Fashion becomes art in the museum through a specific set of tools: language, display, and institutional authority. This project asks what happens when those tools are turned over to the work itself.
Beyond the Runway is a three-part practice, written research, a photographic series, and a runway show, that operates as a single, continuous argument
BEYOND THE RUNWAY
My Independent Study in Art History investigates how fashion exhibitions have functioned as legitimizing mechanisms for fashion as art, and how that mechanism has grown so powerful that luxury brands have absorbed and redeployed it entirely, transplanting the spatial and aesthetic vocabulary of the museum into the retail experience until the two become inseparable. The museum makes fashion art. The brand captures that aura. And the boundary between them has nearly disappeared. Read my research here.
The photo series enacts that argument in the liminal space of the Ackland Art Museum’s sculpture garden, not quite inside the institution, not outside it either. It is the same in-between territory that fashion has always occupied relative to fine art: present, adjacent, never quite admitted. Shot among the permanent collection, three models are photographed as sculptural forms, fashion positioned not as clothing to be documented but as fine art to be encountered. See the photo series and process here.
The runway show performs the final transformation. Selected images from the series are printed directly onto fabric and constructed into three complete garments, turning the clothing itself into a photographic canvas and the body into an exhibition site. Presented as a moving exhibition, the models walk wearing their own photographs, image, body, and garment collapsed into one. The runway becomes the gallery. The body becomes the canvas. The exhibition never stops moving. See the garments and runway show here.
BEYOND THE RUNWAY: FASHION EXHIBITIONS, MUSEUM AUTHORITY, AND THE LUXURY BRAND
ABSTRACT:
The fashion exhibition has become the dominant form of blockbuster museum practice, breaking attendance records at institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The mechanism through which it operates, however, transforming garments from functional objects into works of art, has never been the neutral act the museum presents it as.
This paper argues that the fashion exhibition functions as a legitimizing mechanism for fashion as art, and that this mechanism is constructed, commercially entangled, and no longer exclusive to the museum. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ claim that language produces fashion rather than describes it, Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, and scholarship by Julia Petrov, Valerie Steele, Judith Clark, and Felicia Caponigri among others, it examines how display conventions, curatorial language, and theatrical aesthetics construct rather than reflect artistic value, and what those constructions conceal about bodies, labor, and canon.
It then traces how the aura the museum produces has migrated outward. As fashion exhibitions have grown more theatrical to sustain their authority, luxury brands have absorbed and redeployed that aura, transplanting the spatial and aesthetic vocabulary of the museum into the retail experience so completely that consumers now experience flagship stores as art institutions. The flow runs in both directions: brands shape what museums show, museums lend authority to what brands sell, and the boundary between the two has become nearly impossible for the consumer to locate. The museum and the luxury brand are now one legitimizing system, and neither can be fully understood without the other.
BEYOND THE RUNWAY: AT HOME IN THE GARDEN
The sculpture garden of the Ackland Art Museum is not quite inside the institution and not quite outside it, a liminal space where the permanent collection spills into the open air, where the boundary between art and environment becomes difficult to locate. It is a similar kind of in-between territory to the one that fashion has always occupied relative to fine art: present, adjacent, acknowledged but never fully admitted. If the institutional frame is what legitimizes, what happens in the space just beyond it?
Shot among the sculptures, At Home in the Garden photographs three models not as subjects wearing clothing, but as figures inhabiting an art space, each garment treated as sculptural form, each composition borrowing the stillness and spatial logic of fine art photography. The camera becomes a curatorial tool. The garden becomes the gallery. And fashion, placed within that context and framed as fine art, stops asking for permission.
CONVERGENCE
Three faces, one frame. Esther, Uredo, and Marguerite collapse into each other, heads stacked, gazes outward, each pulling in a different direction while remaining completely inseparable. Shot in the sculpture garden of the Ackland Art Museum, the image borrows the stillness of portraiture while refusing its distance. These are not subjects being observed. They are deciding whether to let you look.
ON THE MARGINS
The sculpture garden sits at the edge of the museum, present, but peripheral. Fashion exhibitions, meanwhile, have moved in the opposite direction: they are now among the most visited, most talked about, most culturally urgent events an institution can mount. Uredo is the exhibition. Tulle catching the air, stiletto heel on the rung, she climbs against a garden wall that shows its age, peeling and forgotten, while she ascends, almost there.
CROWN
The sculpture was here first. But tilt your camera, close your eyes, and it becomes something else entirely: a headdress, an extension of the body, a collaboration that neither party planned. Esther tilts her face to the sky in the Ackland sculpture garden, and the red spiral crowns her, its weight and scale absorbed into her stillness. This is what fashion photography can do that a gallery wall cannot: reframe, recontextualize, collapse the distance between a garment, a figure, and a work of art until the boundaries between them stop making sense.
SYMBIOSIS
The skirt pools over the yellow sculpture like it was cast there, like the two were made for each other, and someone only just noticed. Shot from below, the dress becomes architecture, the figure becomes a monument, the sky becomes the only gallery wall that was ever big enough. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship, the sculpture lending its permanence, the dress lending its life. This is what it looks like when they meet as equals.
THE BODY PROBLEM
Fashion exhibitions have always struggled with the body. A garment needs one to make sense, to move, to drape, to mean anything at all, yet put a real person inside it and you have a runway show, not an institutional one. The solution has always been the mannequin: present but faceless, body without identity. Marguerite stands on her plinth in the Ackland garden, a sculpture among sculptures. Her face is obscured, her identity is not. It lives in the way she stands, the way the garment falls, the way she has made herself at home among the permanent collection.
In this deck, you’ll find all preparation for the shoot and project, including moodboard links, beauty breakdowns, schedule, shot lists, and references.
PROJECT DECK
The research traces how the fashion exhibition has grown increasingly theatrical to sustain its authority, how the runway has borrowed the museum’s vocabulary of display, and the museum has borrowed the runway’s spectacle, until the two formats become nearly indistinguishable. Living Portraits takes harnesses that entanglement.
If the photo series asks what happens when fashion enters the institutional frame, the runway show asks what happens when the exhibition refuses to stand still. Selected images from the series are printed directly onto fabric and constructed into three complete garments, turning the photograph into a canvas and the body into an exhibition site. The models walk wearing their own images, the boundary between subject and artwork dissolved. The runway operates as a moving exhibition, where the curatorial environment is not a room but a body in motion, and the display does not end when the garment is removed.
This is the argument made physical: fashion and fine art are not two disciplines with a disputed border between them. In this room, on these bodies, they are the same thing.
BEYOND THE RUNWAY: LIVING PORTRAITS
Photographed by Pasquale Hinrichs
The UNC Hussman 2026 FashionMash Show was built around a single client and constraint: Levi’s, and denim. As the designer of the Senior Spotlight Collection, I was given complete creative freedom within that parameter, which became an opportunity to extend the research and photo project into a fully realized collection.
The process began with a studio photoshoot, for which I brought together a team of models, makeup artists, hair stylists, and assistants to produce the images that would ultimately live on the garments themselves. Each look was shot with its final form in mind, the face that would stretch across a skirt, the eyes that would repeat down a spine, the profile that would inhabit a pant leg. From there, I handled all post-production and graphic design work to prepare the images for fabric printing, translating photographic files into the scale, placement, and resolution required for each specific garment piece.
Once the printed denim was in hand, I moved into pattern and construction, researching and adapting existing patterns to match my designs as well as making my own, then working with a tailor to execute the final garments. The result was three complete looks, each one a collaboration between image, fabric, and body.
Beyond the Runway: At Home in the Garden was also exhibited at the runway show venue.
The video documents the full runway show, directed entirely by me. Beyond the garments themselves, every element of the production was my own, the music selection and editing, the styling of each look, the direction of the makeup artists and hair stylists to recreate the exact beauty looks from the photoshoot so that each model's live appearance mirrored the photographs printed on her clothing. The walking order was chosen deliberately, the posing directed to extend the visual language of the photo series into motion. What you're watching is not documentation of a fashion show. It is the final form of the exhibition.
RUNWAY VIDEO
In this deck, you’ll find all preparation for the shoot, design realization, and runway show including moodboard links, beauty breakdowns, schedule, shot lists, and references.
PROJECT DECK
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project was one of the most rewarding things I have done in my final semester at UNC, and it would not have existed without an extraordinary group of people. Thank you to my independent study advisor, Dr. JJ Bauer, whose guidance through this vast and endlessly fascinating topic sharpened my thinking at every turn. Thank you to Soraya Lewis and Karli Kennington for being the most talented and generous hair and makeup artists I could have asked for. Thank you to Eva Katz for assisting me and being the best flash holder in the business. Thank you to Tiffany Cole for lending the beautiful pieces that brought this concept to life. Thank you to the UNC Hussman School, the FashionMash program and Dana McMahan especially for giving me the opportunity to take these concepts to the runway and for exhibiting my work. Thank you to Pasquale Hinrichs for capturing be show beautifully. And thank you to Marguerite Stanley, Esther Lee, and Uredo Agada for making my dreams come to life and for making this the most fun I've had on a project.