No abstract

Professional women engage with individual and social issues of ageing, appearance and identity throughout their lives. The challenges professional women have faced since the 1970s have changed as to how they view themselves in new and varied contemporary careers and their perceptions of how others view them. Eleven career women in the Twin Cities, MN, were interviewed about how they managed their appearances throughout their careers. Responses were organized into groups built around the women’s early career narratives – 20s–30s, mid-career narratives – 40s–60s, late and post-career narratives – 70s–90s. We found that these women consciously thought about the meaning and impact of work and their work wardrobe as they passed through each career stage, especially in terms of impression and identity management. We learned through the stories they told how the art, practice and meaning around dressing for work changed over time – with both continuity and change in their expressed outcomes.

An item of headwear, the pussy hat, made news in 2017 when women gathered through social media and local events to create the iconic hat. The hat became a part of the Women’s March that took place in January in Washington DC as well as in cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota. This research involves participant observation of the hat-making process and the hat wearing during marches in Washington DC and Minnesota. Findings revealed the effectiveness of the pussy hat in calling attention to the events that took place prior to and during the marches in January 2017. However, examination of the pussy hat included many variations in form, i.e. colour, texture and shape and the meaning represented some but not all voices of the march.

During summer 2019, Dior to Disco: Fashion During the Era of Second Wave Feminism was on display at the Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The exhibition explored women’s shifting identities, starting with the post-Second World War years through the mid-1970s. Curatorially, we sought out elements and narratives that went beyond popularized tropes of bra burning and disillusionment of upper middle-class white housewives. This article delves into the curatorial process with particular attention to the tension between material objects and the speculative tendencies of curation. Feminism and fashion are highly complex topics, which led to curatorial challenges and opportunities with respect to our exhibition goals, ongoing research and engagement with feminist theory. Additionally, we were working within the scope of the Goldstein Museum of Design’s collection and resources, with the goal of avoiding reductive narratives of the past.

Fashion curation is an integral form of public scholarship within our field and yet has historically been overlooked as such. Unlike creative design scholarship, we have not collectively developed nor agreed upon methods for peer review. As a result, curatorial work is often not considered in tenure-review processes, despite fashion exhibitions meeting the core principles of disseminating scholarship beyond the academy. A recent article in the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, "Fashion Exhibitions as Scholarship," challenged members of our field to implement peer review of fashion curation as a way to encourage and elevate this important form of scholarship (Green, et al., 2019). In this experimental salon session, we built upon Green et al.'s (2019) work by using the innovative salon session format as a juried venue for presenting fashion exhibitions rooted in rigor and research. Five fashion exhibitions were presented and discussed during the session.