GSK Contemporary 2010: 'Aware: Art Fashion Identity'

It takes quite a lot to unite the art critics of newspapers so idealogically apart as The Guardian and The Sunday Times but Aware: Art Fashion Identity (note the lack of punctuation in this title), currently at the Royal Academy, has pulled it off. Both have condemned this exhibition as pretentious and hollow and one can't help but agree. I felt nervous before I even saw the exhibition, feeling that including fashion in the title was no more than a cheap come-on to get the punters in. And I was right. Despite the largely inexplicable inclusion of one piece each from Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen, this exhibition has nothing at all to do with fashion. But, let's try to be fair. When you know that an exhibition is going desperately wrong you have to do something to up the ante - and whereas clothes or garments are not currently buzz words, fashion is. What's a curator to do?

Starting with the title, Aware (the pretension begins right here, folks), quite what the exhibition is attempting to make us aware of is not made clear, either in a catalogue written entirely in sub-academic mumbo-jumbo or a collection of exhibits as random and un-coordinated as the stalls in a North African souk. What strikes one immediately is the fact that there is no rigour in either catalogue or display. We can go on: no learning (and this is, after all, the Royal Academy, founded in 1768 on the highest principles); precious little knowledge; and absolutely no coherent, informed point of view, the one thing that is a sine qua non of any exhibition. Instead we are given an almost willful obfuscation of art and fashion and not a great deal about identity in this motley ragbag.

I also feel that the terms of reference are fatally wooly. Exhibitors barely known are referred to as having risen 'to prominence' and one can't help asking 'in whose eyes?'. Not that all the exhibitors are nonentities: we have Yohji Yamamoto, Gillian Wearing and Cindy Sherman, for example, but one does wonder for what purpose. Certainly not to get us closer to an understanding of the difference between clothing and fashion, let alone the question that hovers all over this whole sorry affair: is fashion ever art? I had better come clean here. After more than thirty years of working in every area of fashion I can say categorically that it is not, just as surely as I know that anyone who sets out to prove the opposite is not very high on the intellect stakes, even if sub Barthes or jargon from the past have been swallowed in one big naively uncritical gulp.

So what can one say about Aware: Art Fashion Identity? I have ploughed through the catalogue and have seen the exhibition twice since the private view where, as I walked the rooms, I became increasingly alarmed that the guests were so cowed that nobody was laughing. I kept looking for the little boy who would point out the obvious. And it is genuinely hard to find any redeeming feature. It is all so disconnected and apparently random that quite what the organisers and curators were hoping for still escapes me. But I am very clear about what they have presented to the public. Aware: Art Fashion Identity is nothing about being aware in any meaningful way and is demeaning to art; entirely separate from anything that could usefully be called fashion; and is as confused (and confusing) about identity as the minds of the people behind this farrago. The sad thing is that fashion is worthy of thoughtful appraisal; does have a place in galleries (look at the Japanese exhibition currently at the Barbican); and should work at the RA, which was, after all, set up to improve design levels across many disciplines. What fashion does not want is what it gets in this exhibition: the absurdity that comes from sub-think about a subject barely understood by these 'experts' and practitioners chosen to lead us all to something of value. On any and every level, I am genuinely sorry to say, they have failed us all.

Colin McDowell is a fashion historian and author of many books on the subject, including Fashion Today