It has become easy to become complacent about fashion exhibitions in museums. Their sheer number and extravagant scale have drowned out the skeptics who once questioned the place of fashion in the museum. Yearly, and even monthly, news media outlets report lists of the must-see fashion exhibitions worldwide, anticipating the avid interest of their readership. Richly illustrated reviews of the major retrospectives in global centers appear in academic journals and the mainstream media alike; catalogs are sold like coffee-table books. With their associated celebrity spectacle, their designer glamour, and their mystique of intimate history, it is tempting to take contemporary fashion exhibitions at face value.However, the display of historical fashion is not uninformed or insignificant. It does not merely reflect the technical possibilities, museal conventions, and aesthetic preferences of any given period; neither is it only a chance product of the combination of the resources of the museum and the embodiment of the subjective personal visions of the curatorial and design teams responsible for the exhibit.