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

'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.

List of figures
List of tables
Author bios
List of acronyms
Foreword
Sarah Scaturro
Cleveland Museum of Art
Introduction: Fashion’s Missing Masses
Kenna Libes
Bard Graduate Center

Section I: Bringing the body back
1. Changing our practices: Diversifying dress display
Camille Myers Breeze
Museum Textile Services
Rebecca Helgeson
Museum Textile Services
2. Reflecting diversity: Transforming mannequins to represent humanity’s true colors in museum fashion exhibitions
Marcy L. Koontz
The University of Alabama
Shirley P. Foster
The University of Alabama
3. Missing mass: Fat fashion in museum collections
Kenna Libes
Bard Graduate Center
4. Hollow honesty: Mannequins in the museum space
Wonne Scrayen
prActiZe5. (Re)Dressing American fashion: A curatorial discussion about “Exhibition Worthiness” and the “Museological Body”
Emma McClendon
Bard Graduate Center, New York
Lauren Downing Peters
Columbia College Chicago
6. Absence, presence, and absence as presence: Disability in the exhibition of dress
Megan Strickfaden
University of Alberta

Section II: Cultural representation and identity
7. The Thobe as biblical fantasy: The legacy of Orientalism in Palestinian dress collections
Flannery Surette
Okanagan College
Wafa Ghnaim
The Tatreez Institute
8. Collecting the colony: Philippine dress and textiles in U.S. museums
Angela Hermano Crenshaw
Bard Graduate Center in New York City
9. Representing indigenous fashion in Latin American museums
Laura Beltrán-Rubio
The Fashion and Race Database
10. Orienting queerness: Strategies in curating queer fashion
Milana Stewart
Independent researcher

Section III: What can one exhibit do?
11. Honoring Native American designers in the Met’s In America exhibition series
Echo Malleo
Kent Historical Society12. Unraveling invisibilities: The “Esther” dress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art
Tolulope Omoyele
University of the Arts, London
13. Un-Fashioning Peruvian stereotypes: Exploring hidden multifaceted identities in fashion exhibitions
Sandra Mathey García-Rada
Istituto Marangoni Paris
14. “The Traces of Use”: The potentiality of visibly worn dress in Appearances Can Be Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo
Michelle McVicker
Antonio Ratti Textile Study and Storage Center
15. The Body Beautiful: [Ad]dressing representation in fashion at National Museums Scotland
Georgina Ripley
National Museums Scotland

Index

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