Exoticism today implies cross-cultural exchange, a hybridity of people and ideas that intersect across ethnic and cultural boundaries. “While the overall form of the global fashion system remains unquestioned, it is in the realm of ‘content’ or the creative element that the hegemony of the West over the category of ‘global’ is constantly being challenged,” suggests the scholar Sumati Nagrath.

How might globalization continue to affect local cultures and design? Will national and cultural identities change? How does fashion play a role in this? In a world that can transmit information at the speed of light, and where planes land in the remotest of locations, there is no place that is so foreign. National and cultural frontiers are blurring as commodities, information, money, and people move more freely. The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has written, “Seeking to impose a cultural identity on a people is equivalent to locking them in a prison and denying them the most precious of liberties—that of choosing what, how, and who they want to be.”

As early as 1908, in his Essay on Exoticism, the French writer Victor Segalen proposed that exoticism meant simply “the perception of the diverse.” Rather than cultural otherness, the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten suggests a new definition for exoticism: “For me, it is rather everything that reroutes us from the ordinary…from our habits, our certainties and from the everyday to plunge us into a world that is amazing, hospitable and warm.”

  -- Tamsen Schwartzman, Associate Research Curator

Exoticism has been organized by Tamsen Schwartzman and Fred Dennis, together with Molly Sorkin, Clare Sauro, Harumi Hotta, and Lynn Weidner. Special thanks to Julian Clark and Valerie Steele.

  November 27, 2007 - May 7, 2008

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