School visit without a guide

Visit the museum with your group and discover MoMu's temporary exhibition and the MoMu Collection.

MoMu’s collection presentation looks back at four decades of Belgian fashion, complemented by a selection from the museum’s historical collection. The exhibition gives an overview of the most important protagonists of Belgian fashion, based on the themes that characterise the distinctive nature of the MoMu Collection.

This exhibition is about girls, but is inspiring for everyone. Together with the guide, you will explore girlhood and the beautiful, complex and emotional journey of growing up. We dream about who we want to be when we grow up.

What does it mean to be a girl? What is girlhood? And how does the idea of ‘the girl’ continue to influence visual culture and fashion? You get a glimpse into the lives of girls, discovering the clothing, identity, and rebelliousness of teenage girls, as well as the perspectives of some artists and designers on their own childhoods through photos, clothing, art and film.

GIRLS is about daughters, sisters, and friendship. About boredom, rebellion and growing up. The imagination is stimulated by various viewing boxes for children or by peeking into some bedrooms, where you can fantasize together about what your own room will look like in a few years or how it once was!

Embroidery, called tatreez in Arabic, is the most important cultural practice of Palestine. Historically, Palestinian fashion was defined by diversity, with every region known for distinct textiles, styles and stitchwork. More than a craft, tatreez in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a visual language shared by women, as embroidery reflected its maker’s identity and origins.

This exhibition explores Palestinian embroidery and dress through the lenses of nature, splendour, power and change. Tatreez was a rural craft, embedded in women’s relationship to nature – from motifs inspired by Palestinian flora, to fabrics dyed with indigo grown in the Galilee. At the same time, the splendour of embroidery attested to women’s wealth and status. The wedding was a vital rite of passage, with sumptuous clothing a key element of celebrations. Golden thread, mother-of-pearl shoes, and elaborate headdresses offer a spectacular glimpse of local craftsmanship. Silver jewellery, along with certain tatreez motifs, also held talismanic significance, reflecting the power of clothing to affect and protect the body.

Today, embroidery’s power lies in its connection to Palestinian identity, as a symbol of resistance and solidarity. Since the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and the establishment of the state of Israel, tatreez has become a form of cultural resistance, an assertion of identity. The exhibition traces the politicisation of the craft, and the continued inspiration it provides to Palestinian fashion designers in the present.