Monthly Archives: June 2013

Abraham photo studio

June 27, 2013 – 09:33

The Abraham Archive also houses 2,600 fashion plates. These tell us not only which couturiers worked with Abraham fabrics, but also what they did with them. What the plates also illustrate is how fashion photography, images of women, and ideals of beauty changed over the years. The collection begins with black-and-white plates showing the extremely […]

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Abraham in black and white

June 21, 2013 – 13:05

Black and white must be the most popular colour combination of all time. The interaction of positive and negative, the alternating dominance of black and white, the simplicity — the variety is astounding. Dots, circles, loops, and knotted lines are among the motifs that recur over the decades.

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MoMu Award 2013 goes to Pierre Renaux

June 20, 2013 – 10:45

Each year the MoMu Fashion Museum presents a MoMu Award to a MA student at the Fashion Department of the Royal Academy in Antwerp. This award, to be presented during the jury proclamation in June, gives a single student the opportunity to present his or her collection in an exhibition at the MoMu Gallery. The […]

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Swatchbooks from Lyon

June 19, 2013 – 09:20

The swatchbooks featured in the exhibition ‘Silks & Prints from the Abraham Archive – Couture in Colour’ were produced in Lyon between 1830 to 1914. There are 227 of them in the Abraham Archive, all of them purchased by Gustav Zumsteg, who gave them a proud place on the company’s bookshelves. Adding them to the […]

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Going down under!

June 17, 2013 – 18:04

MoMu is ready to travel to Melbourne, Australia with the Walter Van Beirendonck – Dream the World Awake exhibition at RMIT Design Hub! More news later!

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Clothing Eros Conference in Oxford

June 16, 2013 – 11:52

Sunday June 16th MoMu’s director Kaat Debo participated in the conference ‘Clothing Eros. The Erotic Potentials of Dress’, with a talk on sexuality and the body in the work of Walter Van Beirendonck. This two-day colloquium, organised by Denise Koller at Ertegun House – Oxford University, hosted talks by a.o. Barbara Vinken, Stella Bruzzi, Philipp […]

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Hubert de Givenchy & Abraham

June 12, 2013 – 10:13

The fashion plates of the winter collection 1956–57, preserved in the Abraham Archive, provide a graphic record of the early days of Hubert de Givenchy’s collaboration with Abraham Ltd. The name of Givenchy, whose great hero and mentor was Cristóbal Balenciaga, has become inextricably linked to two of the women he clothed: Audrey Hepburn and […]

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Abraham scrapbooks

June 8, 2013 – 11:00

The twenty scrapbooks compiled between 1947 and 1996 are full of information about fashion, textiles, and of course Abraham Ltd. Any mention of the company in the press was carefully cut out and pasted in, thus affording us a wonderfully intimate glimpse into the world of Abraham and how it perceived itself. The pleasure the […]

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Variations by the 1st Bachelor students of the Antwerp Fashion Department

June 7, 2013 – 16:23

It’s that time of the year of the Fashion Department’s graduation shows! Until June 16th you still have the opportunity to admire the dress shape studies by the 1st Bachelor students (2012) from the Antwerp Fashion Department at MoMu Gallery. The freshman year is composed around 3 principle artistic subjects. The most important course is […]

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Cristobal Balenciaga & Abraham

June 5, 2013 – 10:29

Characteristic of Balenciaga’s creations is their sculpted, architectural quality. The perfect material for this was gazar, a crisp, semi-sheer etamine fabric that was a specialty of Abraham Ltd. After struggling to adjust to the emergence of prêt-à-porter and slow but steady decline in the demand for haute couture, Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his fashion house in […]

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