without hierarchies. Each piece is the representation and narrative of a precise quest, a declaration of poetics, the expression of a desire to be an active part of a story that is set in the present – one that is nevertheless inherent in a time whose progression is not necessarily linear.

'Memorabile. Ipermoda' also revolves around objects suspended between the ordinary and the extraordinary that inhabit our daily lives, or that make their appearance in the visual narratives that contemporary designers and artists present to us. This bronze and brass carapace decorated with Greek silver coins and gems was made by Bvlgari based on a design by artist Francesco Vezzoli (Brescia, IT, 1971) for the installation Tortue de Soirée, presented at the exhibition 'Huysmans. De Degas à Grünewald, sous le regard de Francesco Vezzoli' (Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 2019-2020). This spectacular and monumental object reactivates fin de siècle obsessions, making one dwell on the dangerous ties between fashion and dandyism and the ever-present oscillation of taste between massification and radical individualism.