Editing an Exhibition. A Critical Consideration of “Self Service: Twenty-Five Years of Fashion, People and Ideas Reconsidered”

In April 2019, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the six-monthly fashion magazine Self Service, Ezra Petronio, its co-founder and current editor-in-chief and creative director, designed and curated an exhibition in Dallas’s Design District, staged in the spaces of the Dallas Contemporary art museum. The title, “Self Service: Twenty-Five Years of Fashion, People and Ideas Reconsidered”, makes Petronio’s intentions clear from the start: re-examining the history of Self Service through an exhibition, bringing back into circulation the contents and authors—photographers, stylists and fashion designers like Mark Borthwick, Jane How and Helmut Lang—that have contributed to the definition and consolidation of the magazine from the second half of the 1990s to the present day. Here the printed material, which often constitutes the endpoint of an exhibition project, was the starting point and the exhibition was seen as a place in which to think in three dimensions about the making of the magazine and about the editorial process conducted up until that moment. The curator formulated a multi-voiced discourse, one that brought many perspectives and languages together and played on a sensibility developed in the field of publishing, deploying means and modalities typical of the production of a magazine.Starting out from this experience, and introducing other examples, the essay investigates the slippages between the two-dimensional space of the page and the three-dimensional space of the museum, and the ways in which editorial practices and propensities can help mould practices and propensities in exhibition-making.