• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.936-953
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• 2016

This article surveys the meaning and history of fashion museum exhibitions to understand the characteristics that make a fashion museum exhibition special. It explores dress museology and fashion museology in theory, and practice across a range of international case studies that include the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Mode Museum in Antwerp, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In particular, it examines how curatorial intervention has developed the interpretation and display techniques of dress within the context of the museum or gallery as well as how fashion has made museums accessible to diverse audiences. For a specific case study, we review the types and roles of fashion exhibitions organized by the Simone Handbag Museum, Seoul. It is the first handbag-centered fashion museum in the world as well as one of the most representative local fashion museums. The museum collection includes fashionable western handbags from rare specimens of the $15^{th}$ century to the latest bags of the $21^{st}$ century, and presents a history of changing fashion cycles and the major socio-cultural shifts that have profoundly affected women's lives in public spaces. Exhibitions show the perspective to a range of curatorial methodologies and show the innovative approaches towards collections and displays with broader fashion issues such as gender, materialism and technology. The article is to help encourage further scholar discourse between fashion museum exhibitions and fashion museology.