This week, the International Library of Fashion Research opens their second exhibition in collaboration with the National Museum of Norway; “Paper Afore Press”, including commissioned and archival work of various collaborators such as the French audio artist and composer Frédéric Sanches, the Italian artist Alia Mascia and the Dutch artist collectiveAmsterdam Warehouse. Paper can be considered as a seminal, original constituent for the fashion system. Firstly, garments and collections commence from paper. Subsequently, magazines, books and ephemera are all intended as a form of assemblage of paper materials through which designers can enter someone’s life in a tangible way. What role does paper play in the fashion system, and for a fashion library in 2023? What is worth cutting down trees for?
Overseeing the exhibition space-making is Vésma Kontere McQuillan, ILFR’s newly appointed Head of Spatial Design. As a practicing architect, and professor at Kristiania University College in Oslo, McQuillan will strengthen ILFR's research within fashion spaces and architecture behind the fashion scenes. McQuillan was ILFR’s spatial design project architect from its conception in 2020 until its opening in 2022. Her research from 2015 was focused on the collaboration between OMA/AMO and Prada, particularly at AMO and Prada fashion shows, and the design process behind these joint productions, which resulted in the book FashionSpaces: A Theoretical View, which was published in 2020.
Following this new research focus and examinations of fashion spaces for an upcominge xhibition project in fall 2023, ILFR has noted the paper set of the Milan-based fashion house Prada’s SS23 menswear and womenswear fashion shows. The Rotterdam-based architectural office OMA/AMO-designed show space was a raw-edged paper mock-up: the walls were made of rolls of regular white paper folded from the ceiling more than 10 m high, and the seating was made of corrugated cardboard in the same colour as the paper for floors.
On this occasion Prada donates ten of these cardboard seats to ILFR, implying a deeper understanding of the field, namely paper architecture, which refers to creating utopian fantasy projects that could not or could not be realised in real life but can exist in such a library space. ILFR has previously reused and recycled props and objects from the National Museum to create a future space for the institution to preserve fashion industry objects and artefacts. Now ILFR celebrates the emergence of new socially sustainable spaces for national and transnational identities by reimagining seating from a fashion show in Milan into a mobile auditorium for fashion researchers and enthusiasts in Oslo who will use these seats as mobile auditoriums across public programming in the physical space.
