Pop-Up Fashion Museum To Explore New York’s Style Legacy During Fashion Week

“A Matter of Style”, a pop-up fashion museum opening September 9, is an exploration of New York’s sartorial legacy, framed through the vast photo archives of Fairchild Media Group, whose portfolio includes the stalwart style-spotter Women’s Wear Daily.  The museum, on view at AG Studios in Manhattan, will present exclusive illustrations, vintage fashion, immersive experiences, and photography in tandem with New York Fashion Week.

Fairchild, founded by John Fairchild in 1910, owns one of the most significant fashion photography archives in media. It includes candids of quintessential New York personalities alongside images of ordinary people whose daily dramas unfold outside the spotlight.

There’s Jackie Kennedy, slipping out of her regular lunch spot La Grenouille. Downtown luminaries like Andy Warhol and Patti Smith appeared in its pages. Epochs in American history unfold in front of the photographer’s lens: the stiff skirts synonymous with the nuclear family; the beaded, fringed height of the hippies.  “Style is a language and reflects history just like any other sort of visual medium,” writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis once told WWD.

“A Matter of Style” comes during a fruitful time for fashion exhibitions. Possibly owing to the enduring popularity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, clothing has entered the art institution—not always a seamless process—where its historical weight is given consideration. Right now, a survey of the work of late artist and designer Virgil Abloh is on at the Brooklyn Museum. And the Costume Institute’s last big outing also centered American fashion, though with a greater emphasis on its relations to European haute couture.

The Fairchild Museum’s New York–specific focus is a nice deviation. It should offer some insight into how the personal and the political intersect on our garments.