Fashion Reimagined:
Themes & Variations 1760 – Now

Encompassing a wide range of attire, the exhibition includes men’s and women’s fashions from 1760 to 2022 and is divided into three thematic sections: minimalism, pattern and decoration, and the body reimagined.

The exhibition offers a fascinating look at innovative contemporary dress and the persistence of historic and cultural attitudes towards silhouettes, surface design, and corporeal beauty. Fashion ensembles range from court suits to street wear. Exhibition highlights include an English 18th-century sack back gown, two rare 18^th-century  English men’s suits, early 19th-century printed cotton dresses, wedding dresses from the mid- and last quarter of the 19th century, as well as a rare 1928 wedding ensemble by Roman fashion artist Maria Monaci Gallenga, a very rare early 20th-century Ispahan mantle by Paul Poiret, and an unusual mid-20th-century Black Narcissus dress by American designer James Galanos. Several examples of 1960s and ’70s mod and hippie chic style, and trenchant contemporary fashions by Giorgio Armani, Romeo Gigli, Zandra Rhodes, Anna Sui, Yohji Yamamoto, Walé Oyéjidé for Ikiré Jones, Anamika Khanna, and Iris van Herpen, among others round out the centuries of fashion on display.

Fashion Reimagined will be accompanied by a sumptuously illustrated catalog with contributions by Annie Carlano, senior curator of craft, design, and fashion at The Mint Museum; Ellen C. Walker Show, director of library and archives at The Mint Museum; Lauren D. Whitley, teacher and senior curator of fashion and textile arts at Boston Museum of Fine Art; and fashion designer Anna Sui.