Guest Blog post from Jane Burke, curatorial assistant of fashion and textile art at the Denver Art Museum. This September, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) will present Shock Wave: Japanese Fashion Design, 1980s-90s, which will focus on how Japanese designers started a “fashion revolution” in Paris during the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition will feature 70 looks from Japanese fashion designers including: Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada, Kansai Yamamoto, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe focusing on how influential their work has become since the initial shock of their arrival into the European fashion system. Shock Wave, is the inaugural exhibition organized by Florence Müller, the DAM’s Avenir Foundation Curator of Textile Art and curator of fashion, who joined the museum in 2015 after bringing the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition to the DAM in 2012. Shock Wave will spotlight the DAM’s own growing fashion collection alongside loans from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as well as from local and national private lenders. “The impact Japanese designers had in the ’80s and ’90s was an important phenomenon in the history of fashion design,” said Müller. “This exhibition will trace the origin of the innovations that they created through the reinvention of textiles, silhouettes and even fashion brand identity.” To accompany the exhibition, the museum will publish a 64-page catalogue written by Florence Müller and Jane Burke, curatorial assistant of fashion and textile art at the DAM, which will include looks from the exhibition as well as fashion photography from the 80s and 90s. Shock Wave: Japanese Fashion Design, 1980s-90s

September 11, 2016 – May 28, 2017