People leave traces…. the personal story, nostalgia and the institution.

Take this page from vogue showing off this McQueen outfit, we have no room for interpretation due to the fact all the information is already given. One person’s vision of how it should look. We never see the original yet a magazine try’s to be your friend magazines such as Grazia.

Why have some forms of art become just simply an object and not what they are intended for? The image is clean, indistinctive and removed from its natural state. Take the national portrait gallery its exhibition on Greats and Classics of fashion photography, there is a distance between you and the photograph there is no personal relationship its as if you can almost touch it or own it but not quite.

This is also true for the V&A fashion gallery the dresses almost seem ghost like, they are stuck in time, yet time exists now and the dress isn’t being shown for what it was intended for, the dress become generic, cold and has this idea of being seen through contemporary eyes.

“Museums sanitise and turn the personal and specific into the generic or the best example of…

They erase human traces and replace it with sanitised information labels about the owner. ”

Look at this Dior dress before it was conserved, and then look at how it has been animated, all information of the dress is lost, its been animated for the here and now, all of the dress’s story has been taken away all human layers have been erased and its been transformed into a perfect state. But where has the sense of memory gone??

Memory: Noun: A person’s power to remember things “I’ve got a great memory for faces”. The power of the mind to remember things “the brain regions responsible for memory”.

Nostalgia: Noun: A sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or a place with happy personal associations. The evocation of these felling or tendencies, ESP. In commercialized form…. You find the present tense and the perfect past.

Museums are like snow globes they are frozen in time; they have no realistic vision

Take his Victorian paperweight as a moment frozen in time, the hair is a personal and can never grow again, this portrays this idea of not wanting to grow up, this Alice in wonderland theory.

This idea of a dilerbrate mistake has been touched upon in recent years. Commes des Garcons 1982 this lace jumper has deliberate mistakes to highlight the memory of a 17^th century worker. This idea of artificial traces questions the perfect and imperfect. Like nails on silk a personal mistake can become beautiful.

Martin margiela injected a dress with fungi therefore it began to rot over time, and it really questioned how we display garments what is imperfect / dying out. Here he has destroyed its potential and it can’t be controlled .it decays naturally, and shouldn’t all things be left in the natural state?

We sanitise our own lives. Take Facebook we all have timelines, we tag and untag, we hide posts. We are curating our own lives; we are giving ourselves a flawless finish, yet we are removing part of our past. You could say we are living in a snow globe with Facebook inside and the reader seeing a very warped view.

The foundling museum is a great example of loosing a memory as well as a part of oneself. The children have been cut off from there past, what would of identified them was striped from them. Therefore that child would not know the whole story that child’s information is changed.

we all like to remember the good and we try to forget a part of our lives that was unpleasant but, then again these things build you to be the person you are today, all of your past happened so why is there a need to cleanse and to be presented with out flaws. Wouldn’t you rather see the whole story and be able to build or create your own opinion?