MOSCOW.- Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the Museum Looks exhibition, associated with the unexpected and unconventional approach to the description of a cultural institution. Curator Alexei Maslyaev and project participants offer us to think about what new we can narrate about the museum when we look at the appearance of the museum staff. At the curator’s initiative, Russian artists and fashion designers explore the potential of our understanding of the cultural institution. The exhibition presents the artists’ interpretation of the staff uniform, i.e. garments and features reflecting their own experiences of the museum space. There are sketches, lookbooks, tissue samples, reference and information materials.

Each of us has his own perception of the museum space. The integrity of the perception is related to the question of the staff uniform, which is rather pragmatic. Attention to this matter may reflect the institution’s desire to create conditions for the comfortable stay of visitors in the museum space, associated with the visual isolation of the museum staff and vesting adequate qualities, i.e. kindness, openness, competence and knowledge of the activities of the institution. But for all that, importance of fashion in the museum is not limited to this component. It allows us to look differently at the cultural model, which is revealed in the issues of identity, behavioral codes and social norms. Garments do the same thing as artworks. They convey the cultural content, hidden deep inside each of us. The search for new opportunities and means for understanding the world is a thing that unites the museum and fashion, despite the differences in values.

The museum staff uniform is a reflection of the image of the institution, indicating its cultural strategy, social function and ways of communicating with visitors. Inventing different museum looks, the designers and artists reveal their own experience of interaction with the museum, subjective reactions to its components and expectations associated with it. The project participants illustrate how they imagine the museum as a whole through the museum staff uniform. Some of them present a practical everyday uniform; others prefer unwearable attire.


The Museum Looks exhibition is on view in the venue of Moscow Museum of Modern Art at 9 Tverskoy Boulevard and in the Tsvetnoy Central Market. Thus, it places the museum in the store and vice versa. It displays in the museum things that we use to see in the department store. The exhibition blurs the lines between these cultural spaces, criticizing the very situation of the opposition. The high/low, serious / frivolous, eternal / fleeting is a manifestation of solid images and cultural mechanisms that define them.