There’s no creative medium more centred around the body than fashion. The two are inextricably bound, entities that inform both shape and proportion, drape and cut, self-image and identity, and a whole laundry list of other world-shaping ideals.

Of course with this comes the fashion industry’s role in upholding standards of beauty that are often unattainable, but in the interest of fairness, the industry also provides the biggest platform for the subversion of such ideals. Call it mutilation, experimentation, the plausible surreal, whatever, it’s this realm of the avant-garde that Antwerp’s MoMu gallery takes care to traverse in their latest exhibition, Mirror Mirror. 

Partnering with Dr Guislain Museum, Belgium’s oldest mental asylum-cum-art space, the two have taken close care to examine the role fashion plays within our lives, be that providing us with hidden meanings of strength or indeed a form of wearable armour to protect us from the world at large. Our first instalment is introduced by the toothy grin of that crumpled Comme Des Garçons Shirt advert, designed by Stephen J Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva as an extension of Shanabrook’s eerie Paper Surgery series. Kawakubo’s designs, the most prescient example of fashion design that defies anatomical symmetry, then take centre stage in a series of dim-lit rooms, carried by a sweeping undercurrent of the dysmorphic that oozes from the surrounding space-taking fits. 

It’s the contorted, plaid two-sets and mesmerising-yet-misshapen cocoon bodices of Kawakubo’s own FW and SS97 collections for Comme Des Garçons that await us here, as well as a twinkling chandelier gown by Noir Kei Nominiya, Walter Van Beirendonck’s rotund and shapely loofa mini dresses and Issey Miyake’s wide-spread, translucent kimonos. Each mannequin sports a glossy wig created by Jamaican-born, London-based hairstylist Cyndia Harvey, some with bangs curly and lacquered, others towering high about the face with strands of glistening beads. One designed for Harvey’s close-friend Simone Rocha interweaves glistening butterfly clips into its voluminous bouffant. This is the out-of-this-world made feasible, design with intent to twist banality in everyday life, and expand our minds in the process.

Moving into Doll World, the exhibition’s middle section renders the body wholly inanimate. In mannequins, designers, artists and the bleak realities of consumer capitalism see a blank canvas for them to project their every whim and ideation. It’s a one-sided dialogue that begins with fashion dolls, the industry’s primary means of communicating the latest trends and styles in an era which predated photography. One of Sarah Lucas’ bunny girls is here too, slumped lazily across a folding chair to show the abject feminine, while surrealist apparitions of the body peak out from thick curtains. An ear here, some painted toes there.

Mannequins are a projection of many things, in a commercial sense they strip the female body of any discernible features that are then to be decided on by the owner. A designer like Ed Tsuwaki will give them lengthy giraffe necks to viscerally reflect his own, trippy designs. WVB lays one to rest with expanding stomachs and congested nostrils, he’s called sleeping beauty, for obvious reasons. Another of his creations hangs from the ceiling, rendered anonymous as it peers out from roof in its morph-suited headgear, imprinted with sharp serpent eyes as if always ready to pounce.

Martin Margiela, a longstanding museum patron (some of his archives even lie in its restoration wing upstairs) lent the proceedings some of his earliest work: a selection of his own Barbie doll fashions, completed when the designer was just thirteen. “He had to think about it because another Barbie creation he made actually got stolen,” reveals curator Elisa De Wyngaert of the donation. “Dolls are things people steal as collector-mania.”

In any case, the curators were given strict instruction not to tussle the hairs of either doll, a keen motif in the Belgian designer’s artistic pursuits, so they were left as they came. Dishevelled and imperfect. Such contributions providing a living time capsule of the designer’s earliest flirtations with fashion. Think raw stitched outerwear, the kind of charcoal grey knitted number that boasts sharp cigarette shoulders and swooping lapels. 

The exhibition’s last port of call considers the life of the avatar, musing on modern-day digital influencers such as Lil Miquela, or WVB’s beloved, cheese-grinned Puk Puk. Commentary here pertains to the stuffiness of the Metaverse, where luxury fashion is so desperately trying to make a mark. Though the endless possibilities of these spaces, be they Roblox, The Sims, Minecraft or League of Legends, lend themselves to both an ethos of constant consumerism and neverending creativity, that’s only half of the fun, and it seems as if those late to the party haven’t quite got to grips with how boundary-breaking this technology could be outside of revenue and shares.

But where does this all leave the body? Will it be subject to the same conditions of patriarchy in the digital space? Has the digitally dysmorphic already gone too far? Perhaps we’re all doomed to the same traumatic breakdown of reality experienced by Ed Atkins’ hyperreal skinhead which fills five screens at the exhibition’s end. It seems what was once a new, utopic horizon for our understanding of self-image has now too been corrupted by greed, tainted by branded promotions and commercial opportunities. This digital future is still ours for the taking, of course, but as Wyngaert’s curation points out, the clock is certainly ticking.

Mirror Mirror runs at Antwerp’s MoMu until 26th February 2023