MANNEQUINS IN THE MUSEUM

Sew What | Enya Barbeau 

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Mannequins are a mainstay of fashion and historic dress exhibitions. Not only can they act as an effective conservational mount for fragile garments, but they also provide visitors with a sense of how clothing items were intended to appear and function on the human body. However, behind the polished public gallery exists a thorny set of practical and intellectual challenges associated with using mannequins in a museum context.

Robe à la française, mannequin à la Met (source). 

A baseline issue is one of sizing and fit. The proportions of commercially available mannequins don’t correspond well with historic clothing, leaving it up to museum professionals to try to retrofit the mounts to better support the garments in their collections. A variety of techniques are used: padding and carving out retail mannequins, as well as fashioning portions of the figure from Fosshape and Ethafoam. These approaches are labour-intensive and require a discerning (and perhaps artistically trained) eye for the human form. Of course, the issue of fit could be eliminated through the use of custom mounts—but based on the financial reality in which most museums operate, it seems almost cruel to present pricey made-to-measure mannequins as a workable solution.

What is this "funding" of which you speak? (source).

Fitting mannequins to the garments is just the tip of the iceberg. In “Exhibiting Gender: Exploring the Dynamic Relationships between Fashion, Gender, and Mannequins in Museum Display,” Chloe Chapin, Denise Nicole Green, and Samuel Neuberg offer a thoughtful analysis of how the use of mannequins in exhibitions is entangled with broader questions of aesthetics and identity. In their survey of North American museum professionals, the authors found that the postures and poses of retail mannequins not only stand out as anachronistic and when displaying dress from eras past, but also reinforce exclusionary gender and beauty archetypes: “In addition to feeling that mannequins did not represent the breadth of gender expression, respondents also were critical for their not representing the diversity of fashioned bodies that exist globally and highlighted other intersecting subject positions like age, ethnicity, and ability as lacking.” The article highlights some of the creative work that people are doing to overcome the dearth of representative mannequins—such as the padding out of a dress form to represent a body that undergone top surgery for the Iowa State University exhibition Queer Fashion & Style: Stories from the Heartland.

Chant "Masahiro Mori" three times and he appears (source).

Another layer of thought revolves around questions of animation and materiality. Clothes are meant to be worn on a living body; although mannequins act as effective stand-in, garments still undergo a process of disembodiment and decontextualization when they sit static on these humanoid forms. Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson outline this phenomenon in the essay “The Body Clothed”: “Dress, the body and the self constitute a totality, and when dress and body are pulled apart, as in the costume museum, we grasp only a fragment, a partial snapshot of dress … Its displays cannot tell us how a garment moved when on the body, what it sounded like when it moved and how it felt to the wearer.” Museum workers try to close this gap in a number of ways. Some displays try to create a sense of embodiment through the use hyper-realistic mannequins—although this direction easily veers into Uncanny Valley. Others try to conjure the dynamism of a living body by augmenting mannequin displays with audio-visual content, live actors, and other special effects. In the 2011 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier,  clothed mannequins rotated around the gallery on a motorized belt. The same year, the Met exhibition Savage Beauty: Alexander McQueen deployed fans to produce a gentle movement in the garments on display.

Like so many aspects of the museum field, mounting clothing for exhibitions involves extensive consideration and preparations behind the scenes before the finished product is brought into public view.  Next time you see a mannequin on display, try to evaluate the interpretive and aesthetic impact it has on your museum experience.  

FASHION: IT'S GOING TO THE DOGS

Sew What | Enya Barbeau 

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This week I’ve had the connection between animals, clothing, and museums on the brain—prompted by the latest episode of The Sunday Edition, where Michael Enright engaged Marc Bekoff, ecologist and evolutionary biologist, in a fascinating conversation about the inner lives and cultural practices of non-human animals. Museums’ fashion and textile collections are overwhelmingly stocked with items made by and for people. But our lives are intertwined with members of other species—and we humans are eager to put our opposable thumbs to use crafting garments for them.

Consider the dog. A walk through the streets of Toronto is enough to prove how eagerly we extend our passion for fashion to our canine companions. Coats and booties are popular choices in the winter, replaced with bandannas and rain jackets in the warmer months. Some fashion houses have even introduced speciality lines for dogs. Sadly, it’s a trend that can cross the line into animal mistreatment. The Ontario SPCA recommends the judicious use of seasonal garments for certain breeds—but the human desire to play dress-up should never supersede the comfort of the animal.

Guilty dog face, c. 1886 (source).

While dog fashion may have blossomed in the petri dish of consumer capitalism, it’s hardly a new phenomenon. Just ask your friendly neighbourhood museums and archives! (Or, take advantage of the many digitization projects that are enabling greater public access to collections and ask a museum on the other side of the world!) Dog owners have kitted out their pets with full-fledged wardrobes for centuries.

Velvet collar featuring insignia of Charles XI of Sweden, c. 1670-1690 (source).

The most common relic in museum collections is, unsurprisingly, the dog collar. Leeds Castle boasts a Dog Collar Museum that features neckwear from the 15th through 19th centuries, ranging from fearsome spiked iron specimens to gilded finery worthy of a jewellery box. Other institutions have older examples. The 2004-2011 travelling exhibition Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs included a leather dog collar that dates to 1426-1390 BCE.

Textile-based artifacts are a trickier beast, as there are fewer surviving examples. However, historic literature and artwork suggest that it was not unheard of for upper-class dog-owners to kit out their pets with fancy accessories and, in some cases, entire wardrobes. In an 1833 diary entry, then-Princess Victoria recorded the evening outfit of her beloved spaniel: “I dressed dear sweet little Dash for the second time after dinner in a scarlet jacket and blue trousers.”

Dash (left) and brethren, sans trousers (source).

The hotspot for dog fashion was, of course, Paris. A series of pet-care books reference the elaborate attire that a dog-about-town might acquire, including ensembles for afternoon calls, evening parties, travel, and days at the beach. In Chien de luxe—truly a manifesto for the ages—Mme. Charles Boeswillwald recommends lace underclothes to lend “a special cachet to the outfit.” (For more on the well-dressed Parisian canine, please check out Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir: Pet-keeping in nineteenth-century Paris.)

Fragonard depicts a mistress and pup with complementary ruffs, 1769 (source). 

By the twentieth century, the proletariat counterparts of these upper-crust dogs were receiving clothing of their own—in the shape of uniforms. One of the few surviving examples I could find of textile-based dog clothing is found in the collections of the Royal Air Force Museum. A Royal Flying Corps tailor custom-made the military-style jacket, complete with military badges, for an officer's terrier. The tradition of apparel and protective gear for working dog continues today; think bullet-proof vests for police dogs and vests and harnesses for service dogs.

As our relationships with dogs and other creatures continue to evolve, it makes sense to acknowledge the important social and cultural role that non-human animals play. I would welcome a dog’s “pretty embroidered coat” or “chic… bathing outfit” alongside human fashion in our museum collections any day.

THE CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY OF A COMMON CORSET ACCESSORY

Sew What | Enya Barbeau 

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A carved wooden busk from 1675 (Image © Victoria and Albert Museum).

I’ve been devouring the new HBO/BBC One series Gentleman Jack, based on the real and rollicking life of 19th-century landholder, adventurer, and lady-loving lady Anne Lister. (British period costumes! Explicit lesbianism! If you’re not on the bandwagon, may I invite you to hop on!) During the opening credits, as the camera pans over Miss Lister donning her gender-bending attire, one item has stood out to me: a wooden stick that our heroine slips down the front of her corset. I vaguely wondered if this stick was used by the masculine-leaning people of yore to achieve a flatter chest.

Nope. After a quick Google search, I can confirm that it is called a busk, and it was a routine part of corsetry from the Renaissance onward. Even better, it has inspired an academic back-and-forth that involves all my favourite things: subverting gender norms, changing social and sexual mores, and questions of class and labour.

Detail of an ivory busk that depicts two hearts hovering above a house, encircled by the words "love joins them" (source).

Busks emerged as a central component of women’s underclothing in western Europe in the 16th century—first among aristocrats, and later among members of the middle and lower classes. Fashioned from a long piece of wood, ivory, or metal, busks were designed to compress the stomach and produce an upright posture when they were inserted into a tubular pocket down the front of a corset. Many surviving examples feature intricate imagery and inscriptions.

Corsets, typically called "bodies" or "stays" in the early modern era, have attracted their share of criticism related to the damage they wrought on bodies in the name a culturally constructed feminine ideal (although the whole organ displacement thing wasn’t as detrimental as it’s been made out to be—the real risks were some indigestion and muscular atrophy). A handful of scholars have pointed towards the busked corset as a tool of disruption rather than oppression. In her 1994 article 'Donne's "Elegy 19": The Busk between a Pair of Bodies,' Sandy Feinstein suggests that the use of busks created a “stiff, erect, masculine visual effect” that allowed women to tap into the social and sexual authority typically assigned to men. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass pursue a similar argument in their chapter of the 2011 book Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, suggesting that the busk allowed women to control access to their bodies and conceal non-marital pregnancies. 

On the other hand, Sarah Anne Bendall characterizes the busk as reinforcing gender and sexual norms due to the role it played in rituals of courtship and marriage. In a 2014 article, she outlines how busks—lying close to the heart and, more provocatively, running from the breasts to the groin—came to be imbued with romantic and erotic connotations. It was not uncommon for men to gift their intended with a personalized busk, complete with depictions of flaming hearts, happy homes, and the couple’s initials. Women who used busks as an expression of sexuality outside the narrow context of courtship and marriage were labelled impure. 

Anne Lister lived at the tail end of the era of the one-piece busk. By the mid-19th century, the split bust had arrived on the scene. Featuring an innovative front closure, the split busk allowed the wearer to put on and remove a corset without assistance—making it much more accessible for the legions of working women who had no maids.

The busk may appear unremarkable: a simple form that carries out a simple function. But if we peek  beneath the surface, a rich array of cultural meanings and stories unfold. In museums, we have the opportunity to connect audiences not just physical objects but also with the layered significances which the item may hold.