This article argues that fashion curation in Latin America must be redesigned in order to disseminate the complex histories of fashion in the region, which are inherently tinted with forms of syste...

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Ahead of Print, 2024)

The exhibition Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse (2022) reexamined the British fashion designer’s oeuvre by contextualizing select Alexander McQueen designs within art history. Juxtaposing ...

The Textile Museum of Canada (the Textile Museum) is pursuing institutional change with a goal to meaningfully address and redress absences in its permanent collection of over 15,000 textiles. To s...

North American dress and textile museums have long been rooted in colonial ideals due to the long-standing perpetuation of Eurocentrism as superior to all other ways of knowing. The fashion and tex...

For too long, museums have used thin, white mannequins as the standard for body surrogates in dress and textile exhibitions. This article explores some of the issues surrounding this practice and t...

Focusing on museums, this article illustrates how textile crafts can become a source for scholarly inquiry and can enhance more inclusive practices at museums. The empirical data comprises four mus...

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 2, 2024)

Fatness may be finding representation on the catwalk, but it has few friends in the museum. This article uses a case study of the Costume Institute alongside interviews with a variety of museum pro...

The conservation field has recently experienced a significant paradigm shift called “peoples-based” conservation, which centers collaboration with communities for whom cultural heritage has meaning...

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

The Iroquois Indian Groups, a series of six life-size dioramas intended to represent different aspects of Hodinǫhsǫ́:nih (Haudenosaunee, formerly referred to as Iroquois in previous literature) lif...

Unlike contemporary fashion models who benefit from powerful tools of self-branding and self-promotion such as the Internet and social media, Soviet mannequins in the 1960s and 1970s operated withi...

The Fortuny Delphos dress from the first half of the twentieth century is famous not only for its unique pleated drape but also for the mystery of the technique used to make it. This article detail...

Luis Estévez, a prominent fashion designer whose work spanned from the 1950s to the 1990s, made an enduring impact on the industry. His clientele included notable public figures like former First L...

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

The 2023 CSA Scholars’ Roundtable focused on the role of collaboration within teaching, learning, costume design, and museum practice. The scholars reflected on the challenges, successes, opportuni...

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 50, No. 1, 2024)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

The process of “knocking off” the work of others has been an integral practice of the United States ready-to-wear industry since the 1890s. In the 1930s, the Fashion Originators Guild of America (FOGA) created an internal system to protect its members’ design work, but in 1941 this system was declared in restraint of trade, and the next best protection option laid in the US design patent system. This

Seventeenth-century knitted-silk waistcoats have mystified dress historians for years since little is known about how these intricately patterned knitted garments were worn or used. This paper documents the examination and research of a seventeenth-century woman’s knitted-silk waistcoat from the Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums, Scotland. This waistcoat, acquired by the museum in 1937, is knit in

This visual essay presents drawings related to a research project that sought to develop a visual language that communicates the precarity of clothing items that have emerged from alpine glaciers in Europe. These artworks achieve a poetic effect that recalls the tensions and challenges of preserving these artifacts of glacial archaeology. This essay focuses on selected drawings of footwear from the

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

When Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt (1845–1934) appeared in the Electric Light Dress, commissioned from the House of Worth for her family’s legendary 1883 fancy-dress ball, she not only displayed her wealth but also signaled her modernity. While members of more established families came in historical costumes that confirmed their status by drawing comparisons with European aristocracy, Vanderbilt, whose

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

The 2022 CSA Scholars’ Roundtable considered the teaching of fashion history in an era of globalization, increased awareness of social justice, and amplified understanding of the effects of colonization. This report documents the authors’ panel presentation and summarizes the audience’s comments and discussion.

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Phelps Associates, a business operated by the husband-and-wife design team of William Drown Phelps (1890–1962) and Elizabeth Heintges Phelps (1909–87) from 1940 until 1969, was critically acclaimed for creating accessories and sportswear that embodied American ideals from patriotism to practicality. The Phelpses’ accessories designs celebrated handcraft traditions in the making of leather goods, while

Activists often have used dress to express solidarity with Black resistance movements such as the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In our research, we built upon our own and previous scholars’ work by analyzing the intersections of activism, identity, and dress in a specific space, place, and context: twenty-first-century Black women college students during the Black Lives Matter movement

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 49, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 48, No. 2, 2022)

This article is concerned with identification and interpretation of the costumes featured in two portraits of Polish aristocratic women by Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Katarzyna Potocka née Branicka in Oriental Costume, 1854 (National Museum in Warsaw) and Wieńczysława Barczewska, Madame de Jurjewicz, 1860 (Museum of Fine Arts in Boston). The former outfit, brought by the wearer from her journey to the

In the mid-1920s, American clothing manufacturers introduced a new size range they called the “new half sizes.” It was in response to emerging biometric data showing that women were not as tall as the standard sizes designers had assumed. In addition, the new sizes added extra room at the waist and hip, intended to accommodate those who had abandoned corsets. Initially, manufacturers claimed that this

In this essay, I argue that clothing played an important role in the establishment and maintenance of the postwar American project of independence and “normalcy.” Using previously unpublished sources, I trace the history of Functional Fashions, a clothing line of accessible garments for disabled persons in the United States that existed from 1958 to 1976. Designer Helen Cookman created the line as

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 48, No. 2, 2022)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 48, No. 2, 2022)

Published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America (Vol. 48, No. 2, 2022)