FIDM Museum Blog

Research resources

One of the best aspects of working in a museum is the constant discoveries we make about our objects. In addition to preserving and protecting the objects in our care, we also spend a lot of time researching objects in our collection. Each object embodies a specific narrative, and it's our job to document and relate this story. One of our goals in starting this blog was to make these narratives widely available. We also share our research through regular exhibitions in our gallery, presentations at academic and community venues, and through our interactions with the faculty and students of FIDM.

When we're researching objects, we utilize a variety of resources. In our post today, we're going to reveal some of our sources! Readers, we'd also love to hear from you. Where do you turn when you are trying to find out more about a particular garment or designer?

Moving a museum collection

Heather Vaughan, of the dress studies blog Worn Through, interviewed our very own Christina Johnson about the process of moving our collection into compact storage. This was a HUGE project that took place over several months in 2008. You can read Christina's account of the move and see before/after photos of our storage facilities here.

Floating forms

A well-designed and well-installed museum exhibit appears effortless, as if the objects on display were always meant to be viewed in that exact context. Despite this apparent ease, museum exhibitions require a tremendous amount of long-range planning. Christina Johnson and Kevin Jones, co-curators of High Style: Betsy Bloomingdale and the Haute Couture spent three years planning the exhibition. An important aspect of their planning was deciding how to best display the garments. As you've seen from the images we post on this blog, the FIDM Museum has an extensive collection of dress forms and mannequins. Christina and Kevin decided, however, that Betsy Bloomingdale's haute couture garments would be best displayed on floating forms. Unlike mannequins or dress forms, floating forms do not extend beyond the boundaries of the garment. This allows you to focus entirely on the garment, without the distraction of legs, arms or facial characteristics.

As you might imagine, creating floating forms is a complicated process. All of the floating forms used to display the garments in High Style were created by Carolyn Jamerson, FIDM Museum Study Collection Manager. Carolyn worked on the floating forms for almost a year! She recently gave a presentation about the process and we're going to feature a brief overview today.