FIDM Museum Blog

Thanks for a great year!

One year ago this month, we started the FIDM Museum blog as a way to share our objects with a wider audience. It has been a great experience, bringing us in closer contact with fashion history aficionados around the world. Thanks to all of YOU for reading, commenting and sharing our posts with your friends and colleagues. Keep reading, as we're working on a number of fantastic posts. We've also started a Facebook page. Don't forget to join us there, as we regularly post additional content and links.

Below are links to a few favorite posts from the past year. Leave us a comment if we've missed one of your favorites! Also, let us know if there are topics you'd like us to cover on the blog.

This post on Fashion & Feathers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries resonates with the current interest in sustainable fashion. And this post on counterfeit Chanel perfume provides historical perspective in the current debate about whether fashion designs can or should have copyright protection.

Our post on Fancy Dress was a big hit! We'd love to know if it inspired any Halloween costumes.

All of our posts involve historical research. Finding an image of this exact Tina Leser skirt was very rewarding.

Photographs provide an additional source for researching fashion history. This 2-part post analyzes several photographs from our collection.

Fabulous 1970s platform boots!

Our post about the 1920s silhouette inspired a great discussion in the comments section, as did this post on display options for garments.

Traveling in High Style

Have you ever wondered how a complete exhibition gets from one museum to another? In this post, FIDM Museum Registrar Meghan Grossman Hansen fills you in on the process.

This month, the FIDM Museum’s award-winning exhibition High Style: Betsy Bloomingdale and the Haute Couture is hitting the road. A slightly modified version of the exhibition will be installed at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA from August 14, 2010-January 2, 2011. If you missed the exhibition in Los Angeles, this is your chance to learn about a style icon and the haute couture process.

As the FIDM Museum Registrar, I want to fill you in on the behind-the-scenes activities of traveling an exhibition. The shipping has to be planned in great detail, from the number of objects, the size of the crates, to the size of the truck. In our case, the total volume does not warrant an exclusive truck, so we are fortunate to tag along with other artworks on an art-transportation shuttle from Los Angeles to the east coast. (Yes, there are trucks filled entirely with art objects criss-crossing the country!) Next, a packing list is planned with a number of considerations in mind: dimensions, weight, condition, and object accessibility (for instance, the order in which objects will be installed may be an important factor in where they are packed).

Assistant Registrar Dani Killam creates the packing list.

Dress form, mannequin or floating form?

Regular readers of this blog have probably noticed the variety of forms we use to display objects from the FIDM Museum collection. When we photograph an object for in-house documentary purposes, it's usually dressed on a headless dress form or mannequin. For exhibition and/or publication, we go all out, pairing garments with contemporaneous accessories (shoes, hat, jewelry, etc.) in an effort to present the garment as it might have been seen in its own era. The paper wigs worn by some of our mannequins are another aspect of this contextualization. More recently, we've used floating forms to display garments during exhibitions. The decision regarding which type of display to utilize is the result of a complicated equation involving time, resources, space, staff, garment condition and intended usage of the final image or dressed mannequin.

Interview with Coraline costume designer Deborah Cook

Hosting the annual Art of Motion Picture Costume Design exhibition allows us to get an up-close look at costumes from recent films. This year, the exhibition featured a group of intriguing small visitors--puppets from the stop-motion animation film Coraline (2009). Like costumes created for humans, the Coraline puppets wear carefully conceived ensembles constructed from fabric and thread. But how does the design process differ when you're working with puppets? To better understand the process of designing costumes for animated films, we talked with Deborah Cook, costume designer for Coraline. Deborah has extensive experience working on costume design for animation, including the Corpse Bride (2005), The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and the UK television series The Koala Brothers. Deborah currently works as a costume designer in pre-production for Laika, the makers of Coraline. The information she provided via email interview enhanced our enjoyment and understanding of Coraline and made us look forward to her next project. Thank you Deborah, for taking the time to talk with us!

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Please describe your involvement with the making of Coraline?

I was involved in the making of Coraline as the head of costume design and fabrication, seeing costumes through from their conception through colour and fabric choices, pattern cutting, animation testing and the final fitting.

Coraline puppets on exhibition at the FIDM Museum & Galleries

FIDM Museum Shows Off at Debut

Our post today was written by Meghan Grossman Hansen, FIDM Museum Registrar.

Last month the FIDM Museum participated in the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising’s annual Debut fashion show—but calm your fears, there were no models sauntering down the runway in fragile historic clothes. High Style: Betsy Bloomingdale and the Haute Couture was the inspiration for an elegant display of FIDM Museum Study Collection garments donated by Mrs. Bloomingdale. This selection of colorful dresses included evening, cocktail, and day dresses worn by the style icon to notable events. Like most of her haute couture pieces donated to the FIDM Museum, many of the garments on display were designed by Marc Bohan for Christian Dior.

The completed FIDM Museum display at Debut.

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.