The Styled Side: Fashion as a museum exhibit

There are many ways to spend this upcoming Memorial Day weekend, but several of them are inside. 

"A number of museum exhibits here focus on fashion and what we wear as art," says Michelle Dalton Tyree from Fashion Trends Daily.

"Reigning Men," now at LACMA, explores the history of men’s fashionable dress from the 18th century to the present, for example.

And several months ago, the Bowers Museum dedicated an exhibit to the work of rising Chinese designer Guo Pei. 

"We're really starting to see a cluster of high fashion exhibits," says Tyree and it really started about five to six years ago."

A showcase in Paris of work by Yves Saint Laurent was one of the first, along with a traveling exhibition of Alexander McQueen's designs.

"Social media has changed the landscape," adds Tyree. "The hunger for all things fashion and style has given birth to a ready-made audience that all but assures not only a healthy attendance but an 'organic' promotion of it."

Other exhibitions to put on your to-do list while traveling throughout the summer:

• There is an Oscar de la Renta retrospective in San Francisco, but that ends May 30th. It's a perfect time to head up before the exhibition closes.
• In NYC, check out Manus X Machina, the exhibit that kicked off by the Met Ball this year. It celebrates fashion in an age of technology, and explores how fashion designers are reconciling the handmade and the machine-made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear.