Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Curatorial Reflections, Jun 2022

During summer 2019, Dior to Disco: Fashion During the Era of Second Wave Feminism was on display at the Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The exhibition explored women’s shifting identities, starting with the post-Second World War years through the mid-1970s. Curatorially, we sought out elements and narratives that went beyond popularized tropes of bra burning and disillusionment of upper middle-class white housewives. This article delves into the curatorial process with particular attention to the tension between material objects and the speculative tendencies of curation. Feminism and fashion are highly complex topics, which led to curatorial challenges and opportunities with respect to our exhibition goals, ongoing research and engagement with feminist theory. Additionally, we were working within the scope of the Goldstein Museum of Design’s collection and resources, with the goal of avoiding reductive narratives of the past.

The exhibition One American Family: A Tale of North and South was the culmination of a multi-year project that began with a graduate student’s examination of three quilt tops that once belonged to a family that had donated over 500 objects to the University of Rhode Island’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection. This family, which had deep roots in New England, became intertwined through marriage with a family from Charleston, South Carolina. The student, Rachel May, a doctoral candidate in English, became so enamoured of the quilt tops, two related swatch books and the story behind the artefacts that she continued her research for several years, finally publishing a book in 2018 titled An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery. The book is based on documentary research, but imagines the lives of the quiltmaker, her family and the enslaved people she came to own during the antebellum period. To commemorate the publication of the book, the university sponsored an exhibition and several educational events. A graduate-level class ‘Exhibition and storage of historic textiles’ tackled the problem of how to separate the documentary evidence from the book’s fictionalized narrative, and to visualize that evidence using the artefacts in the Historic Textile and Costume Collection.

The purpose of the exhibit Peruvian Textile Traditions: A Living Heritage was to showcase Peruvian dress and textile arts by conveying their significance and associated meanings to two ethnic groups in Peru: the Quechua people from the Andes Mountains and the Shipibo-Conibo from the Amazon rainforest. Textiles and dress have played uniquely important political, social and religious roles over thousands of years and continue to communicate and produce meanings through fibre, cloth and garments. The exhibit featured nineteen handmade textiles and six Peruvian ethnic dress ensembles, organized into three main vignettes: dresses, Andean and Shipibo-Conibo textiles. While exploring the exhibit’s content and cultural legacy, this article also reflects on the importance of showcasing diverse cultural heritage as a way to build more inclusive universities, communities and museum spaces.

Flights of Fancy: Fashion and Function in Circus Performance is a digital exhibition of circus costumes that examines the complexities, histories and representations of circus through representations of material artefacts, ephemera, print media, photographs and other primary sources. Through curated features of the exhibit, we investigate circus costumes’ sociocultural influence on fashion through aesthetics and functional design. The purpose of this article is to explore how digital fashion exhibitions may be developed to create educational resources and how their curation process may be interpreted through theory. To do this, we examine the curation of Flights of Fancy through an exploration of its use of symbolism as an organizational device. We use multiple theoretical lenses, including Erving Goffman’s concepts of the front and back stage presentations of self, along with Anneke Smelik and Susan Kaiser’s updated view that interprets Goffman in the digital/social media sphere, Paul O’Neill’s composition of exhibitions through background/middle ground/foreground and Susan Kaiser’s time, space and place. Flights of Fancy: Fashion and Function in Circus Performance, digital exhibition (February 2021 – present; Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, Cornell University Library): https://exhibits.library.cornell.edu/flights-of-fancy.

In 2020, we curated and mounted an exhibition at the Iowa State University Textiles and Clothing Museum that centred Black women college students’ fashion. We explored how our participants negotiated their Black and activist identities through dress while on a predominately white campus and surrounding community in the Midwestern United States. In this article, we critically analyse how we, as curators, confronted and rejected white supremacy and were compelled to provide additional labour while curating due to systemic racism. Throughout the curation and installation processes, we challenged numerous forms of oppression, for example: a lack of collected objects representing Black women’s dress practices; assumptions that Black women engage in illegal activities; a dearth of dress forms coordinating with black and brown skin tones. The supplementary work, which included additional time, financial resources, intellectual and emotional labour, is one way that compulsory whiteness is upheld in fashion museums. Curators who engage in social justice initiatives are disadvantaged by ongoing institutional racism, which is prevalent in a plethora of universities in the United States; the focus of this article is predominately white, land-grant institutions. We acknowledge that structural inequities museum curators contend with when claiming space for marginalized identities are prevalent, but can be overcome, despite the hegemony of the silencing and oppression of Black people. We call for a radical shift in fashion museums and curricula.

University fashion and textiles collections add value and opportunities for teaching, research and community outreach. Collections within the United States are housed within private and public, large and small colleges and universities, with foci reflecting the greater institutional and departmental mission, history and geographic setting. Professionals often wear multiple hats within their collection and serve in additional roles in the larger units they represent. This conceptual article aims to present a fashion and textiles collection matrix (FTCM) as a means of self-study, particularly in areas where collection professionals are typically not trained. It is a tool for self-assessment within the domains of organizational structure, resource allocation and outreach and impact. Using the FTCM, faculty, staff and administrators can identify areas within their structure that they are optimal, proficient or under development, in order to celebrate accomplishments and recognize growth opportunities. We present a sample FCTM, highlighting how collection personnel might take the next steps to prioritize goals and create action steps appropriate for their local context.