“These three avant-garde designers have become an international ...

a montage of his sketches and fabrics strewn across the floor, garments in progress, and
even the office of the première d’atelier. Elsewhere, antiques, books, and historic
clothing from the museum's archives illustrated Yamamoto’s inspiration. The second
floor display showed Yamamoto’s garments in a French history of costume narrative, the
only of the three installations to do so. Here, the curators displayed a selection of designs
they considered best represented the designer’s development from the early 1980s to the
present, eighty-five percent of which where the same garments from Correspondences,
terminating in a final confrontation that paid tribute to Dior, Vionnet, Mme. Grès, and
Chanel. Here, too, certain garments were not hidden behind display cases allowing for
visitors to touch them, a first for the museum.
The final stop of the triptych was Dream Shop at the ModeMuseum. In Dream shop,
the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to one designer, visitors could revel in the
materiality of Yamamoto’s clothes: out of eighty silhouettes from the late 1980s to today,
visitors could try on about twenty in a white, dream-like space with neon-lit changing
cubicles. This interactive experience goes against the mindset of conservation and basic
museum etiquette. Nathalie Ours, a Yamamoto spokesperson, explained that this was the
first exhibition that corresponded to the designer’s concept of the viewer’s direct and
“living” relationship to the garment. 45 In most cases, the transformation of “living”
garments into “dead” objects on display distances them from their original context and
from the audience. Here, however, viewers perceived the clothes as consumable items.
This interactive experience became a commercial one, simulating the store environment,
as the spectators quickly attuned themselves to the rhythm of handling and trying on the
clothes, thus acting as a stimulus to purchase. Here, exhibition, publicity, and commercial
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