THE SET DESIGN OF THIS HENRIK VIBSKOV EXHIBITION UPENDS THE IDEA THAT FASHION IS ONLY ABOUT CLOTHES

03 feb 2022, for frame

Location

Stortorget 2, 2609 Lillehammer, Norway

Design

Henrik Vibskov, Cecilie Skeide

Brand

Henrik Vibskov

Curation

Cecilie Skeide

Site

Lillehammer Art Museum (Lillehammer Kunstmuseum)

Located at the Snøhetta-designed Lillehammer Art Museum, the exhibition (Please!) Clean Up, Honey highlights Henrik Vibskov’s fashion ingenuity through shows and props.

Key features

Lillehammer Art Museum’s first fashion exhibition brings together installations, light, music, photography, video and wearable pieces to showcase the work of one of the most essential names in Scandinavian fashion design, Danish designer Henrik Vibskov. The custom-made installations divide the museum into four parts. The first, displaying photographic and video content, is a spatial reportage of 20 years of design, establishing the fashion show as a medium. This section offers focus on each show in individual video booths, with a photo series revealing Vibskov’s entire body of work on the walls. 

The second part comprises installation The Radish Arm Charm – the rebuilt set of the designer’s AW19 collection. Thirdly, there is a set created specifically for the Lillehammer Museum – The Nightmare Room – unseen before this exhibition. It includes an interactive element: visitors can try on one of Vibskov’s garments and move objects around in the space. The exhibition's highlight is a meditation room dubbed The Tower, an eight-m-tall installation created from various show props and wearable pieces collected through the years. 

Frame's take

Before collaborating with Lillehammer Art Museum, Vibskov's cultural connection to Norway was Alexander Ekman's 2014 ballet A Swan Lake, presented at the Norwegian Opera. The costumes from that show are displayed on the wall at the beginning of the exhibition. Curator Cecilie Skeide points out that this is the designer's very first exhibition in the framework of an art museum – before, Vibskov only shared his work in a design context. As a result, the museum's objective became to remove boundaries between different creative genres.  

In the exhibition, the performative narratives of Vibskov’s fashion shows position the designer as an artist, asserting that clothes are not the only important aspect of the fashion world. (Please!) Clean Up, Honey offers new means of exploring art and plays with the new cultural consumerism of our times: the show provides a rich mix of media, from the meticulously crafted set props to the purchasable pieces from the collection SS17, The Kitchen of Non-Existence.