Fashion’s Missing Masses: The representation of marginalized populations in collections and exhibitions of dress [Hardback]

Fashion’s Missing Masses - Edited by Kenna Libes

Fashion’s Missing Masses: The representation of marginalized populations in collections and exhibitions of dress

Kenna Libes (Ed.)

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With fashion exhibitions featured in more museums than ever before, and the practice of curatorship and textile conservation ever more professionalized, this book provides a timely overview of the most pressing issues regarding diversity in the display of dress. The authors, all highly regarded in the field, share cutting-edge examples of successes and failures in the museal representation of real bodies, real people, and real vestimentary practices. This volume is destined to become indispensable to scholars of fashion curation worldwide.

Dr. Julia Petrov
Curator, Daily Life and Leisure
Royal Alberta Museum
Edmonton, Canada
author of "Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress"

Featuring contributions from leading scholars and curators, the book challenges traditional fashion narratives and advocates for a more inclusive approach to the display and curation of dress. This essential work pushes the boundaries of fashion museology, offering new perspectives on diversity, equity, and the power of bringing the most marginalized to the center.

Jonathan Michael Square

In this timely and important volume, Libes and her contributors remind us that fashion cannot be divorced from the physically and culturally diverse bodies that wear it. This collection of essays highlights the absence of diversity in many fashion museum exhibitions and calls for new approaches to ensuring representation in future collecting practices and exhibitions. It offers both practical lessons and thoughtful advice for inclusivity and is a must-read for fashion and museum scholars and professionals alike.

Dr Sarah A. Bendall
Gender and Women's History Research Centre
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Australian Catholic University

'Fashion’s Missing Masses' fills a gap in literature on museums and fashion collections and focuses on the display of clothing and fashion that has historically been left out of the canon. The fifteen essays in this volume span topics on Indigenous and traditional dress; disabled and fat bodies; and queer and ethnic identities. Their authors study the ways that dress and textiles have been collected, displayed, and often ignored across a century and a half of museum exhibitions.
Representation and inclusion in fashion museums is a new and rapidly evolving area of research in the reexamination of dress history. These chapters provide unique information and perspectives on curation, collections management, conservation, and research, which will be valuable to a wide group of audiences working, teaching, and learning in and about museums.
This volume touches on practical concerns of exhibition, including mannequin availability and difficulties of mounting dress, as well as broader questions of scholarship and activism that will be key for educators and researchers who wish to stay abreast of developments in this field. Diversity in fashion is a hot topic, and understanding the line between tokenization and representation in spaces of institutional authority is crucial to learning how we can better serve our diverse populations in the teaching of history.

Kenna Libes is a PhD candidate in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. She has worked in museums and nonprofits in collections management, textile conservation, and curation, and has Master's degrees in fashion history and museum studies from Brown University and the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology.
Her current areas of research include the dress cultures of marginalized populations in the fashion history canon with a focus on the historical intersections of body size and dress. She also studies historiography and the composition of collections and exhibitions to understand the production of the past and its influence on the present. She has published in the journals 'Dress and Fashion' and 'Style & Popular Culture' and contributed to exhibitions internationally.

Diversity, inclusion, mannequins, body ideals, disability, cultural identity, textile history, fashion, conservation, curation, exhibitions, colonialism, museums