The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta is bowing a new museum dedicated to fashion, it announced August 27.
The museum, named SCADfash, will open its doors on October 1, and its inaugural exhibition, Oscar de la Renta, will run from October 3 to December 21.
SCADfash will add 10,000 square feet of space — comprising a public gallery space, a fashion conservation lab, and a media library for educational film and digital presentations — to SCAD’s existing 27,000 square feet of academic studio space, serving the institution’s fashion and fashion marketing and management students.
SCADfash complements the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, which the college founded in 2002, and which has previously staged fashion retrospectives on designers Stephen Burrows (An American Master of Inventive Design, which ran in 2014) and Vivienne Westwood (Dress Up Story — 1990 Until Now, running now till September 13).
It is designed to be the dedicated site for hosting cutting-edge international fashion exhibitions, films and lectures, as well as showing off pieces in SCAD’s permanent collection, which houses more than 1,000 garments made by Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Givenchy and many more.
“SCADfash celebrates fashion as a universal language and garments as vehicles of identity,” said SCAD President and Founder Paula Wallace. “This museum focuses on the past, present and future of fashion design, connecting conceptual to historical principles of dress, whether ceremonial, celebratory, or casual.”
Oscar de la Renta will feature the designer’s creations from the mid-1960s till his death in 2014, as well as pieces by the maison’s new creative director Peter Copping. It is a re-staging of the Oscar de la Renta: His Legendary World of Style exhibition, which the SCAD Museum of Art presented earlier this year from February to May.
Each ensemble featured in the show comes from the closets of some of de la Renta’s most iconic clients, including his wife Annette de la Renta, his stepdaughter Eliza Bolen, Iranian American philanthropist Mercedes Bass, and Diana Taylor (the former New York State Superintendent of Banks and the domestic partner of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg), according to curator André Leon Talley. Other important gowns include those worn by former first lady Laura Bush, pop star Taylor Swift and talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
The film Ovation for Oscar, an intimate behind-the-scenes look at the amount of work taken to produce a major museum exhibition honoring the Dominican-American couturier, who had over the years generously gifted fabrics from his collections to the SCAD School of Fashion for student use, will also be screened.
