This book is available as open access through the Knowledge Unlatched programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. "A remarkable resource for the field of fashion studies suitable for both newcomers ... {and] seasoned practitioners." - Fashion Historia "A precious source in the study of the subject ... inspiring." - The Journal of Dress History The last decade has seen the growing popularity and visibility of fashion as a cultural product, including its growing presence in museum exhibitions. This book explores the history of fashion displays, highlighting the continuity of past and present curatorial practices. Comparing and contrasting exhibitions from different museums and decades-from the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 to the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, and beyond-it makes connections between museum fashion and the wider fashion industry. By critically analyzing trends in fashion exhibition practice over the 20th and early 21st centuries, Julia Petrov defines and describes the varied representations of historical fashion within British and North American museum exhibitions. Rooted in extensive archival research on exhibitions by global leaders in the field-from the Victoria and Albert and the Bath Fashion Museum to the Brooklyn and the Royal Ontario Museums-the work reveals how fashion exhibitions have been shaped by the values and anxieties associated with fashion more generally. Supplemented by parallel critical approaches, including museological theory, historiography, body theory, material culture, and visual studies, Fashion, History, Museums demonstrates that in an increasingly corporate and mass-mediated world, fashion exhibitions must be analysed in a comparative and global context. Richly illustrated with 70 images, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion history and museology, as well as curators, conservators, and exhibition designers.

Why is fashion "in fashion" in museums today? This timely volume brings together expert scholars and curators to examine the reasons behind fashion's popularity in the twenty-first century museum and the impact this has had on wider museum practice. Chapters explore the role of fashion in the museum across a range of international case studies including the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Fashion Museum at Bath, ModeMuseum in Antwerp and many more. Contributions look at topics such as how fashion has made museums accessible to diverse audiences and how curators present broader themes and issues such as gender, class and technology innovatively through exhibiting fashion. Drawing on approaches from dress history, fashion studies, museum studies and curatorship, this engaging book will be key reading for students and scholars across a range of disciplines.

The Ebony Fashion Fair began in 1958, and over the next 50 years the traveling fashion show blossomed into an American institution that raised millions for charity and helped Johnson Publishing Company reach audiences. Show organizers overcame racial prejudice to bring the pinnacle of Europe's premier fashion to communities that were eager to see, in real time and space, a new vision of black America that was the hallmark of Ebony and Jet magazines. Eunice Johnson took over as producer and director in 1963, and under her direction, the traveling show took on new heights as she expanded her cachet and power within fashion circles. Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair recreates the experience of the Ebony Fashion Fair through the story of Mrs. Johnson and more than 60 garments from icons of the fashion industry such as Yves St. Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, Christian Lacroix, and Patrick Kelly among others.

This book presents one hundred of the finest textiles and fashion arts produced by weavers, embroiderers, and designers around the globe. Twenty-nine short essays introduce some of the major techniques and genres that textile makers have invented over the past twenty-five hundred years of human history.--[book cover].

Published in conjunction with an exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 5-Aug. 15, 2010, and at the Brooklyn Museum, May 7-Aug. 1, 2010.

This volume explores the conservation and presentation of dress in museums and beyond as a complex, collaborative process. Recognizing this process as a dynamic interaction of investigation, interpretation, intervention, re-creation, and display, Refashioning and Redress: Conserving and Displaying Dress examines the ways in which these seemingly static exhibitions of “costume” or “fashion” are actively engaged in cultural production. The seventeen case studies included here reflect a broad range of practice and are presented by conservators, curators, makers, and researchers from around the world, exposing changing approaches and actions at different times and in different places. Ranging from the practical to the conceptual, these contributions demonstrate the material, social, and philosophical interactions inherent in the conservation and display of dress and draw upon diverse disciplines ranging from dress history to social history, material cultural studies to fashion studies, and conservation to museology. Case studies include fashion as spectacle in the museum, dress as political and personal memorialization, and theatrical dress, as well as dress from living indigenous cultures, dress in fragments, and dress online.

Nineties fashion--from grunge, to Clueless's Alaïa, to Margiela's new couture--is an essential reference point for contemporary style. This book, created in tandem with an exhibition at The Museum at FIT, documents the changing culture, attitudes, and creatives that ushered in our visual age. Minimalism. Deconstruction. The rejuvenation of established houses. These are just a few of the concepts that have come to define 1990s fashion. Others include an increased concern with environmentalism, developing technologies and the beginning of the fashion internet, freewheeling historical references, and a predilection for lifting significant styles from other cultures (the issues raised by this 'borrowing' are reviewed through a contemporary lens). In the twenty years since the decade ended, the fashion world has experienced several nineties revivals. Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the 90s focuses specifically on designers who challenged the expected appearance or workings of high fashion, and who played an important role in laying the foundation for fashion of the twenty-first century, including: Tom Ford, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Martin Margiela, Stella McCartney, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, and Viktor & Rolf. Additional chapters address changes to fashion editorials and campaigns (under talents like Steven Meisel, Corinne Day, Inez & Vinoodh, Mark Borthwick, and Nan Goldin), a new theatricality to runway presentations, and the emergence of fashion theory as a field.