Versace's frocks may be fun but they're not art

I have grave doubts about the authority conferred on a business empire by an exhibition like this

What are museums for? To document the past, of course. But if we ask "Where does the past begin?", it becomes quickly apparent that the job of many museums will also be to document and explain the way we live now. A museum will, if it is sensible, want to acquire the best of contemporary culture, which means guessing what, in the future, will seem most significant and valuable. There is no point in trying to acquire things once they have become canonical, once their value is universally recognised. It makes more sense to snap them up immediately.

From time to time, museums engaged in this risky exercise will probably want to focus attention on this part of their activities. When they do, however, it might well prove that, while we, the paying public, agree in general with the aim of the exercise, we might well not agree with the particular judgements. In any case, it shouldn't be allowed to take attention away from a museum's central purpose: to examine and display what we mean by "the past", to work towards the time when our present has become exactly that, the historical past.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is just about to open an exhibition that is devoted to the fashion of Versace. It's a startling thing to do, I must say. Versace isn't a house with a long history, or, indeed, a particularly high reputation among connoisseurs of high fashion.

Their products are very closely identified with a particular era, and a particular sort of client. They are rock-star clothes, celebrity clothes, clothes for the paparazzi and for the film premiere. For Versace, the 1980s never ended, and the work produced by Gianni Versace and, after his death, his sister Donatella is exuberant but not exquisite; even Dolce and Gabbana are more capable of demure good taste from time to time. They are clothes to stop the traffic, impressive in an overpowering way, but I can't see that they've exerted much influence or, really, made the sorts of innovations that entitle them to be considered by historians of fashion alongside Coco Chanel, Dior or Vivienne Westwood.

Versace, in short, represents a business much more obviously than a set of interesting aesthetic values. I have quite serious doubts about the kind of authority conferred on a multi-national business empire by an exhibition like this. It seems justifiable if, as in the case of, say, Vivienne Westwood, there is a sense of a real artistic personality working out ideas in clothes. But Versace is somehow too much of a money-making enterprise to justify this, and the clothes not original enough to reward the aesthetic examination.

It seems a clear tendency in museums now to link themselves with the worlds of high fashion and café society, in the hope that some of that glamour, or more precisely some of that money, will accrue to them. It works, of course. The National Portrait Gallery mounted a huge glossy exhibition of the fashion photographer Mario Testino last year, and it proved immensely successful for them.

Nevertheless, it was not a very admirable thing to do. Testino's photographs proved, when viewed in bulk, depressingly vacuous, and if the show gave him some superficial authority, it more powerfully demonstrated that there was not much in his work worth taking seriously. It looked like an exhibition at Madame Tussaud's: Look, here's Kate! Look, here's Diana!

The Versace show, I think, looks likely to be a show along the same lines. For 20 years an air of indescribable glamour has hung around the label, at such celebrated moments as Liz Hurley's career-making appearance in a dress held together by safety-pins. That glamour will, no doubt, pull in the crowds. But the V&A ought to resist the obvious appeal and examine what, if anything, they are showing here. The safety-pin dress got results, but in the cold light of day it doesn't seem to me like an admirable or interesting piece of work. I would be hard put to name any Versace work that justifies inclusion in the most elevated company, let alone that carries an entire exhibition.

Museums, of course, have to acquire and show contemporary work in any medium in a benefit-of-the-doubt spirit. One never knows what posterity will find interesting, but I would hate to think that the demands of the box office will lead to a series of exhibitions of contemporary fashion businesses, to the neglect of the fascinating historic collections.

There is no great urgency for mounting a Versace show; it would be much more to the point to return to a long-gone moment in history, and it would fulfil the duties of the museum much more admirably. It isn't wrong, exactly, to focus on contemporary fashion from time to time, but it would be good to think that a Versace show will be followed not by Stella McCartney, but by a serious exploration of Worth or Fortuny. That seems less and less likely to happen.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk