V&A Dundee to celebrate five decades of club culture
As well as the first large-scale examination of the relationship between club culture and design, V&A Dundee will also celebrate iconic fashion designer Mary Quant next year
Next year, V&A Dundee will be diving into the design of clubbing with exhibition Night Fever: Designing Club Culture. Charting the rise of the nightclub from the 60s on, the show will explore the clubbing space, and look at how "architecture and interior design merge with sound, light, fashion, graphics and visual effects to create hugely influential epicentres of pop culture."
Among the exhibition will be a look at the legendary New York club Studio 54, where Andy Warhol was a regular; Manchester's Haçienda, which was designed by Ben Kelly with graphic design by Peter Saville; and Ministry of Sound's architects OMA reveal their latest designs for the London venue.
The show – developed by the Vitra Design Museum and ADAM: Brussels Design Museum – will take the form of films, photography, posters, flyers and fashion, as well as light and music installations.
V&A Dundee will also be bringing a Mary Quant retrospective, currently on display at the V&A in London, north of the border.
"The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone," said Quant, and that's exactly what she did. Her playful, jubilant clothes helped define the fashion of the swinging sixties and utilised mass production techniques to create a new look that all women could find on the high street.
The retrospective explores Quant's work between 1955 and 1975, "where she encouraged a new age of feminism and revolutionised the high street". Co-curated for the V&A by Jenny Lister and Stephanie Wood, the show draws on the V&A’s extensive fashion holdings, as well as a huge range of garments tracked down following a public call-out.
Mary Quant, V&A Dundee, 4 Apr 2020–6 Sep 2020
Night Fever: Designing Club Culture, V&A Dundee, 31 Oct 2020–4 Feb 2021