We have watched styling shape culture for decades without ever giving it a room of its own. Exposure - The Power of Being Seen, from Harry Styles to Lady Gaga Exhibition, opening March 26 at ITS Arcademy in Trieste, brings together actual garments and accessories worn by Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, Beyoncé, Madonna, Björk, Damiano David, Kylie Jenner, Jenna Ortega, Chappell Roan and Gwyneth Paltrow inside Italy's first contemporary fashion museum.
Curated by the Belgian stylist Tom Eerebout, the man who spent years making Gaga the most visually radical performer of her generation. The stylist has always been the author the credits forget. This is his argument made physical.
Harry Styles in his most gender-dissolving constructions. Beyoncé armored and mythological. Madonna rewritten for every era she decided to inhabit. Björk in the kind of pieces that make fashion critics reach for words they have not used before. Behind those moments: Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Jean Paul Gaultier, independent visionaries like Maiko Takeda and Una Burke, and emerging designers whose work now lives in the permanent ITS Collection. The range is the point. Iconic images are not made by one hand.
How a Look Is Born
What separates "Exposure" from every other archive show is how it showcases the process. From the first concept to the fitting, from the staging to the moment a look enters the collective imagination and refuses to leave, "Exposure" traces every step. Eerebout has always understood styling as a collaborative space. The Designer brings the object. The performer brings the body. The stylist brings the edit, the eye, the nerve to commit. That triangle, usually invisible, is finally the whole story.
The catalogue, edited by Eerebout and philosopher Emanuele Coccia, pushes the conversation further. Dialogues between Eerebout, Coccia and fashion historian Olivier Saillard move between philosophy and the practical reality of dressing someone the entire world is watching. Three very different minds. One shared obsession.
ITS Arcademy – Museum of Art in Fashion has been building toward a show like this since Barbara Franchin launched the ITS Contest in 2002. More than 15,000 items in the collection. Matthieu Blazy through the doors in 2006, now Creative Director of Chanel. Demna in 2004, now at Gucci. The Museum has always known where the future was before anyone else thought to look. The Exposure Exhibition is what two decades of that instinct looks like when it finally lands.
