MoMA PS1’s New Fashion Exhibition Is Nothing Like a Retrospective
New York Fashion at PS1, 1980–1984 features super-rare ephemera from Betsey Johnson, Willi Smith, Homer Layne, and more designers.
The MoMA PS1 museum in Queens, New York can summon different associations for everyone. For some, it’s their annual pilgrimage to the tables of the Printed Matter Book Fair. For others, it’s a weekend summer Friday or sticky, dance-pit Warm Up nights. For many, it continues to operate as a school for developing one’s eye and artistic practice.
Celebrating its 50th year in 2026, MoMA PS1 is doing some overdue bragging on its lesser-known histories. That includes the seasonal program which founder Alanna Heiss and her staff devised in 1978 to put the whole building to use. At that time, they’d hand over rooms to freelance curators working in architecture, dance, performance, poetry, video, film, and fashion. This November, MoMA PS1 assistant curator Kari Rittenbach investigates this special moment through an exhibition called New York Fashion at PS1, 1980–1984, devoted to the initiative helmed by stylist and makeup artist Hollywood Di Russo, who ran the series from 1980 to 1985.
Installation view of New York Fashion at PS1, 1980–1984
That fashion got its own room at all says something about what Heiss was building in the ’80s: a still-fledgling colony in a former schoolhouse redefining what an art institution could be, and for whom. Fashion was considered by Heiss and her colleagues to be integral to the holistic art palace—after all, mannequins had been on view at The Met since 1946; and Diana Vreeland spent the ’70s turning store windows into theater. But Heiss and Di Russo were after something else. They wanted to see living designers treated as artists rather than displayed behind glass.
When designing her own exhibition, Rittenbach took Di Russo’s and Heiss’s original modus operandi to heart, creating a show that communes with fashion’s multidimensional output, from photography and drawing to installation and performance. The show is anchored by an oversize wall vinyl with the typed-out lineup, featuring Betsey Johnson, Willi Smith, Homer Layne, and more.
Installation view, Betsey Johnson, March 13, 1983.
In researching this show—which is open to the public from November 5 to March 15, 2027—Rittenbach relied heavily on the museum’s own archive, which is remarkable in its possession of super-rare pieces. Each image and document on view here feels like an important signal from another time. And even though they are recreations, Smith’s installation seems especially poignant because of how it wrestles with the language of 1970s minimalism. It also appears to forecast the next generation of the fashion industry. Back in those days, Maison Margiela was still seven years away from founder Martin Margiela’s first runway show at a playground; it would be another eight years before artists and designers like Damien Hirst and Miuccia Prada came together in Florence for Germano Celant and Ingrid Sischy’s inaugural fashion and art biennial.
In-progress preparations for the exhibition Homer Layne’s Collection of Charles James Fashions. 1981
New York Fashion at PS1 is a show that, through its prescience, begs the question: why are all our fashion exhibitions focused on the retrospective lens? Could there be immense value in a return to more active involvement between designers and the museum?
