Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear is an immersive, engaging and richly sensory landmark exhibition at the V&A taking visitors on a journey from historical to contemporary, exploring gender, identity and adornment. The spatial design transported you from the ancient past to the present day, marrying spectacle with social commentary, and materials with context. The design challenged norms, invited new audiences, and asked crucial questions around gender and identity – questions bound up in the fabric and history of menswear.

Innovation: Our approach was driven by a desire to innovatively address historical power imbalances and statements made by fashion regarding race, body, and gender identities. It utilized various design elements such as juxtapositions, material choices, colors, shapes, lighting, and even typography to create a dialogue between objects and visitors, encouraging critique and reverence. Artworks challenged power and Eurocentric narratives- a section drew from Yinka Shonibare's work to explore empowerment through 19th-century high-society fashion. The commitment to under-represented voices extended to AV and film commissions, incorporating soundscape and immersive film experiences.

Functionality: The V&A set out to create a retrospective menswear exhibition featuring 100 looks and 100 artworks, presenting the evolution of masculinity as a nonlinear narrative, connecting across time and geographies. The exhibition design creatively supported this agenda, featuring a central transitional space ('The Pinnacle') that juxtaposed historical and modern representations of masculinity. This space provided a unique experience, connecting different icons, fashions, and geographies in a non-linear narrative.

Creativity: The experiential environment commented on the work as much as any accompanying text, emphasising the context and narrative associated with each material. The entrance featured dynamic lenticular graphics to convey how menswear has been fashioned and refashioned over time. Material choices emphasised connections and differences between the exhibition's three key sections (Undressed, Overdressed, and Redressed) For a show about fashion, fabric was a critical material. In total, the exhibition contained 400m2 of printed fabric. In Undressed, illuminated fabric walls challenged conventional depictions by abstracting black bodies. These were juxtaposed in Redressed, where fabric walls resembled glass curtain walling in cityscapes.

Sustainability: Our strategy centred around minimising material, prioritising reuse and specifying materials able to be recycled for subsequent projects. Using fabric dramatically reduced the amount of traditional timber stud walls and we designed for re-use, making the most of full-size panels and reversible fixing details so elements could have a second life. Taken together Fashioning Masculinities showcased that environmentally conscious design does not preclude luxury and inclusivity.