We’re excited to invite fashion writer, researcher and curator Weiqi Yap for a lively evening of conversation on contemporary fashion and acts of self-fashioning in the museum.
Fashion and dress have long been instrumental in defining the self in public spaces. As highly socialised spaces, exhibition and museum spaces are particularly attuned to various actions of looking and self-fashioning. How we dress to look at art and artefacts is often overlooked when contemplating our exhibition visits.
Considering artists Wawi Navarroza’s self-portraits and Annie Cabigting’s paintings in Appetite’s current exhibition ‘a bird flies into the mirror’, we can locate parallel influences in contemporary fashion photography and acts of self-fashioning in the museum. In this conversation, Weiqi will explore conceptual, historical and stylistic threads which intersect fashion and visual art, share her experience setting up the independent fashion curation studio Fashion On Display, and her process of curating its debut fashion exhibition, “Dressing for the Dream Space”.
Weiqi Yap is an independent fashion writer, researcher, and curator. In May 2022, she opened Fashion on Display, a Singapore-based independent fashion curation studio and experimental gallery dedicated to exhibiting fashion and everyday dress. Conceived as a year-long curatorial experiment, the studio hopes to provide a platform where fashion is reflected on with rigour and celebrated with criticality; and to explore alternative ways of looking at why we wear what we wear. Yap’s writing seeks to unpack our intimate relationship with fashion, dress, and personal style, and has been published in Vogue Singapore, the International Journal of Fashion Studies, Fashion & Market, and The Fashion Studies Journal. She is also a lecturer in Cultural and Contextual Studies in Fashion at the School of Fashion at LASALLE College of the Arts.