A Cabinet of Serendipities
A Cabinet of Serendipities
Centre for Fashion Curation / Fashion Space Gallery Vitrine, London College of Fashion, September - December 2019
This display comprises objects collected as aides to my practice-based doctoral research in fashion curation. The practical element of my thesis was a proposal for a site-responsive exhibition about fashion and graphic satire devised for Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole’s neo-gothic villa in Twickenham. Horace Walpole (1717-1797), man of letters, was also an eminent collector of art and antiquities and he designed Strawberry Hill as a thematically curated cabinet of curiosities, to which he regularly welcomed members of the public. Walpole also coined the term “serendipity” to refer to discoveries made by “accidents and sagacity, of things [which one] was not in quest of” (HW Corres, 28 Jan. 1754). Serendipity has subsequently been acknowledged as a faculty to which all scholars and collectors are in debt (Lewis, 1952, p. 216). More than a potentially mystical phenomenon, serendipity has been further interrogated as the outcome of the “interaction of chance with the prepared mind” (Merton & Barber, 2004, p. 45).
The display and accompanying guide are experimental and prototypical manifestations of the exhibition Fashion & Folly: in miniature, in print and as a next step in the proposal process. My thesis explored the ways and means of proposing exhibitions as a creative curatorial practice, and this display addresses new aspects of the research methodologies. It is the first public exhibition of Fashion & Folly, and it provides an opportunity for visitors to engage with aspects of curatorial practice that are rarely made visible when exhibitions are realised.
