Fashion at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, with something for the glitter community

For a museum that measures its history in 150 years, the Natural History Museum in Vienna is opening its anniversary celebrations to the world of fashion and the glitter community. The institution, founded with Emperor Franz Joseph I’s signature in 1876, is hosting Eurovision-inspired activities, a fashion show and a high-fashion photo production.

The museum’s collection has grown to around 30 million objects. Tens of thousands of beetle species are preserved in the grand building, which opened in 1889. Visitors also come for the recently refreshed gemstone bouquet, the Venus of Willendorf and an array of dinosaur skeletons.

The collecting tradition began more than 270 years ago, when Franz I Stephen bought what was then the world’s largest natural-history collection from the Florentine scholar Johann Ritter von Baillou. About 30,000 objects, including fossils, minerals, shells and gemstones, formed the imperial collection. Unlike many princely cabinets of curiosities at the time, it was organized according to scientific principles.

The museum’s anniversary program also looks outward. Students from Vienna’s Herbststrasse fashion school drew inspiration from scientific findings, while the institution’s building and decorative-stone collection recently received the IUGS Geocollection designation from the International Union of Geological Sciences as one of the world’s most important earth-science collections. The collection documents, among other things, the materials used to build Vienna’s Ringstrasse.

But the museum is also examining the darker side of collecting. Its exhibition “Good Collecting, Bad Collecting” places the institution’s objects in a contemporary context and addresses colonial claims to power. That reassessment, the museum suggests, can open space for questions about the future, and even for fashion.