Enthusiasm for high-fashion treats

Data is less conclusive in Singapore, in part because of the relative paucity of blockbusters a la Savage Beauty and a reliance on nonspecialist museums with their own peculiarities.

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Though Mr Onn does not give figures for ACM’s most comparable monograph, Guo Pei: Chinese Art & Couture (2019), the show appealed especially to a younger crowd, he says.

Guo is the world-famous couturier behind the viral omelette dress with a pooling yellow 5m-long train-fame that Barbadian singer Rihanna wore to the Met Gala in 2015.

That show, ACM’s first that went big on a living designer’s contemporary work, “marked a shift” for the heritage museum founded in 1997, Mr Onn adds

Its followups included an annual showcase of contemporary local fashion #SGFashionNow (2021 to 2023) and a retrospective of 59-year-old Gn’s work, Andrew Gn: Fashioning Singapore And The World (2023), which travelled to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, United States, in September.

But Mr Onn stresses that fashion does not have an automatic edge over other shows at ACM. In fact, visitor numbers are quite standard across the board, he adds.

Its Manila Galleon exhibition, on the complicated trade history of the former Spanish colony, did “very well” after opening in 2023. Fashion, or more precisely textiles, featured narrowly in a section on silk, a prime export that tested the competing Mexican industry and, when woven into embroidered “Manila shawls”, excited the European nobility as an exotic status symbol.

With such a diverse slate of shows at ACM, comparison between genres is impossible, says Mr Onn. Even pitting the arch fantasy of Guo’s designs against the demi-couture of Gn would not be “apples to apples”, he adds.

ArtScience Museum vice-president Honor Harger says audience profiles across its different shows tend to remain constant. Give or take a little variance, its base is tourists, and a “heartbeat” of locals and families.

That comes down to the museum’s location in the centre of Marina Bay, and its unique art-meets-science ambit being its “primary driver of demographics”, she says.