I Wear My Voice on My Sleeve - Fado and Fashion

23 November, 2012 to 31 March, 2013

One year after the consecration of Fado as a World Heritage Site, the Fado Museum and MUDE (Fashion and Design Museum) promoted the exhibition I Wear My Voice on My Sleeve - Fado and Fashion in both municipal spaces.

Fado has also been music for dressmakers, costume and fashion designers, inspiring several generations of creators. Lending their art its own melody, voice and tempo, the fashion designer is, in this sense, also a musician. Inspired by the musicality of another timbre, their stage goes from the blank page or from the “toile” to the stage of the voice that embodies and then participates in a collective enchantment. 

The exhibition I Wear My Voice on My Sleeve – Fado and Fashion proposes precisely a journey among the images that Fado has presented and which throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have shaped and recreated its identity. Each costume recalls a unique time and context. Each inevitably evokes an absent voice. Each one summons us into an immaterial, intangible, incorporeal dimension, into a necessarily fleeting, unrepeatable domain, which is hard to imagine being conveyed except through individual memory. And at the same time, each reveals fragments of another dialogue, always renewed and rediscovered, between Fado and Fashion - a Voice and its Image – through which we can also rediscover much about the way we see ourselves.