Few people think of New England as a destination for fashion exhibits. While it may be true that no major city in this region is host to an internationally known Fashion Week, many of our gateway cities were once major textile manufacturing hubs during the Industrial Revolution. From the always delightful American Textile History Museum in Lowell to the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, New England museums have remained committed to studying, collecting and displaying objects and textiles from the region’s textile past.
On April 6, the American Textile History Museum opens Behind the Veil: Brides and their Dresses, an exhibition that explores 150 years of wedding dresses and the cultural values that surround it, as told through the stories of generations of women and their bridal garments.
Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion, the latest fashion exhibition at the RISD Museum of Art set to open in April, celebrates two centuries of the dandy and is accompanied a fully illustrated catalogue which I’ll be sure to purchase.
While not every object in these two samurai exhibitions is made of textiles or falls under the "fashion" category, Lethal Beauty: Samurai Weapons and Armor at the Currier Museum of Art which opened on February 2 and Samurai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts set to open on April 14 should be worth checking out.
Later this Fall the Peabody Essex Museum will open Future Beauty: Avant-Garde Japanese Fashion, an exhibition that explores the avant-garde in Japanese fashion and features designs by Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto among others.
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- Detail of group of shirts worn by Francis J. Carolan, ca. 1900. T. Hodgkinson, shirtmaker, London. Monogrammed cotton plain weave, cotton novelty weave, and silk novelty weave. Anonymous gift. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
Thumbnail image: "The Original Suit" belonging to Guy Hills, ca. 2002. Courtesy of the Dashing Tweeds Archive. From Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion opening at the Museum of Art-Rhode Island School of Design in April 2013.
