Exposure – When The World Is Watching. ITS Arcademy’s new exhibition is coming March 26th.

There is an art that operates largely out of sight, yet more than any other determines how fashion enters our lives and settles into the collective imagination. Rarely celebrated, often anonymous, it does not create garments but decides their public existence, their ability to become symbols, icons. It is the art of styling, which unfolds in the charged space between body and dress, where material, identity and desire converge. Where clothes stop being objects, and begin to act as a language.

Exposure – The Power of Being Seen, from Harry Styles to Lady Gaga, curated by celebrity stylist Tom Eerebout – Lady Gaga, Austin Butler and Rebecca Ferguson are just a few of his clients – the forthcoming  exhibition presented by ITS Arcademy – Museum of Art in Fashion, is conceived as an opportunity to look closely at this hidden yet fundamental practice. Rather than celebrating spectacle alone, the exhibition sheds light on a profession that is fluid, deeply relational and fundamentally ephemeral. It will explain what it means for a stylist to give clothes a life, to transform them into storytelling images capable of shaping visual culture, at their best influencing collective culture and belief.

Housed in the gallery of ITS Arcademy, Exposure is structured as a sequence of environments that echo the spaces, conditions and mental states in which styling takes place. Experiential thresholds, moments that allow visitors to grasp how a stylist thinks, works and feels. Moving through them, one encounters the fundamental forces of the profession – exposure (the red carpet) and intimacy (the hotel room), research and instinct, precision and illusion, care and control – revealing styling as a practice that is at once technical and emotional, strategic and deeply human.

At the heart of the exhibition lies Tom Eerebout’s own trajectory. Raised in Ostend, Belgium, in the picaresque world of trailer parks  where his parents worked, he grew  up among outsiders, exposed to lives lived at the margins, forging an enduring empathy and an ability to recognise beauty where others see disorder. A sensibility that continues to define his work: an instinct to compose worlds from fragments, holding vulnerability and spectacle together.

Styling entered his life not as a plan, but as a discovery. From teenage pilgrimages to Antwerp and its fashion underground, to an aborted path through photography and art school, Eerebout’s education was informal, practical and intuitive. Assisting stylists in London became his real training ground, where learning passed through observation, trust and generosity rather than hierarchy. Styling revealed itself not as decoration, but as storytelling – a way of constructing meaning through clothes, movement, sound and light.

For Eerebout, styling is a form of visual writing. Designers provide the vocabulary, the stylist composes the sentence. He begins each project with a narrative impulse – a song, a script, a mood – and creates it through research, dialogue and fitting. The decisive moment is always the body: the instant when a garment meets a person and becomes something else entirely. The stylist mediates between designers, artisans, performers and images, ensuring that multiple intentions converge into a coherent presence. What results is not just a look, but a world an audience can enter, if only briefly.

This understanding of styling as a form of curation lies at the heart of Exposure, and it is also the starting point of a dialogue between Tom Eerebout and Olivier Saillard, fashion historian – and one of the most influential figures in fashion museography – who has curated all previous exhibitions at ITS Arcademy, most recently in collaboration with philosopher Emanuele Coccia.

In conversation with Coccia, Eerebout and Saillard reflect on their respective practices and their points of convergence and divergence. Because if the stylist works with living bodies, movement and immediacy, the curator operates with absence, with garments detached from the bodies that once animated them. Yet both are driven by the same question: how can clothes communicate meaning?

Olivier Saillard – who has repeatedly explored the interaction with the living body, notably through his performances involving actress Tilda Swinton –  describes the museum as the final step in the life of a garment, a space in which memory replaces presence and absence becomes productive. The stylist, by contrast, “activates” garments in the present, allowing them to incarnate through performance, celebrity and exposure. 

And yet, as both acknowledge, the boundary is porous. Red carpets have become new exhibition spaces – often more influential than fashion weeks – and celebrities function as living museums. Garments circulate between runway, performance and archive, accumulating layers of life. Styling, in this sense, does not oppose the museum – it anticipates it, accelerates it, and sometimes haunts it.

Celebrity culture plays a crucial role in this dynamic. In a media–saturated world, public figures operate as contemporary icons, their images endlessly reproduced and ritualised. Eerebout compares this to religion: celebrities as saints, images as altars, red carpets as ceremonies. The stylist’s role is not merely to dress these figures, but to translate their essence into visual form, crafting narratives that resonate across screens and generations. When successful, these images outlive the moment, becoming part of our shared visual memory.

At its core, however, styling remains an intimate practice. It is built on trust, empathy and the ability to read another person’s energy. It involves reassurance as much as control, listening as much as decision–making. In this sense, the stylist is not only a visual author but also a caretaker, sometimes almost a therapist – someone who helps others feel aligned, protected and transformed. No AI algorithm can replace that relational intelligence. As Eerebout explains with disarming clarity,  AI is a blender, “but you still need to decide what to put inside.”  Technology may accelerate circulation, but desire, intuition, and care remain irreducibly human.

Exposure approaches styling as an evolving knowledge situated between art and industry. Curating an exhibition on styling brings together two kindred practices, allowing them to reflect one another. It recognises that every dressed body is already a temporary museum: a fragile, luminous site where stories, identities and futures briefly take shape before dissolving again. A concept that is dear to both Saillard and Coccia, and was previously explored in  Fashionlands – Clothes Beyond Borders and The Many Lives of a Garment.

In making the invisible visible, Exposure offers visitors not an instructions manual, but an experience. Like entering a concert – and indeed it was a 2008 Kyle Minogue concert that marked the moment styling as a force first clicked in Tom Eerebout’s mind – the exhibition proposes a moment of suspension: a chance to step into another world and feel something shift. 

If fashion is often dismissed as surface, styling reveals it as structure – an architecture of meaning built on bodies, images and belief. Understanding it means understanding how we see – or want to see – ourselves. And, in turn, how the world looks back at us.

EXPOSURE
The Power of Being Seen, from Harry Styles to Lady Gaga
Curated by Tom Eerebout
Thursday 26 March 2026 — Sunday 3 January 2027