SMU’s second annual fashion week held its keynote address featuring guest speaker Myra Walker in Meadows Museum’s Bob and Jean Smith Auditorium Thursday evening.
Walker, who is the director of the Texas Fashion Collection and a professor at University of North Texas, is a fashion curator and spoke about fashion as a form of art. She has worked on putting together fashion exhibits for museums.
“Fashion exhibitions are like a religious experience,” she said.
Walker, who spoke to a crowd of about 30 people, went through many recent exhibits all over the world, how they were put together and the importance of each one.
She included the most recent fashion exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art – “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier.”
“The exhibit was the brainchild of Gaultier himself,” she said. “He told us so much about himself via the exhibition.”
Walker went onto explain how exhibits are there to educate the public about the fashion industry and designers. Exhibits use the medium of fashion to explore ideas of fashion, art, history and art history.
Walker’s favorite exhibit that she visited was the “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
“The fashion world is divided in who saw this exhibition and those who did not,” Walker joked.
Over 661,000 people visited the exhibit. Museum exhibits inspire designers all around the world, like House of Dior and Chanel, to collect and preserve their work, Walker says.
Walker’s favorite exhibit that she has worked on is “Balenciaga and His Legacy: Haute Couture from Texas Fashion Collection,” which was shown at Meadows Museum in 2007. She worked on the exhibit for 10 years.
She is currently a guest curator for Meadows Museum next fashion exhibit – “Mariano Fortuny: The Spanish Maestro of Venice,” which is set to open in March 2015.
“It’s regrettable that Dallas or North Texas doesn’t have a museum dedicated to fashion,” Walker said.
Exhibits are a source of education to the public and help aspiring fashion designers’ imagination. Walker hopes that Dallas will join other cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in viewing fashion as an art.
Ashley Stainton, a fashion media minor, enjoyed listening to Walker’s experiences and advice.
“I learnt a lot about fashion as an art form that I didn’t know before,” Stainton said. “I would definitely like to check out some of the upcoming exhibits she talked about.”
Walker’s keynote was SMU’s fashion week’s fourth event of the week. The final event will be SMU Retail’s Club Fashion show at 5 p.m. at the median of Bishop Boulevard.
“The purpose of fashion week is to promote education of the fashion industry,” Rebecca Marin, an SMU student who helped make fashion week happen, said.
