21 January 2026  Fashion in Color: A New PerspectiveThe Wien Museum has announced a new fashion exhibition for autumn titled "Farbenspiel" in German and "True Colors" in English. The exhibition will open in October 2026 and focuses on the cultural meaning of color in clothing. It is based on one of Europe's largest museum fashion collections, making the project particularly relevant for fashion and cultural history.The Wien Museum's fashion collection includes almost 30,000 objects, ranging from the 18th century to the present. It covers women's, men's, children's, and sportswear, as well as accessories such as hats, fans, bags, and umbrellas. A strong focus lies on bourgeois women's fashion of the 19th and 20th centuries, including evening and ball gowns, but the collection also documents everyday clothing and iconic fashion items of the modern era. This overview is continued online. The museum's digital collection allows access to more than 120,000 objects and descriptions, including many fashion-related items. Searching Fashion OnlineThe online collection can be searched by object type, material, color, time period, or by names of artists and producers, such as fashion designers. Users can also search more broadly, for example with terms like "fashion images". Without a clear strategy, however, the sheer scale of the archive can make research challenging.Color as a Social CodeTo make social connections visible, curator Michaela Lindinger chose fashion colors as a guiding narrative. Lindinger is a Vienna-based curator and author who has worked at the Wien Museum since 2004. Her work often focuses on social history, gender, and fashion.In True Colors, clothing is presented as more than decoration. Colors are shown as symbols of power, status, emotion, and identity. Across four centuries, garments reveal how color reflects social rules, emotions, and change. Fashion appears here as a social force that helps shape everyday life. Exhibition DetailsThe exhibition True Colors – Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries will be shown at the Wien Museum, Karlsplatz, from October 1, 2026, to March 28, 2027. Around 350 garments will be on display, from workwear to ball gowns, including pieces by designers such as Fred Adlmüller and Gertrud Höchsmann, whose works are already documented in the museum's online collection.Image: Six colorful silhouettes of ballgowns stand in a horizontal line against a white background. From left to right, the dresses are navy, cyan, green, red, and yellow, overlapping slightly to create a translucent, rainbow-like effect. Photo: © Fashion.at / AI-generated with Imagen 4 / Google AI Studio |