The Curtain Matches the Gaze - MERDE Attends MoMu’s Latest Exhibition: Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair.
Words by Molly Apple
Richard Malone (left) & Patty Carroll in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
At MoMu’s latest exhibition, Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair, we were guided by curator Romy Cockx through a journey that braids history, fashion, and architecture. The exhibit begins in shadow: both a mannequin and chair draped in dark cloth, evoking domestic confinement. As we move through the space, the atmosphere shifts and fabric becomes furniture, and the line between interiors and garments blurs.
Cockx’s commentary on gender and design challenges us to reconsider how our environments—both worn and lived in—have long been shaped by gendered expectations. The exhibition winds through time and material, from silent portraits of women fading into their wallpaper to contemporary fashion that confronts the politics of space and identity.
Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
The light and textural tones sparked excitement only fashion curation nerds might fully appreciate. The atmosphere also feels vaguely familiar, like an echo of domestic spaces where women have historically been hidden, decorated, and contained. Portraits frame historical gowns inside a dramatically lit enclave: women dissolving into curtains, their clothes camouflaged by wallpaper and lace. Their facial expressions flicker between boredom and desperation, as if the male painters behind them wondered, Where did she go?
This quiet vanishing act is part of the show’s power. Cockx—whose expertise in gender studies threads through the exhibition—offers a lens on how femininity has long been staged, controlled, and even erased within the home.
As the rooms unfold, fabric becomes furniture. Outfits appear in sculptural groupings, standing like ghosts of lives once lived, or runways once walked. Some pieces come from MoMu’s own archive, others from designers around the world. Hussein Chalayan’s work faces us with the haunting question of what we take when we flee—whether from war or from a gender role we never chose. Home may offer privacy and safety, but for many, that promise never becomes real.
Maison Martin Margiela (Autumn-Winter 1999-2000), John Galliano for Maison Margiela (Autumn-Winter 2018-2019), Viktor&Rolf (Autumn-Winter 2005-2006), Marine Serre (Autumn-Winter 2019-2020), Comme des Garçons (Spring-Summer 2020) and Jenny Fax (Autumn-Winter 2022-2023) in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Marine Serre’s designs ask bluntly, Is there a Planet B? Jenny Fax cloaks girlhood in protective armor. Viktor & Rolf dives into escapist fabric fantasy, while Walter Van Beirendonck leans into arts-and-crafts maximalism with wallpaper and aprons iconography.
The expo invites art history buffs, fashionphiles, and furniture freaks alike. In one gallery more full of objects than clothes, we encounter Jeanne Lanvin and Josef Hoffmann, whose worlds remind us that fashion and home have always been intertwined—crafting how we present ourselves and how we retreat from view.
Rooms brighten physically, but the themes grow heavier. Gendered constructs are embedded in both couture and architecture. The 19th-century’s draping mania bound both women and interiors, layer by layer, in actual physical constraint. As the “fashion house” evolved into a fully immersive environment under designers like Paul Poiret, it laid the groundwork for figures like Walter Van Beirendonck and Raf Simons to infuse personal narrative and architectural thinking into their brands.
One female designer who bridged these worlds masterfully was Diane von Fürstenberg. As women’s clothing became less restrictive, so did the home. Walls came down, culturally. Floor plans opened up. I found myself wondering what a parachute pant might look like as a room. Maybe that’s the American in me talking…
Paul Poiret in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Throughout the tour, Cockx highlights designers who both reinforced and resisted historical gender roles. Austrian architect Adolf Loos, for example, claimed that if women were economically independent, they would “discard frivolity”—frivolity meaning fashion. Josef Hoffmann agreed, once declaring women unfit to be architects because they’d “yield too much to the wishes of the client.”
If I could, I’d hold an ornate mirror to these men’s faces and ask, Is it fashion you fear, or the power women might wield if they designed the world around you?
Lilly Reich, leather, teak and steel daybed No. 258, designed in 1930, produced by Knoll (as ‘Barcelona Daybed’ under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), 1960s in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
One textile designer's story stood out: Lilly Reich. She worked in Hoffmann’s atelier and later collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and most of her contributions appeared under his name. Sound familiar? Misogyny doesn’t discriminate by medium. I’m not surprised a woman invented the daybed though…
Reich was a visionary, asking not just about form and function but also about production, global trade, and the economics of domestic spaces. In our currents times of tariffs and international precarity, I can’t help but wonder: What would Lilly Reich do?
We’ll never fully know. Her work is still eclipsed by a man—named Ludwig, of course… no hate to modern Ludwigs. But her 1922 quote, “Fashion today has no style; it is merely always fashionable,” feels especially urgent now, in an era where trend cycles outpace meaning, and fashion is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
My senses lit up when we entered a room with a miniature home beside a blank white table. There's something pure and transportive about tiny houses, often called dioramas, but I prefer dollhouses. This one replicated Ann Demeulemeester’s home: Le Corbusier’s Maison Guiette, built in 1926 in Antwerp. The model features Le Corbusier’s signature modernist style, with ribbon windows, stark white facades, and no ornament which makes Demeulemeester’s attraction to it feel poetic. Men have long deemed women’s aesthetic instincts as frivolous, yet here Ann finds beauty in restraint.
The white table beside the model echoes Demulemeester’s love of blanc. White fabric covers everything-her home, her studio, her store, even her runway. But it never feels cold. It’s blankness is openness. Clean, but lived-in. Still, but emotional.
Ann Demeulemeester in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
That stark approach carries into the next room, co-curated by Martin Margiela. An all-white atelier repurposes discarded materials—exposed wires, ghostly objects painted over, forgotten things made new again, in true Margiela fashion. I found myself wondering: Is it a quiet rebellion when a man does it? Or a loud one?
Maybe I’m jaded… Either way, this is a space where imperfection is embraced. Where covering something in white becomes both erasure and rebirth. I giggled imaging an 18th-century still-life painter walking into a room, only to find a noblewoman joyfully throwing white paint across her dress and matching brocade curtains, tabis on her feet.
The journey ends in Raf Simons’ intimate world: raw edges, raw emotion. Quilts from past collections drape over furniture like mismatched hugs. The room feels nostalgic, but not sentimental. He reminds us that domesticity is not just about comfort—it’s about memory, survival, and reinvention.
Martin Margiela in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Raf Simons for Calvin Klein and Cassina, Feltri chair in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
I left with questions. What if beauty, how we dress and how we live, —isn’t something sanctioned, but something we invent ourselves, outside the binary? What if design could reflect identities never meant to fit neatly inside a room or a dress?
And as trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive creators thrive across industries, what happens when we stop decorating the “home” and start redefining it altogether?
Of course, these thoughts arrived long after I had the chance to interview Romy Cockx, the curator herself. We spoke about her early exhibitions on gender equality, her background in history at the University of Antwerp, and her belief in the value of cultural context—how a diamond or a scrap of lace can tell you everything about power, about time, about who was seen, and who wasn’t.
Botter (Autumn-Winter 2022-2023) and Chalayan (Autumn-Winter 2006-2007) in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Molly: This exhibition was centered around gender, and I’m sure you have a unique perspective as a woman in a historically male-dominated space. Can you share your experience with that?
Romy: Well, here in the museum, it’s not really a male-dominated space. Many of the directors and key figures have been strong women for over 20 years, especially in the fashion museum sector. Historically, of course, museums were male-dominated, but that has changed significantly.
Molly: Where do you see yourself in that landscape, especially considering how much of this exhibition discusses men overtaking or interpreting the female perspective? How do you engage with those themes from a feminist standpoint?
Romy: I’ve always been interested in gender studies. I studied history at the University of Antwerp, and I was particularly intrigued by how the idea of the "female spirit" evolved in the 19th century—how women transitioned from corsetry to the straighter, more androgynous silhouettes of the 1920s, with short hair and looser clothing. That shift fascinated me, and I explored it in my thesis on the discourse around "the new woman"—a term that reflected societal anxieties about women taking on new roles at the turn of the century. This was also linked to concerns about declining birth rates, so the topic can be analyzed from multiple perspectives.
My first job was curating an exhibition on gender in Belgium for the Women’s Archive in Brussels. I also worked on an exhibition about Miet Smet, the Belgian politician who was the Minister for Equal Rights between Men and Women. Gender has always been a core interest of mine, though I wouldn’t necessarily label myself a feminist in the way the 1970s movement did—where it was often framed as a battle against men. My approach is more about historical context; I believe you have to view gender through the lens of its time rather than imposing a modern, outsider perspective.
Adolf Loos in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
For instance, when I curated an exhibition on Man Ray and fashion, there was a section on his relationship with Lee Miller. Initially, Man Ray’s comments about Miller seemed harsh, but looking deeper into their dynamic, I began to see how power worked both ways. Miller may have held more influence in that relationship than is often assumed. Power structures are complex, and I wanted to present the discourse in a nuanced way rather than simply saying, "Look at what men did to women."
Molly: I can certainly be guilty of that, but that complexity definitely makes the conversation more interesting. Have all of your exhibitions included an element of gender?
Romy: Not all of them. I’ve also curated an exhibition about lace focusing on craftsmanship. For the Diamond Museum, I collaborated with antiquarian interior designer Axel Vervoordt on exhibitions about Antwerp’s history, the diamond trade, and 16th-century interiors.
Molly: When working on historical exhibitions, were there any unexpected or humorous discoveries that lightened the heavy research process?
Romy: Yes, definitely! Sometimes I laughed at how seriously people took certain things. For example, Le Corbusier’s portraits—his glasses, his whole persona—there’s an amusing intensity to it.
Hussein Chalayan, Afterwords, Autumn/Winter 2000 in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Molly: Your exhibition moved from historical perspectives to modern designers like Margiela and Raf Simons. Today, we’re seeing a growing intersection of interior design and fashion. Where do you see alignment or misalignment between the two?
Romy: It’s definitely becoming more prevalent, and I think COVID played a role. People invested more in their homes, and if they were already loyal to certain fashion brands, they were more likely to buy their homeware as well. While I initially thought this crossover started in the 1980s with brands like Versace, I was surprised to find that it goes back to Poiret. It’s always been a branding strategy to some extent.
Molly: Even fast fashion brands like Zara Home are tapping into it now.. Did you consider exploring set design within this exhibition, or did you want to focus more on domestic interiors?
Romy: I focused on the home itself rather than retail or set design. While store design was touched on, diving deeper into that would require an entirely separate exhibition. I was actually surprised this topic hadn’t been explored more thoroughly before.
Molly: In curating the pieces, what aspects of the home were most compelling to you? You mentioned finding a dress that resembled a lampshade.
Schwestern Flöge in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Romy: For historical dresses, I looked at Alfred Stevens' paintings and searched for garments with heavy embellishment and draping that aligned with that era. For contemporary pieces, I focused on designs incorporating furniture elements—bedding, upholstery, tassels. I was pleased to find relevant pieces in our collection and supplemented them with loans from designers. Interestingly, contemporary designers like Stefan Cooke and Julie Kegels have also been using interior motifs.
Molly: Did you work directly with these designers when selecting pieces?
Romy: Not directly. It was more of a coincidence that their work aligned with our themes. But that’s often the case in exhibitions—ideas emerge collectively because we’re all responding to the same cultural currents.
Molly: Are there any designers you wished you could have included?
Romy: Dries Van Noten’s use of interior fabrics is fascinating, but the gender aspect didn’t fit as neatly into our narrative. Curation is always a puzzle—you start with a concept, request specific pieces, and hope they come through. Some objects are restricted by complex museum policies. For example, there’s a historic chair in Austria that can’t leave the country without government approval unless it belongs to a public collection.
Maison Margiela (Spring-Summer 2014) and Walter Van Beirendonck (Spring-Summer 2014) in Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2025, © MoMu Antwerp, Photo: Stany Dederen
Molly: I suppose logistics and politics permeate every industry. But you did manage to include emerging designers like Jenny Fax. How did you find these more niche voices?
Romy: That credit goes to my colleague. She focuses on contemporary fashion, whereas I tend to start with history and move forward. She identified designers who fit our theme, and we acquired pieces for the collection.
Molly: That balance within your team must be so valuable. How large was the team for this exhibition?
Romy: Our core exhibition team was just four people, but we worked with conservation, communications, and an incredible intern. It was a collective effort.
Molly: As a final question, what’s something you’d like visitors to keep in mind when they walk through the exhibition?
Romy: I’d love for people to reflect on the idea of action and reaction throughout history—how fashion and interiors evolve in response to societal changes. Do we dress or decorate based on personal taste, or are we shaped by cultural moments? When you view fashion across time, you realize how much it reflects the era rather than just individual choice.
Molly: Thank you so much for sharing your insights!
Romy: Thank you—it was a pleasure
Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair is on view at MoMu in Antwerp through August 3 — if you’re nearby, don’t miss the chance to walk through these rooms yourself.