Search

This article discusses the embodiment of making and wearing clothing through a close analysis of the weaving and production practices of a contemporary Maya weaver, Lidia López. The first author lived in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Sacatepéquez, Guatemala where she studied the back strap loom under the instruction of master weaver, Lidia López, while the second author served as an advisor on the research project and assisted with interpretation of fieldwork data. Anthropologist Daniel Miller has encouraged a research approach that thoroughly integrates the practice of making, arguing that 'the things people make, make people'. When a person weaves cloth using centuries-old techniques and tools passed down across generations, the cloth embodies identities that transcend time and materializes networks of social relations. This brings new possibilities to ethnographic research about processes of making. If we are what we make, as Miller argued, then what are we when we make cloth? In this article we explore the production of cloth as embodied practice: weaving on the back strap loom, bringing goods to market, the practice of teaching weaving, and all of the social relationships and realities that contribute to the production of clothing. The title of this article, 'Her eyes, my body', refers to the relationship between the primary ethnographic interlocutor, Lidia Amanda López de López, and the first author as ethnographer and weaving apprentice. By teaching weaving on the back strap loom in the tradition of her antepasados (ancestors), Lidia facilitated ways of knowing ‐ from the kitchen table to the loom, from her home to the market. Entangled and woven together through dialectics of time and space, private and public, past and present. Warp and weft are woven into cloth, culture and identities.

Curated exhibitions are places where research practice, creative design, storytelling, and aesthetics converge. In this article, we use the term “fashion exhibition” to refer to the organized display of extant dress-related items within museums or other public spaces. Curation, as a form of creative design research, produces numerous outcomes including museum exhibitions, digital archives, and associated publications; however, our field has not yet established a method to peer review fashion exhibitions. In this article, we build upon the work of previous scholars to propose criteria for evaluating fashion exhibitions. In doing so, we aim to elevate the scholarly status of fashion exhibitions, particularly those mounted by modestly funded institutions, and use the recent fashion exhibition, “Women Empowered: Fashions from the Frontline,” as an example to illustrate our argument.

Fashion curation is an integral form of public scholarship within our field and yet has historically been overlooked as such. Unlike creative design scholarship, we have not collectively developed nor agreed upon methods for peer review. As a result, curatorial work is often not considered in tenure-review processes, despite fashion exhibitions meeting the core principles of disseminating scholarship beyond the academy. A recent article in the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, “Fashion Exhibitions as Scholarship,” challenged members of our field to implement peer review of fashion curation as a way to encourage and elevate this important form of scholarship (Green, et al., 2019). In this experimental salon session, we built upon Green et al.’s (2019) work by using the innovative salon session format as a juried venue for presenting fashion exhibitions rooted in rigor and research. Five fashion exhibitions were presented and discussed during the session.

In the field of dress history, the name Irene Castle is synonymous with 1910s and early 1920s fashion. During this period, Irene was a household name and considered a style authority. Fashion historians previously have focused on her fashion influence in the early 1910s when she was dancing with her first husband, Vernon Castle; however, this paper argues that Irene’s greatest fashion impact occurred later, during her silent film career. Film, as a new medium, brought moving, fashioned, celebrity bodies to cities and towns across the United States, becoming an important vehicle for conveying fashion. Not only did Irene use her silver screen presence and stardom to become the “Best Known and Best Dressed Woman in America,” she was the first film star with an eponymous fashion line.

This paper examines Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations' traditions of producing bodily adornments and clothing for trade with outsiders, from the 1700s through today, by looking at early examples in museum and archival collections and concluding with an ethnography of contemporary artists and designers. The earliest Nuu-chah-nulth dress and adornment artifacts currently held in museums were collected during Captain Cook's third expedition in 1778. These collections show that the Nuu-chah-nulth maintained extensive trade networks as Aleutian textiles and dress and Tlingit masks, armor, and hats are part of Cook's collection. Nuu-chah-nulth people began changing their designs to target European and American markets by the mid 19th century when women began producing pika-uu (decorative basketry). Merchant and cruise ships alike stopped along the coast and passengers purchased curio basketry in all shapes and forms: mats, covered bottles and abalone shells, baskets, hats, earrings, and pendants. Art history scholars refer to the 1920s - 1950s as the “dark period” of Northwest Coast art, as First Nations people struggled with residential schooling, Indian hospitals and the spread of disease, and aggressive assimilationist policies adopted in Canada (Cole 1985). As legislation changed and Canada accepted multiculturalism, Northwest Coast art exploded in the 1970s and continues to play a critical role in fashioning the bodies of both tourists and Nuu-chah-nulth people alike. In recent years, Nuu-chah-nulth designers have embraced new technologies, like silk screen printing, while retaining traditional production techniques in order to produce fashions that are exceedingly popular among tourists.