Capturing the Fashion and Feelings of Girlhood: Inside MoMu’s GIRLS Exhibition

By Julia Robles

Girlhood is a stage of life that resists exterior explanation. At the Fashion Museum Antwerp, its emotional complexity is captured and shared through the artistic medium of fashion.  The MoMu’s exhibition, curated by Elisa De Wyngaert and Claire Marie Healy, titled GIRLS: On Boredom, Rebellion and Being In-Between, sets out to celebrate the beauty of girlhood. With the recent surge of interest in the portrayal and aesthetic associated with girlhood across fashion, film, and visual culture, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) has gained renewed attention as a defining reference point. 

Costumes and other visuals from the film are heavily featured within the exhibition, drawing from the dreamy and nostalgic nature of Coppola’s portrayal. Both the film and the exhibition seek to translate the often misunderstood emotional interior of girlhood. As the film reflects, “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy,” capturing the emotional intensity that GIRLS similarly aims to evoke through fashion. Wyngaert and Healy utilize clothing as a vessel for memory, reinforcing fashion’s ability to communicate emotional experience where words may fall short. 

By Julia Robles

This raises the idea of clothing as a marker of identity, not only within different cultures but also as an outward expression of the changes all individuals internally undergo as time goes on. Garments create a form of personal archive to encapsulate our identity at different stages of our lives. This creation of nostalgia is particularly powerful when tied to the idea of girlhood, a period defined by its rapid emotional changes and sense of self-discovery. The clothes we wore during adolescence often become inseparable from memory, representing the moments of becoming before our identity has had time to fully settle. By revisiting these garments, whether in personal memory or within an exhibition space, viewers are confronted with versions of themselves that feel simultaneously distant and deeply familiar. Fashion creates a sense of tangibility to anchor the past, preserving the emotional imprint of who we once were and reminding us that our former selves are not something that can be lost but instead are layered and carried with us over time. 

Visit MoMu  Fashion Museum Antwerp at Nationalestraat 28, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. The museum is open Tuesday – Sunday, 10 AM – 6 PM (last entry usually around 5:30 PM) and closed on Mondays. The exhibition GIRLS. On Boredom, Rebellion and Being In-Between runs through 1 February 2026. Get your tickets and more details here: https://www.momu.be/en/exhibitions/girls