Matthew Williamson at the Design Museum

When she was director of London’s Design Museum Alice Rawsthorne got a lot of flack for putting on exhibitions about frivolous subjects such as Philip Treacy and Manolo Blahnik, and nominating the Gorrilaz for Designer of the Year. Her overly populist decisions had, if I remember rightly, something (although not everything) to do with her departure.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that – under Rawsthorne’s successor Dejan Sudjic – the Design Museum was putting on a Matthew Williamson exhibition.

Sudjic clearly understands design and its audience, and I suspect he may be trying to make that point with Williamson. (Oh, and here - but that was a while back). I’m not sure you could get a more frivolous and populist fashion designer than Matthew Williamson. This is not an intellectual, fashion/architecture-fusion label like Hussein Chalayan or Issey Miyake. Williamson is all handpainted peacock feathers, georgette, frills and sequins – it’s pure, unadulterated, fashion fashion fashion. 

I went along last week. I'm not sure if I was allowed to take these pics, but noone stopped me, so here they are. Exhibiting fashion in a way that ends up looking like an exhibition and not a posh shop is a skill that noone bar the V&A seems to have mastered yet. I think the Design Museum could have done better on this front, but it's nearly there. This is a sweet, compact exhibition, and I am so thrilled that it’s actually on that I’m not about to criticise it. (Much).

Fashion is one of the more accessible faces of design, and if it brings people to the end of Shad Thames to see it, therefore keeping the museum going, so much the better. I’d like to have seen a little more of Williamson’s processes and inspirations – more behind the scenes stuff, maybe take the intellectual content up a teensy bit at least... but the couture on display is impossibly intricate and lovely and provides more than enough eye candy to satisfy. And I believe that if the Design Museum is to really engage people, its directors need to know what people want to engage with.

Comments

[claire]

Ooh looks great - was on my list of things to do this autumn. Glad you didn't slate it!