From the bourgeois salon of the XIXᵉ to installations by Margiela or Raf Simons, "Fashion & Interiors: A Gendered Affair" at Antwerp's MoMu offers an immersive journey through layers of fabric, folds of furniture and the twists and turns of identity. More than an exhibition, it's an invitation to rethink the way we live - our spaces as much as our bodies.

The home as a mirror of gender

From the very first rooms, the tone is set. The home is no longer a simple set, but a social theater in which every piece of furniture, every curtain, every lace tells a gender story. We discover how, in the XIXᵉ century, women were assigned the role of interior beautifiers, in an almost fusional continuity between their clothed bodies and their domestic environment. From crinoline dresses to upholstered sofas, everything speaks of softness, folds and retreats. It's an aesthetic that's assigned as much as subjugated. The private becomes political. And every knick-knack placed on a mantelpiece reads like a silent demand, an attempt to control - however confined - a restricted space of freedom.

This is the subtlety of curator Romy Cockx: to show how, behind the apparent lightness of fabrics, issues of power, representation and domination are at play. What could pass for ornamental becomes, on closer inspection, a tool of resistance. Here, decor is never neutral.

Declutter to exist

Then comes the changeover. The entry into modernity. Lines became cleaner, spaces rationalized. With Loos, Le Corbusier, Lilly Reich and the Bauhaus, functionalism takes precedence over ornament. Aesthetics changed. And roles too. The feminine gender is no longer defined solely by the softness of a cushion, but by the rigor of a well-designed chair and the angularity of a corset-free dress.

This is perhaps where the exhibition hits the nail on the head: in that pivotal moment when aesthetic liberation also becomes the emancipation of the body. By exhibiting structured garments and radically designed furniture side by side, MoMu illustrates the idea that fashion and interiors evolve in tandem. That our postures - quite literally - are transformed by the objects that surround us.

An armchair can straighten a back, but also affirm a vision of the world. A dress can liberate a waistline, but also a voice. And these everyday objects, long seen as futile or decorative, become the protagonists of a critical, feminist narrative.

A total work of art

This idea of an ongoing dialogue between disciplines runs throughout the exhibition. Henry van de Velde, a pioneer of Art Nouveau, already dreamed of a coherent universe where architecture, furniture and clothing spoke the same language. Today, designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Raf Simons and Hussein Chalayan extend this vision. For them, fashion is never disconnected from the rest: it draws inspiration from walls, textures and floor tones.

The MoMu's scenography accompanies this thought with delicacy. You don't wander through an exhibition, you pass through atmospheres. A hanging calls up a memory, a silhouette emerges in a mirror, a light fixture echoes a sleeve. The visitor is invited to feel, to look differently, to position himself. Literally: where am I in this interior? What does this piece of furniture say about me? What does this dress project about my identity?

When space becomes skin

What's most striking is the persistent impression that boundaries are disappearing. Body and space are no longer two distinct entities, but porous surfaces. A dress can become a partition. A carpet can evoke an embrace. And some of the devices in the exhibition take the experience to the sensory level. Space becomes tactile. You feel the velvet as much as the idea it conveys. We perceive the memory of a textile, a gesture, an era.

This is where "Fashion & Interiors: A Gendered Affair" really comes into its own. For beyond the pieces on display - magnificent, often rare, always eloquent - it's a way of thinking about what's sensible. A way of saying that the things we wear and the things we live in form a language. That gender is not an abstract concept, but a concrete arrangement of objects, materials and lines.

Intimacy as a field of action

At a time when the distinction between public and private is becoming increasingly blurred, this exhibition reminds us that intimacy is a place of power. That our interior choices, our clothes and our objects are never neutral. That they shape the way others see us. And our own.

What MoMu offers us here is a gentle but determined reflection. A living room that speaks. A curtain that questions. A garment that answers. It's not spectacular, it's better: it's intelligent, finely thought-out, deeply human.

MoMu - Antwerp Fashion Museum
March 29-August 3, 2025
momu.be