ZHF at the Fashion Research Symposium 2025
‘A Life’s Work, A Life’s Wardrobe: Fashion Collections at the Zaha Hadid Foundation’
The Zaha Hadid Foundation’s Dr. Catherine Howe and Dr. Jihane Dyer were invited to Oslo on 21 March 2025 to take part in the annual Fashion Research Symposium organised by Norway’s National Museum and the International Library of Fashion Research. Responding to the day’s theme, ‘Creating Afterlives’, they presented ZHF’s work-to-date on its fashion collections. In addition to Zaha Hadid’s designs and collaborations for fashion brands and exhibitions, these comprise her extraordinary personal wardrobe of over 2000 clothing items and accessories, along with a variety of fashion-related ephemera.
The symposium marked the close of the National Museum’s exhibition, ‘Ephemeral Matters: Into the Fashion Archive’, curated by Hanne Eide (Curator of Fashion and Dress) and fashion scholar Marco Pecorari (Parsons Paris). Pecorari’s book Fashion Remains: Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive (Bloomsbury, 2021) provided the basis for the exhibition’s revaluation of fashion archives beyond the material garment. Bringing together a selection of public and private collections, ‘Ephemeral Matters’ placed a spotlight on the paper trails and presentation materials that have tended to be discarded by the fashion industry, or overlooked by the museums they happen to end up in.
The ‘Creating Afterlives’ symposium built on the themes of the exhibition, gathering researchers to ‘explore ephemeral afterlives through alternative and critical archival practices in fashion’. The ZHF team’s paper reflected on the early stages of discovering, learning from and reconnecting the dots within a formerly private collection – one that was not amassed strategically but built up through Zaha’s love of shopping and wearing the avant-garde, her frequent travel and her tendency to rarely throw things away.
Drawing on photographs and press coverage of Zaha, recordings of her lectures, as well as correspondence, receipts, fashion magazines and lookbooks stored in the collections, the paper emphasised just how interwoven Zaha’s fashionable and professional lives were. It included examples of a bag that inspired a series of Perspex models, and faxes that suggest the exchange of her architectural paintings for clothing by her favourite designers.
The paper also highlighted certain important garments in the collections and the related traces in the archives that crystallise moments in time and reveal patterns of wear. Pieces from a groundbreaking 1983 collection by Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, which Zaha purchased that year, have appeared across a decade’s span of photographs of the architect. And a singular jacket she designed and painted around 1985 has been reunited with its initial sketches and a portrait of her wearing the piece, which fronted the catalogue for her first French retrospective at Bordeaux’s arc en rêve centre in 1989.
The team also heard about the exciting research and initiatives being undertaken by international colleagues. Talks included: Carla Sozzani’s establishment of both the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa and the Fondazione Sozzani; the nascence of the International Library of Fashion Research, founded by Elise By Olsen with the late Steven Mark Klein; the reawakening of the photography archive of former editor of Vogue Germany, Angelica Blechschmidt, by gallerist Kirsten Landwehr; and the architectural spaces of fashion being explored by Jochen Eisenbrand (Chief Curator, Vitra Design Museum) and Vésma McQuillan (architect and professor, Kristiania University of Applied Sciences Oslo). Their significant parallels with the work of ZHF made the symposium a fruitful opportunity to start conversations and consider new directions for our research on the fashion collection and archive.