The exhibition is a journey through one hundred years of fashion photography and shows new ways of exploring and establishing this genre as a museum art form. The fashion photography collection not only includes high fashion from the 1930s to the present, but also extends the definition of fashion photography to include street style: High-fashion photography embodies the life to which we aspire, street photography the life we actually lead. Shown together, we see one influence the other, and vice versa.

For the first time, this exhibition “Mix & Match”, with around a thousand works from the Nicola Erni Collection, consciously combines and intuitively relates fashion photography and contemporary art—works by Sylvie Fleury or Jean-Michel Basquiat are shown side by side with fashion photographs by Ellen von Unwerth or Peter Lindbergh. These juxtapositions are often unexpected, visually surprising, playful, and open to new discoveries and interpretations.

The exhibition opens with the three adjacent works by British photographer Martin Parr, who shot an editorial for US Vogue in 2019 and chose a museum space as the backdrop to present the latest fashion. The result is a symbiosis of fashion photography and contemporary art that offers a forward look to the exhibition.

“Mix & Match” is organized around thirteen thematic focal points. The centerpiece of the exhibition, “Fashion Photography—From Magazine to Artwork,” reflects the context of fashion photography and reminds us that it was originally created as commercial, commissioned work for fashion magazines, editorials, and fashion campaigns.

“What likely began as a personal preference and an intuitive idea soon manifested itself as a visionary collection strategy and a pioneering take on a medium that is often misunderstood and still neglected in the art world. With her characteristic enthusiasm and flamboyant spirit of discovery, Nicola was among the first to realize—later followed by others—a much-needed, in-depth, but delightfully playful development of an important collection and an appraisal of fashion photography as a key form of artistic expression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” —Max Hollein

The exhibition was created in collaboration with Birgit Filzmaier, Zurich. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication “Mix & Match: Fashion Photography Meets Contemporary Art”.