Designer exhibitions enthral and educate, but above all, they sell

Their purpose isn’t merely to enthral and educate - it’s to reinforce brand identity

A general view during the 2014 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show at Earl's Court exhibition centre on 2 December, 2014 in London, England (Getty)

In 1983, scandal erupted when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a costume exhibition devoted to the work of Yves Saint Laurent. The reason? Because Saint Laurent wasn’t dead – and neither was his business.

One was hawking the inaccessible (such as, say, Picasso) and the other mass-product (with YSL launching its “Paris” perfume the same year). And for many, the link between a temple to art and the overt commercialism of fashion was unacceptable. “The equivalent of turning gallery space over to General Motors for a display of Cadillacs,” sniped the critic Robert Storr.

Admittedly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hasn’t staged a solo exhibition of a living designer since then. Even talents as rich as Miuccia Prada and Karl Lagerfeld have been yoked to figures from further-flung history, such as Elsa Schiaparelli or Coco Chanel. And that avoids accusations of pandering to the advertising dollar, and of transforming esteemed institutions into designer window displays.

The flip-side, however, is that brands are now doing it for themselves. Rather than necessarily partnering with grand galleries and museums, fashion’s biggest houses are simply renting spaces, hiring curators and staging their own shows, devoted solely to themselves. The latest is Hermès’ Wanderland exhibition, installed at the Saatchi Gallery until 2 May.

The show is devoted to that untranslatable French notion of flânerie, the act of wandering around and taking in your surroundings. It’s untranslatable because there are all kinds of literary allusions tied up in the word – what Balzac described as “gastronomy of the eye”. The French label makes it akin to window shopping, as you trip your way through Hermèsified Parisian street scenes, entertainingly engineered with animated teacups and the like. Hermès windows are always good, and they warrant an afternoon’s wandering.But – and it’s a big but – this all feels a little like a giant, real-life advertising campaign. There isn’t much else there – no other brands intrude on their idealised universe of leather and silk.

Meanwhile, both Prada and Christian Dior have staged similar exhibitions, taking over spaces at Harrods and transforming them into shows that glorify their own past and present. (The present is usually tied to product, with Dior launching cosmetics, and Prada a capsule collection. As spectacles, both were superb. So is Hermès’ Wanderland. But ultimately, their purpose isn’t merely to enthral and educate. It’s to reinforce brand identity, in an intoxicating extension of traditional two-dimensional advertising imagery; and also, ultimately, to use that to sell us stuff. That’s the issue many had with that Yves Saint Laurent exhibition. And it lingers.