The year 2024 marks a momentous occasion in Belgium’s cultural landscape, as museums across the country celebrate Belgian painter James Ensor’s legacy on his 75th death anniversary with exhibitions that revisit and contextualise his complex visual language. From the quaint beach town of Ostend, where Ensor was born and raised, to the centres of politics and commerce in Brussels and Antwerp, museums are examining his artistic preoccupations around experimentation with styles and mediums, ranging from post-Impressionism to Expressionism and Surrealism – and from painting to highly inventive print-making. The prolific and somewhat enigmatic artist is perhaps most well-known for his biting critique of Belgian society and the bourgeoisie, which he often depicted as figures in a grand masquerade, replete with skeletal memento mori. This particular aspect of Ensor’s legacy is highlighted in Antwerp through a couple of daring propositions: one is a survey of Cindy Sherman’s decades-long flirtation with fashion at the photography museum, FOMU (Fotomuseum Antwerpen), and the other is an exhibition on make-up in the city’s fashion museum, MoMu. Both opened in late September alongside a major survey of Ensor‘s paintings at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (KMSKA) and a gem of a show at the historical printing museum Plantin-Moretus, the world’s only museum that’s also a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Sherman’s survey at the FOMU, which travelled from the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany, delves into her use of masks and garments to create striking macabre vignettes on how identity is, in more ways than we’d care to admit, performed. Fashion’s culturally coded language of taste, class, sophistication and even politics becomes material in the photographer’s oeuvre as she slips into different personae: there are ladies who lunch, aloof counterculture rebels and unusually aesthetically pleasing clowns. The connection between Ensor and Sherman appears tenuous at first, based merely on both artists' use of masks. And yet, their works reveal a shared obsession with the grotesque, the carnivalesque and, ultimately, the malleability of the human form. Sherman’s use of costume, often veering into the absurd, mirrors Ensor’s carnivalesque tableaux, where the human form becomes a site of both laughter and terror.

The tension between critique and co-option runs throughout Sherman’s career. What once shocked and upended traditional ideas of beauty has, over time, been assimilated into the very systems of power it sought to disrupt.

Ensor’s maternal grandmother was a renowned mask-maker in Ostend. This connection to the essential traits and disguise imbued Ensor with an early fascination for the mask as a literal object and a metaphor for the hidden true self. Sherman’s own shapeshifting speaks to a postmodern fragmented sense of self, where identity is reconstructed through layers of artifice or cobbled together through visual codes. Her photographs blur the line between couture and caricature, between androgynous avant-garde armour and exaggerated, freakish depictions of femininity. Antwerp is indeed a fitting setting for such an exploration. The city, home to the famed Antwerp Six — designers such as Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries van Noten, who deconstructed and redefined fashion in the 1980s and early 1990s — is steeped in a tradition of breaking down established norms of beauty and form.

Works in Anti-Fashion trace the fine line between fashion as high art and fashion as farce – a relationship Sherman began exploring in her often rejected fashion campaigns of the 1980s. Having gained international acclaim in the late 1970s for her series Untitled Film Stills, also on view, Sherman further engaged with customs and mainstream representations of female roles in early works that eschewed the fashion industry’s self-seriousness. The photographer would pose in exaggerated outfits, often distorting familiar tropes of the high-fashion photograph and moody fashion spreads. The now-iconic work Untitled #122 (1983), for example, was originally commissioned by retail entrepreneur Dianne Benson as an advertisement for her New York boutiques. The menacing image of a woman with white-knuckled fists and tousled hair clad in Jean-Paul Gaultier was published in the iconic pop culture magazine Interview and exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York, so that this foray into the fashion industry was still perceived and consumed as art. Her next assignment, which came in 1984 from French designer Dorothee Bis, was deemed too provocative and was refused for publication in Vogue Paris.

In 1990, Sherman was asked to create and shoot a cover for the magazine Cosmopolitan. She presents herself as a pregnant woman, refuting all conventional notions of taste, beauty and elegance. The image exceeds the boundaries of what is considered acceptable at the time and is rejected by the publisher. But this is a fast-moving industry and with her growing acclaim as a member of the Pictures Generation— a cluster of American artists including Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Robert Longo and Richard Prince, who borrow their visual language from mass media and American popular culture— the fashion commissions keep coming. As the industry booms, avant-garde designers such as Rei Kawakubu of Comme des Garçons edge into the mainstream, and fashion campaigns dominate not only glossy magazines but also public space.

As the chronologically organised exhibition reaches the early 2000s, we see two industries—fashion and art—coming closer together, entangled both economically and culturally. What started as a critical examination of fashion’s excess and the artificial construction of beauty in Sherman’s images was later embraced by the fashion fraternity, as major fashion conglomerates sought to capitalise on Sherman’s subversive edge. This is the all-consuming power of fashion – what was once a critique becomes a commodity.

Intentionally or not, the survey’s chronology also outlines the industry’s endless cycle of reinvention and commodification. Critics such as Valerie Steele and Eugene Rabkin have each, in their circles of academia and subculture, respectively, long pointed out fashion’s paradoxical role in society as a form of expression that is at once liberating and enslaving. Steele, who is credited with introducing fashion theory into academia, has written extensively on the ways in which fashion can serve as both an armour and a straitjacket, absorbing every form of subversion only to spit it back out as a product.

Eugene Rabkin’s trenchant critiques of the luxury industry have highlighted how fashion is increasingly detached from its original intent as an art form, now subsumed by the commercial imperatives of conglomerates like LVMH and Kering. “The relationship between fashion and culture has shifted from symbiotic to parasitic,” Rabkin says in a recent interview for NSS Magazine, "because fashion—especially luxury—clings to the arts to give meaning to clothes that no longer have any. It's a very sad story because I fell in love with fashion when I realised there could be genuine cultural connections. Before that, I thought fashion only existed to flaunt status, which, however, is absolutely true.”

The tension between critique and co-option runs throughout Sherman’s career. What once shocked and upended traditional ideas of beauty has, over time, been assimilated into the very systems of power it sought to disrupt. In contrast, James Ensor’s paintings were never so easily absorbed into mainstream tastes. His surreal tableaux, filled with skeletal figures and masked caricatures, served as a direct challenge to bourgeois values and aesthetic conventions. While Sherman was eventually welcomed by the industry she challenged, Ensor remained a contentious figure, his biting satire of authority and society never diluted for commercial gain. Yet today, in Antwerp, a city that celebrates both fashion and rebellion, the shared concerns of these two artists resonate in ways that feel unexpectedly contemporary. Both Ensor and Sherman examine the surfaces we present to the world, whether through the fabric of fashion or the metaphors of the mask, and both reveal the fragility— and absurdity—of those constructions.

Cindy Sherman - Anti-Fashion is on view at the Fotomuseum Antwerpen (FOMU) until February 2, 2025.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)