Denim: Fashion's Frontier

摘要

Over twenty years ago fashion historian and museum director Valerie Steele famously labelled fashion the 'F-word', and drew attention to a field many academics spurned for its assumed anti-intellectual and frivolous connotations. Likewise, historians of the American West, notably Patricia Nelson Limerick, articulated how in American history the frontier also came to be known as the 'F-word', and, as a term, was often repeated without proper acknowledgement of the brutal history of Western expansion. The title of the Museum at FIT'S exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Denim: Fashion's Frontier, unites the two loaded terms and their complicated histories. Curator Emma McClendon's exhibition includes over seventy denim garments spanning 175 years from the museum's permanent collection, and the illustrated catalogue and essay explores the textile's multivalent and shifting connections to fashionability and North America's past, both real and imagined.