Staging Fashion, Imagining the City: Fashion Exhibitions and Urban Modernity at the Museum of London and Beyond, 1973-2026

This thesis examines the role of fashion curation in reimagining cities and museums about them. Taking the Museum of London as its central case study – a city museum approaching its latest large-scale transformation – it tracks how major fashion displays have materialised shifting visions of the city at key moments during its past fifty years, and imagines the forms they could take in the years to come. It equally contributes to a wider debate around urban modernity, demonstrating through the fashion-city-museum nexus how that concept has been, and continues to be, reactivated in practice.

Part One of the thesis draws out the connections between the continuous reshaping of city museums, the notion of urban modernity as a curatorial framework, the capacities of fashion curation to materialise modern urban imaginaries, and the ‘assemblage’ of exhibition history research. These connections are examined in Part Two through analysis of three fashion exhibitions and displays staged by the Museum of London and its predecessor, the London Museum: Mary Quant’s London (1973), The London Look (2004) and the Pleasure Gardens (2010). Devoting a chapter to each, detailed, archive-led investigations reveal their complex stagings of both a dynamic city and an ever-changing museum.

Part Three looks beyond the Museum of London before imagining its future. A survey of international fashion exhibitions and displays staged in the past decade aims to capture the current state of urban-fashion curation. It identifies how fashion-city-modernity relationships have been reimagined differently within other contexts and in frequently innovative ways. Together with those of the Museum of London case studies, these findings prompt a set of provocations in the final chapter. With the expected 2026 opening of the reconceived London Museum in sight, they contemplate how a renewed city museum might take urban-fashion curation forward in the coming years.