Yale opens "Text and Textile" costume exhibit

By

Cassidy Mantor

Published
May 15, 2018

Yale University has opened a new costume exhibit called "Text and Textile," exploring fabric and apparel through their intersections with literature and politics.

According to the university, the exhibit is a look at "text and textile in literature and politics, from Eve spinning in a thirteenth-century manuscript to the mill girls of New England in the nineteenth century."

Highlights include Gertrude Stein's waistcoat, the "Souper" paper dress by Andy Warhol, and manuscript patterns and loom cards from French Jacquard mills. The exhibit also includes paper dolls made by Zelda Fitzgerald for her daughter, Renaissance embroidered bindings and poetry from Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

The exhibit was curated by Kathryn James, Melina Moe, Katie Trumpener. Explaining the idea behind the exhibition, Moe said, "textiles are the stuff of myth, but they are also the product of industrial capitalism."

A keynote address will be delivered by Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Text and Textile is accompanied by an additional exhibit, Text & Textile in Arts Library Special Collections at the Robert B. Haas Arts Library at Yale, as well as a thematic wall display of works in the Long Gallery at Yale's Center for British Art.

Text and Textile opened this month at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and will run through Sunday, August 12. The keynote address, entitled "Pink: The History of a Color," will be given Wednesday, May 23.