The Museum and Design Disciplines is an academic publication which originates in the series of research conferences organized and held at IUAV University of Venice (2011), in collaboration with Fondazione di Venezia. Edited by Maddalena Dalla Mura and Matteo Ballarin, the book aims to focus on the multifarious relationships that connect design disciplines and the contemporary museum, which, beyond the real or alleged booms or crisis, definitely is a significant cultural, economic, political, and social element and player.
Museum and Design Disciplines is divided in three sections: Society and Participation, Design Culture and Relations. Within the second section, it is possible to read an essay about MoMu. Written by Marco Pecorari – Phd Candidate at the Centre for Fashion Studies (Stockholm University), the essay is named “MoMu Effect: On the Relation between FashionDesign and Fashion Museum”. In this essay, Pecorari explores the relation between fashion design and fashion museum by presenting the case of MoMu and its peculiar relation with Antwerp fashion design. Investigating MoMu through the analysis of its exhibitions, Pecorari shows how MoMu approaches fashion design as a “discipline capable of self-reflection and able to produce those instruments that may be used afterwards as hermeneutic tools or metaphors to read fashion in its complexity”. Transporting the ‘Bilbao effect’ neologism into fashion, Pecorari explains how the ‘MoMu Effect’ must not only be seen as the cultural iceberg of a shopping phenomenon but as a crucial example for future reflections on fashion on behalf of museums.