A Conversation with FIT's Melissa Marra-Alvarez, Curator of Minimalism/Maximalism
Introductory platform highlighting minimal and maximal looks.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez, a curator at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology [MFIT] in New York City, distilled two abstract words, “minimalism” and “maximalism,” into a well researched, accessible exhibition, Minimalism/Maximalism, [1] that ran for six months in 2019. The show investigated how these two words manifest in fashion and made what could have been heady, academic concepts tangible. I found there to be an air of familiarity throughout the space — the feeling of having seen or experienced a connection to garments and accessories from both the future and the past. A Louis Vuitton “Murakami” bag conjured the luxury and excess of the early 2000s. Nearby, a pair of Balenciaga “Triple S” sneakers gleamed in a glass case, evidencing how decadence and excess return in an endless cycle. The exhibition utilized history, politics, and economics to breathe life into the garments on display. [2] This social and cultural context acted as a grounding force connecting a range of sartorial expressions that spanned from the 18th century to the present. The curator’s quiet meditation on where we’ve been — and where we’re going — fulfilled a pressing need for context and authenticity within the fashion industry. Melissa Marra-Alvarez shared her insights with me in a conversation that took place in November, 2019, shortly after the show had closed and was updated in May, 2020. We spoke about the role of fashion exhibitions in educating the public, her own journey to curation, and how fashion historians and educators can use the challenges of the present as an opportunity to disseminate their knowledge outside of the gallery space. The interview has been condensed and edited.
Hey, Melissa. Just to start with a personal introduction, can you tell me a little about where you’re from?
Well, I am a native New Yorker. I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Brooklyn and Queens. We had a middle-class upbringing, I’m one of three girls, and I’m the oldest sibling.
Can you describe your relationship with clothing and how it has evolved over the years?
l was always interested in fashion, even from a very young age. I wanted to be a fashion designer for many years. I would look through magazines and make up my own designs from what I saw in Vogue or whatever my mom had lying around. I definitely digested fashion magazines when I was old enough to understand fashion and buy my own, so probably ever since middle school all through high school. When I got a little older, I would save up my coins and buy Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
How did you enter the field of fashion curation? Did you pivot from one career to another?
When I was in undergraduate school I studied literature and photography. After I graduated, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, so I was living in Soho with a friend of mine and I just took any job. I was doing displays in windows for the Gap downtown when one of my best friends said she just got accepted to this great graduate program at the Fashion Institute of Technology [FIT]. She said, “Melissa you would absolutely love this! It’s totally up your alley.” So I started looking into that and I was like “You know what, she’s right, this is awesome.” I think I had been out of school for maybe two or three years by then, so the following year I applied, and I got in. The program at FIT is interesting because it gives you hands-on experience in creating mannequins, learning how to store objects, learning about conservation, but also gives you a bit of history and some curatorial studies. When I was there, I really fell in love with the curatorial aspect of museum work. I liked telling stories with objects, and I loved fashion history. Before I got to graduate school I didn’t know fashion history was something you could study, so that was really inspiring.
After you completed FIT’s graduate program did you jump into curatorial work at a public institution or did you do private archival work?
Before I graduated, I got to co-curate an exhibition for our graduate class “Temptation, Joy, and Scandal: Fragrance and Fashion 1900-1950.” But no, when I graduated I couldn’t find a job right away. I was interning at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I asked if I could extend my internship because I wasn't working and I loved being around historic clothes in a museum setting. They agreed, and I worked there for another year. Then I got a job doing archival work for designer Geoffrey Beene. When I was working at The Met, part of my responsibilities was to catalog a large Geoffrey Beene donation, so I was very familiar with Mr. Beene’s work. I spent two years with a colleague of mine, Tae Smith, [3] and we went through his entire archive and organized it, cataloged it, and created a database.
Left: Narciso Rodriguez, evening dress, spring 2011, USA. The Museum at FIT, Gift of Mr. Narciso Rodriguez. 2010.92.2. Right: Comme des Garçons, bodysuit, Multidimensional Graffiti collection, Spring 2018, Japan. The Museum at FIT, Museum Purchase. 2018.2.1.
Why is it important for a designer to catalog and archive their own work?
It’s a record of their history that has such value. I think designers are recognizing that more and more now. I think years ago it wasn’t very common for designers or even organizations [to catalog and preserve their own archive]. Even now, a lot of magazines are going out of their way to digitize their archives, which wasn’t the case maybe ten or twenty years ago. I was really surprised at the extent to which Mr. Beene had his own archive. Some of it was at his house in Oyster Bay, New York, some of it was in his studio on 57th Street. It was an archive that had everything. It included garments, accessories, sketches, newspaper clippings, slides…you name it.
Can you describe your particular role on the Museum at FIT curatorial team?
I am the Curator of Education and Research at MFIT. My role sits within the education and public programs department. I actually think I’m very lucky to be in a position where I get to put my educator cap on, and also get to curate exhibitions. I think a big trend in museums going forward will be to have a more collaborative process of exhibition-making. An educator might typically have little input in the curatorial process, but they are very visitor-oriented and used to thinking about how audiences will receive information. Typically, a curator's skill set is more object-based, each wears a different hat. Curators are the "expert" on the subject matter at hand. We are already starting to see the trend for exhibition-making to go in a much more collaborative direction. I feel really lucky that I get to be a member of the education department and bridge both of these worlds. I try to do that in my exhibitions as well, I always think about how people are digesting the content that I’m giving them. Is it accessible enough? Can they relate? How will or can they relate to the pieces or the objects on display?
Can you discuss some examples of collaborations that take place between the Museum at FIT and the local community?
So, for example, we do a wonderful children's program with kindergarteners at a local elementary school [4] once a year, usually in the spring semester. We’ll pick an exhibition that’s up at that time and we’ll coordinate the program around that. It’s really fun to try to get little tiny five-year-olds to understand a concept in the exhibition or to play with the concept of fashion. They’re surprisingly observant and astute. They always surprise us each year with how quickly they catch on to things, and it’s really fun to see them get excited about an aspect of fashion. What’s great is that we’ve even had some of the teachers that we worked with say that they really appreciate coming to the museum and participating in these workshops. One year, a teacher said that she considered it a form of professional development because she was learning [new] terms and ideas that she had never heard before. It’s exciting to have that extra reach and know that, in addition to curating an exhibition, I also get to play a role in finding ways to disseminate the knowledge or an idea in an exhibition outside the gallery space.
FIT students in the Childrenswear program also collaborate with the P.S. 33 students. Who started that partnership?
About five years ago, my colleague and supervisor Tanya Melendez [Senior Curator of Education and Public Programs] had this idea to do a children’s program to extend our outreach and further serve the Chelsea community. We did the first childrenswear program in conjunction with a show called Fairytale Fashion. [5] Tanya had said this [theme] was the perfect introduction to getting children involved, and we partnered with Lauren Zodel [Assistant Professor, Fashion Design, Fashion Institute of Technology] who teaches Introduction to Childrenswear. Lauren said, “I work with students who are designing clothes for that age group, and I think it would be really beneficial for them to have this experience where they can observe kids and see how they think, how they move, and how they act because they can bring that back to the classroom and use those observations in their own designs.” [FIT Students] come to the school [P.S.33] with us, and we do a craft project with the kids. The FIT students work with them, learn from them, and actually get inspired by the kindergartner’s ideas and bring that back to FIT for their final projects. That was the beginning of this partnership that we formed, and every year [since,] we have worked with the FIT childrenswear class.
Installation images from the Cross-Pollination Minimalism/Maximalism display, Art and Design Gallery, Fashion Institute of Technology. Photo by Eileen Costa, © The Museum at FIT.
Can you tell me more about the education initiatives you’ve facilitated, and how they’ve encouraged collaboration between the Museum at FIT and FIT students?
Our Cross-Pollination program is a collaboration with international students. This was the brainchild of Tanya Melendez, who wanted to create a program that facilitated dialogue between students in different countries and help to foster interactions between students from different cultures. What the project does, is pick a [Museum at FIT] exhibition. For example, this year we did a Cross-Pollination [6] with Minimalism/Maximalism. We worked with students in FIT's Fashion Design department (Knitwear and Childrenswear) and students from the design and dance departments at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, and we found a way for the students to facilitate a dialogue. This was all done virtually, using various social media and file-sharing platforms. Both sets of students were given the theme of art during the 1960s and 1970s. The students in Singapore had to examine art in Singapore during the 1960s and 1970s, and the FIT students looked at American art during the 1960s and 1970s. Students created mood boards based on their research, and they posted these mood boards up to a shared virtual platform. There, they had a dialogue where they could comment on each other’s mood board and see the inspirations that each group was using. The next step was to create their own project based on their research and their interpretation of minimalism and maximalism. The results of this collaboration were shown in a small display in New York at FIT’s Art and Design gallery, [7] and another in Singapore, in their [LASALLE College of the Arts] student gallery. It was a lot of fun, some of the student work from Singapore came here to be displayed and some FIT student work went to Singapore and everybody was able to collaborate. That’s another way that the education department helps to disseminate these curatorial ideas and concepts.
What was the research process like for Minimalism/Maximalism? Walk us through how this personal idea or concept became a public-facing exhibition.
Pin-up board used to layout objects and organize ideas for the exhibition Minimalism/Maximalism. Photo courtesy Melissa Marra-Alvarez.
I had been looking at fashion collections and reading magazines and was cognizant of a shift. It felt like one moment everything was minimalism and all of a sudden the buzzword was maximalism. I grew up in the 1990s during a heyday of minimalist fashion. This shift from minimal to maximal, or maximal to minimal, isn't the first time it’s happened. We’ve had this sort of back and forth dialogue over and over again, so [I thought] wouldn’t it be fun to take a step back and look at the history of fashion through this idea of opposing aesthetics? When I proposed this idea, I proposed it for our Fashion and Textile History Gallery, and one of the mandates of the gallery is it’s going to take you through the history of fashion. “Minimalism” and “Maximalism,” they’re 20th-century terms, both of them. But really, the ideas behind them go way back, so wouldn’t it be fun to trace this development, and really this back and forth relationship, almost this dialogue that these two aesthetics have? I was inspired by Isaac Newton’s quote, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” and this idea that it’s these reactions to one another that moves fashion forward. So that’s what I tried to show in the exhibition. Because the exhibition was chronological, and because everything had to come from the museum's permanent collection, I began by researching the terms minimalism and maximalism. I then said, how do these apply to fashion? Because both of these terms are used very broadly. They’re used in art, architecture, and music, so what do they mean? Let's define them within the realm of fashion. Then, what pieces do we have in the collection that speak to what I was finding in my research? Basically just continuing that process going forward until we got to the present day.
There was also a multimedia aspect in the first gallery. You had a clip from John Galliano’s Maison Margiela podcast juxtaposed with a video of his SS19 Artisanal show. What led you to choose that specific episode [8] to open the exhibition?
That [idea] was born from just watching the fashion collections. I love going online and seeing what new ideas/trends are forming, especially when you’re curating a show, right? Galliano had just shown his collection for Margiela and it was totally maximal. Bright colors, lots of crazy graphics. But then, later on in the collection, everything turned to black, and it became very minimal. What’s wonderful is that Galliano has this podcast where he’ll talk out every idea, and in this episode, he was talking about some of the ideas addressed in my exhibition. He was talking about how we’re overstimulated, and we live in this oversaturated society, and how eventually, these maximal qualities give way over time to something more minimal, thus, that’s how these new ideas are born. I was so excited, I ran to our director [Dr.] Valerie Steele and I said I really want to feature a clip of this in the show, and she was very supportive of that idea so I started figuring out how we could incorporate it into the exhibition. In the end, I decided to put it in the beginning whether you looked at it when you came into the show or as you were leaving. I thought it really tied in some of the ideas I was trying to highlight.
I really loved the section on 1990s minimalism. What is your personal connection to invisible luxury and minimalism? This section felt so personal.
I just love the 1990s. I was in high school at the time, so it was one of those moments where I was really paying attention to fashion in my own limited little world and devouring those fashion magazines and sort of revering the images that I saw. I definitely trended more towards 1990s minimalism; for example, the Prada Nylon backpack had a personal connection to me. That was a really fun part of the exhibition for me because living in the 1990s, you’re just saying “Oh, look at this cool dress” or “I like this” or “I like that.” You’re just identifying what you’re drawn to. I got to go back and revisit some of those fashion magazines and have that perspective to say “Oh my god yeah, you know this was a reaction to that ostentation of the 1980s.” I think so much of 1990s minimalism and invisible luxury is also about this idea of authenticity. When I was researching, there was a fashion historian, I can’t recall who at the moment, but she was saying that basically, although 1990s fashion seemed so much less ostentatious and so much less about status than it did in the 1980s, it was just as much about status, but just from a lowkey, sort of subtle approach. I think that is very true and something I carry into my own style today. You know, it left an imprint on me. But yes, I loved the 1990s section, and in fact, a colleague of mine, Colleen Hill, is working on an upcoming exhibition that’s all about 1990s fashion.
There are so many connections between fashion and architecture. How did you decide which pieces and architects to incorporate into the exhibit?
In my research at the time, all of these reporters were talking about this “new minimalism” around 2009-2010, and one of the qualities that they ascribed to “new minimalism” was an architectural purity. So I was specifically looking for pieces that spoke to this. I think there’s a very strong dialogue between fashion and art, and minimalism and maximalism were both 20th-century terms that first began being used in relation to art, so, I hoped to highlight some of those connections. Jil Sander’s very aesthetic was founded in the Bauhaus art movement and the Issey Miyake Bao Bao bag is very architectural unto itself but has a direct link to Frank Gehry architecture.
Minimalist looks of the 1980s and 1990s, featured in Minimalism/Maximalsim.
Phoebe Philo has a significant presence in the show. Can you discuss how her work at Céline impacted the exhibition?
I came up with the idea for Minimalism/Maximalism around the time where we had started to see a shift in fashion. We were going from a period that was dominated heavily by minimalism into a sort of more maximal aesthetic. Phoebe Philo is one of those standout designers who spearheaded minimalist styles around 2010. And so, I wanted to have her represented in the show. At the time, we didn’t have any of her pieces in the museum’s collection. It was really funny because she had just announced that she was leaving Céline. My director [Dr. Valerie Steele] said, “Hurry up! Let’s write to her and see if they would be willing to donate something to the exhibition.” So, I did, and she said yes. I asked her to pick something that she felt was emblematic of her style and her time at Céline. What she selected to be a part of the show was a zebra-print jacket that had this white holster sling bag from her Fall 2015 collection. It was a really striking ensemble. When I first saw it, my initial reaction was it had a maximal quality about it. It wasn’t completely what I thought of when I would think of Céline. Then I started looking at it more, and I just fell in love with it. We tend to think of animal prints as these maximal prints, but she was using them in a very tempered way, and it still had that sort of minimalist balance to it. What I also think was really interesting, that [piece] was from Fall 2015. [9] That really was a period where fashion, in general, was beginning to shift more towards a maximalist aesthetic so it’s interesting to see how a minimalist designer was playing with those ideas [minimalism and maximalism]. When Robin Givhan [of the Washington Post] reviewed the collection, [10] she actually said it was kind of a minimal and maximal collection.
Some of the pieces in the exhibition were connected to very specific moments in time and to pop culture. Can you speak on the impact of music and culture on the exhibit?
Fashion is an expression of our times, so you have to look at all the elements that come together and make up a given period. When you start looking at that, oftentimes some of the trends that we see, some of the mindsets that designers are working in or even a designer who might emerge in a specific period starts to kind of make sense or click. What’s interesting now is that we have social media. I enjoyed following the #minimalism/maximalism hashtag. I enjoyed watching what people posted, what they wanted to share after leaving, and the things that they felt personally connected to. Everyone has their own something that they might be drawn to or something that they hate. But it’s a special vantage point where you can have these windows into other people's experiences, which I think is really helpful just in understanding how someone might be perceiving the exhibition.
Can you share some of the new strategies that the Museum at FIT Education team is utilizing to disseminate their knowledge outside of the gallery space in a Covid-19 environment?
Our museum has had to react quickly to the sudden closings of our galleries and strategize ways of engaging audiences from home. This has involved quick responses from the education department as well as the museum's media department, since a lot of this outreach has to be done digitally. We recently updated our education page [11] on the MFIT website to include engaging activities for children, teens, and adults. There are lesson plans for parents and teachers to utilize that draw on some of our past exhibitions as well as the museum's permanent collections. Our team has also created scavenger hunts, design resources, and other fun activities such as word scrambles. Our museum media department has also been working on posting podcasts and making some of our older fashion culture talks and conversations available online for our audiences. Strategizing how to engage audiences at home, has presented opportunities to work more collaboratively between departments including education, media, and curatorial, fostering new ways of engagement and outreach that will be exciting to carry forward!
Notes
[1] “Minimalism/Maximalism,” Fashion Institute of Technology, https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/exhibitions/minimalism-maximalism.php
[2] “Minimalism/Maximalism: 1920s - 1940s,” Fashion Institute of Technology, https://exhibitions.fitnyc.edu/minimalism-maximalism/?url=gallery-1920s-%E2%80%93-1940s
[3] “About Tae Smith,” Tae Smith: Costumes Textiles Fashion, http://costumesandtextiles.com/bio/
[4] “Educational Collaborations: Collaboration with P.S. 33 Chelsea Prep,” Fashion Institute of Technology, http://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/education/educational-collaborations.php#ChelseaPrep
[5] “Fairy Tales School Program,” Fashion Institute of Technology, http://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/news/archive/2016/fairy-tales-school-program.php
[6] “Educational Collaborations: Cross-Pollination,” Fashion Institute of Technology, http://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/education/educational-collaborations.php#CrossPollination
[7] Photos of the Cross-Pollination: Minimalism/Maximalism exhibition: https://www.flickr.com/photos/museumatfit/albums/72157711863037118
[8] “THE MEMORY OF… with John Galliano”. THE MEMORY OF…. Podcast audio. January 2019. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/maison-margiela-ss19-artisanal-co-ed-show/id1401921399?i=1000428256571
[9] “Céline Fall 2015 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2015-ready-to-wear/celine
[10] Robin Givhan, “Celine goes maximalist, Givenchy tries foreplay at Paris Fashion Week,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/03/09/celine-goes-maximalist-givenchy-tries-foreplay-at-paris-fashion-week/
[11] “Educational Resources,” Fashion Institute of Technology, https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/education/educational-resources.php
