Publications
Peer-Reviewed
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 the associated dress materials have been collected, displayed, and passed over across a century and a half of museum exhibitions.
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The reexamination of dress history is an emerging topic of interest in the field, and while there have been recent conferences and forthcoming journal issues on the topic, there are no books that specifically and solely deal with representation in fashion museums. This is a new and rapidly evolving area of research, and these chapters provides unique information and perspectives valuable to a wide group of audiences. The authors are curators, conservators, and scholars who study the dress of marginalized populations and believe strongly in diversifying the bodies and cultures included in exhibitions.
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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.
'All the ba-zooms go': Industry ideals and the aesthetics of size in dress collections
In Dress
Special issue: Reframing Fashion in the Museum
Volume 50, Issue ? (2024) - doi/full/10.1080/03612112.2024.2360815 (paywall)
Fatness may be finding representation on the catwalk, but it has few friends in the museum. This article uses a case study of the Costume Institute alongside interviews with a variety of museum professionals and dealers of historic clothing to discuss the culture of acquisition and exhibition that tends to exclude larger garments from display. This bias consists of a set of subjective aesthetic preferences that drives curators and collectors to focus their efforts on garments designed for or worn by people with ideal bodies and is reinforced by the well-intentioned effort to have fashion recognized as a higher decorative art form rather than a practical craft. The mechanisms by which collections develop and exhibitions are created often reinforce the exclusion of larger sizes, making change a complex endeavor, but the active renegotiation of these norms is already in progress.
The Dress and Commercial Image of the American "Fat Lady", 1850-1920
In Fashion, Style & Popular Culture
Volume 11, Issue 2 (2024) - https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00245_1 (paywall)
In this article, I analyse the genre of ‘Fat Lady’ photographs popular between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. I assert that there is an archetypal appearance that developed in the 1860s and was standardized by the 1880s, consisting of certain dress, grooming and posing practices that emphasized their subjects’ sizes and presumed social status. Fatness was a performance that these women were employed to embody – one that straddled the lines between corporeal deviance and normality.
Freak shows reveal cultural anxieties about bodies. The way Fat Lady performers were costumed reflected concerns about fatness taking up too much space and visibility as well as fatness rendering people immature and androgynous, thereby challenging established sex-role differences; it also revealed the potential erotic allure of extreme body size. Over a century of popularity, Fat Lady performers came to rely on costumes inspired by evening dress, childrenswear and then lingerie, all of which grew scantier as time progressed. Existing cartes de visite, cabinet cards, posters, advertisements, reports from journalists and side show insiders, and rare interviews with the performers themselves provide material for close analysis.
Loom widths and fabric consumption:
Exploring hem circumference in nineteenth century women’s dress through a period cutting guide and extant garments
In the Journal of Textile Engineering & Fashion Technology
Volume 10, Issue 3 (2024) - 10.15406/jteft.2024.10.00379 (open access)
This paper presents a case study comparing a handful of extant early nineteenth-century American dresses to advice from periodicals and dressmaking manuals in order to understand whether similar advice might have been taken in service of making these pieces of clothing. While many historians logically assume that wealthier women would have worn dresses that demonstrated conspicuous consumption via sheer yardage and that simpler work clothing would be narrower and less concerned with fashionable excess, the dresses in this survey prove otherwise, demonstrating that women and their dressmakers were designing clothing in response to multiple factors rather than wealth or poverty alone.
Fat by the Wayside: Size Exclusion in Exhibitions and Collections of Dress
SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology / Qualifying Paper, February 2022
In recent years there has been increased interest in populations historically underrepresented in museum collections, including those of diverse color, gender, and class. This paper seeks to add size – specifically fatness – to that list, and advocates for museums to uncover and exhibit their larger pieces of women’s dress. It discusses the interconnection of the fashion industry with the museum to understand the forces that maintain an anti-fat bias in acquisitions and exhibition. It emphasizes the need for change in the museum, not just on the catwalk. It asks museum staff and scholars to acknowledge that fat people existed in history and deserve to be represented through their fashionable dress. It seeks out existing collections of larger clothing and asks why and how they were collected, and it searches for solutions to the difficulties of finding and displaying such garments.
This paper relies upon news articles, historical sources, theses and dissertations, and lastly, a series of interviews with museum, auctions, and sales staff who work with historic and contemporary collections of dress across the US.
“Glory in a Host of Entomological Spoils:” Beetle-Wing Embroidery and the Exhibition of India in Anglo-American Dress, 1780-1903
In Dress
The Journal of the Costume Society of America
Volume 47, Issue 1 (January 2021)
Published online December 4th, 2020
Iridescent, color-shifting beetle wing casings have been embroidered onto dress around the world for centuries. This paper explores a variation of the practice from its roots in Mughal-era India through its translocation and transformation by English dressmakers during the East India Company and colonial eras. This paper considers the first recorded English women to wear such garments, how and where they were made, and the intersections of fashion, exhibition, and naturalism. By examining extant textiles made for use in both countries, this paper asserts that the English-speaking world, influenced by its colonial sensibilities, appropriated and implemented a new style of beetle-wing embroidery.
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Accessible through a paywall here.
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An excerpt from this paper was used as the provocation text for the 2021 seminar "Troubling Epistemics and Postcolonialism" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Essays in Exhibition Catalogs
Glossary of lace
In Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilemuseum St. Gallen
Bard Graduate Center
Yale University Press, 2022.
The Plus Pattern Project: A foray into 1920s Stoutwear
In The Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties
The Museum at FIT & FIT Graduate Studies
March 2021- present
This essay describes the process and experience of creating a set of free and publicly-available patterns taken from antique plus-size 1920s dresses, as well as some research and context for each original object.
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The catalog received a limited print run and will be free for download here in the future.
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The patterns, along with tester makes and several videos, are available through the exhibition website here.
Online Publications
Plus-sized patternmaking as historic dress scholarship
For Serena Dyer & Sarah Bendall's Recreative Reflections project
Part of the Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library
Fall 2025
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A brief discussion of the motivations and rewards of patterning larger-sized historic garments for my dissertation.
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'Shaped by the Loom' at Bard Graduate Center
For Handwoven
May/June 2023 issue
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If you have ever wanted to plunge headfirst into the world of Diné (Navajo) weaving, Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery is the place to do it. The exhibit, which opened on February 17, 2023, ushers the visitor into a colorful world of Native American textile art.
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INÈS GÂCHES-SARRAUTE AND THE STRAIGHT-FRONT CORSET
For the Fashion History Timeline
February 5, 2023
Often anachronistically called the ‘S-bend,’ the dramatic straight-front corset of the early 1900s was invented by a doctor for health purposes and quickly swept up into the tides of fashion.
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Threads of Power: 500 Years of Lace from the renowned collection of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen
Beetle-Wing Embroidery in Nineteenth-Century Fashion
For the Fashion History Timeline
July 28, 2021
Beetle-wing (or elytra) embroidery rose to fame in eighteenth-century India and was appropriated by English visitors for use during the period in which the East India Company (1757-1858) and then the British military (1858-1947) occupied the country. Victorian gentlewomen in England, America, and Australia attended balls with thousands of elytra glittering like emeralds on their light cotton dresses, making statements about their wealth, power, and worldliness.
This form of embroidered decoration is inextricably linked to colonialism and it has been an item of fantasy and exoticism for more than two hundred years. But how could high-society women bear to wear…bugs?
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Essays on Black and Indigenous Sitters of Color
For the Fashion History Timeline
through the Fashion Institute of Technology, ed. Justine De Young, via a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant
2020
Ten essays interpreting the fashion and textiles of Black and Indigenous people of color in paintings from western art history, 1500-1800.
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1583/5 - Annibale Carracci, Portrait of a Woman Holding a Clock
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1770s - Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom
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Essay also cited here by the Art Gallery of Ontario​
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1770-96 - Agostino Brunias, Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape
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1778 - David Martin, Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray
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1785 - Marie-Victoire Lemoine, Portrait of a Youth in an Embroidered Vest
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Conservation Articles
For Museum Textile Services
2018-19
Articles of varying length describing the historical context and conservation treatment of current projects; eventually republished in the 2019 & 2021 annual magazines.
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Dating before the Wedding: The Fairbanks Dress (forthcoming upon completion of the project)
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