Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When the Brooklyn Museum in New York staged The Rise of Sneaker Culture, an exhibition devoted to sneakers in 2015, it raised some eyebrows. Art museums had already increasingly been staging fashion exhibitions, but sneakers were another story.“Intellectually lightweight,” opined the New York Times in its review, which ended with the following observation, “Sneakerheads probably won’t mind, though. For them, the exhibition should be catnip.”As museums fight for cultural relevance and younger, diverse audiences, they have embraced all forms of pop culture, fashion included, blurring the lines between art, entertainment and commerce. And as fashion has taken more of a streetwear turn — sneakers and hoodies are now a regular part of most brands’ assortment — so have the museums. Opening at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, next month is Nike: Form Follows Motion, the first ever museum exhibition devoted to the brand, spanning its ascent from a grassroots start-up to a global sportswear phenomenon. When national art museums began to form in the 19th century, their mandate was to edify the public. Art was seen as an expression of national pride and one of the cornerstones of civilisation with whose protection museums were charged. Today, such notions seem terribly quaint.As public financing began to dry up in the 1960s, art museums were forced to seek new forms of capital infusion. Attracting new audiences through crowd-pleasing exhibits became key.In 1963, crowds of oglers descended on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the “Mona Lisa”, on loan from the Louvre. Cash poured in and other museums took note. As the art critic Robert Hughes noted in his 2008 documentary The Mona Lisa Curse, “People came not to look at it, but to say that they’d seen it.” Be that as it may, the exhibit broke all attendance records and held it until 1978 when the Met staged another pop vehicle, Treasures of Tutankhamun.The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008 was another symbolic moment. Its main sponsor was Louis Vuitton, whose creative director at the time Marc Jacobs collaborated with Murakami on a collection of bags. In return for its largesse, some of those bags were displayed in the museum — not at its shop, but alongside Murakami’s art. To mark the launch, Louis Vuitton threw a party on the grounds of the museum, which controversially featured mock Canal Street, Chinatown, stalls, where attendees could shop for real LV bags as if they were fake. Today fashion has become a form of entertainment, with blockbuster runway shows attracting scores of celebrities, whose fashion choices are endlessly dissected by the internet commentariat. And where pop culture goes, so do fine art museums.Museums used to describe their missions as maintaining cultural heritage. Now most museums define their mission as appealing to the publicArt critics may pour scorn on fashion exhibits, but they bring in visitors; the attendance record that the King Tut exhibit held for 39 years was finally broken in 2018 by Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. According to the Met, five of the 10 most visited exhibits in the history of the museum have been put on by its Costume Institute, which focuses on fashion and costume design.Museums today need all the audience they can get. According to Natasha Degen, the author of Merchants of Style, a book about the intersection of art and fashion, art museums now have to compete not only with each other, but with mega-galleries like the Gagosian, museums built by fashion brands such as Fondation Louis Vuitton and Fondazione Prada, and various “immersive” exhibits. Perhaps they also view museums dedicated to design, where fashion exhibits make more sense, as competitors as well. It is not that museums lack visitors; according to the American Alliance of Museums in the US, museums receive more visitors than all sporting events combined, but few of them are young and from minority backgrounds. A 2010 report commissioned by the Center for the Future of Museums, a research arm of the American Association of Museums, showed that while the minorities made up 34 per cent of America, only 9 per cent of them attended museums. Of these, Hispanic and Black people were especially under-represented.Museums hope to expand the demographic of museum goers with exhibitions devoted to sneakers, streetwear designers, and streetwear-adjacent artists. The Brooklyn Museum, of the LV bag fame, has led the way. In addition to The Rise of Sneaker Culture in 2015, it has put on shows such as KAWS: What Party in 2021, featuring a body of work from the graffiti-turned-fine-artist, and Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” in 2022, which traces the arc of the late designer’s multi-faceted career.Today, streetwear-centric exhibits avidly travel across the US. The Abloh exhibit, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA) in 2019, travelled to the Atlanta High Museum before ending up in Brooklyn (and eventually travelled to Doha in the UAE). The Sneaker Culture exhibit also travelled to Atlanta High, which in 2017, hosted an installation by Daniel Arsham, an interior designer-turned-artist favoured in streetwear circles having gained notoriety for designing interiors for Kith, the New York retail temple of streetwear. Last year, the Orange County Museum of Art in southern California put on another Arsham exhibit.Figures like KAWS, Arsham and Murakami are examples of influential figures dabbling in both fashion and art, who appeal to a broader audience while having the cultural legitimacy that allows museums to deflect accusations of lowered standards. Whether sneakers belong in an art museum or not may be up for debate, but the fact that they bring in visitors is not. Madeleine Grynsztejn, MCA’s director, confirmed that the Abloh exhibit was the third-most-attended exhibit in the history of the museum. The first was that of Murakami, the second of David Bowie, according to the museum.The Abloh exhibit also came with a heavy dose of merch that Abloh developed for the museum’s shop, which for some generated more interest than the exhibit itself and helped pad MCA’s bottom line. “The line between commerce and art has always been thin,” says Grynsztejn. Perhaps. But what about the line between art and entertainment?“Museums used to describe their missions as shepherding and maintaining cultural heritage,” says Degen. “And now most museums define their mission as appealing to the public.” Something to think about when you stand in line to see Taylor Swift’s costumes at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.Nike: Form Follows Function is at the Vitra Design Museum from September 21 to May 4 2025, and then travellingSign up for Fashion Matters, your weekly newsletter with the latest stories in style. 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