Museum Night 2025: Fashion & Interiors. A Gendered Affair.

During this edition, MoMu shows that female identity is not static, but constantly changing. Craft, time and rest are gateways to new opportunities.

Fashion & Interiors explores the relationship between fashion and interiors through the lens of gender.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, bourgeois ladies embellished both their bodies and their homes with drapes and fringing. Some male designers such as Henry van de Velde and Josef Hoffmann waged war on that decorative excess and designed women’s clothing and interiors as part of a total work of art. Fashion designers Paul Poiret and Jeanne Lanvin drew inspiration from this approach and used interior design to create a powerful brand for their fashion houses. The impact of clothing also resonated with modernist interior designers and architects such as Adolf Loos, Lilly Reich and Le Corbusier.

This complex history is reflected in surprising ways in the creations of contemporary fashion designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, and Raf Simons.

Join us at the table and get inspired by the delicate craftmanship of the centuries-old quilting technique, which you can view in the Fashion & Interiors exhibition. In this walk-in workshop, you will learn more about the technique by stitching the last parts of the pattern into one big quilt. This is how you will learn the basics of quilting. The result will be a beautiful patchwork of discarded textiles, which, as a sustainable blanket, will become part of artist Eveline Bumba's Sleep performance in the exhibition's intro space. Come quilt along in the MoMu Auditorium and become part of an artwork!

Textile artist Mei-Lin Oomes composes new narratives by merging textile traditions, techniques and materials with the contemporary. She works around themes of identity, belonging and preservation - questioning the position and perspective of modern life.

The reinvention of the role of women is a concept of all times. As in the exhibition Fashion & Interiors, artist Eveline Bumba highlights this role from a contemporary angle. SLAPENDRIJK is a live performance in which artist Eveline Bumba records her research into radical rest.  The sleep performance shows how we have outgrown life in the rat race of an exhausting society. At the end, a sustainable quilting blanket - made during the walk-in workshop led by textile artist Mei-Lin Ooms - becomes part of the performance. Thus, she makes the bridge to the 19th-century woman in the exhibition - melting into her interior, but coming home to herself in the 21st century. Admire her performance in the exhibition's intro space.

Eveline Bumba is best known for her untamed and pure word art. In her eternal search for meaning, she transforms from word artist to object maker and back again.  Her work is a philosophy of life about freedom and a rebellion against fixed ideas.