Danielle Sprecher, Menswear Archive Curator at the Westminster Menswear Archive and a recipient of ICOM UK’s Bursary Scheme, shares her experience in New York visiting The Met, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the PVH Archive.
ICOM UK’s Bursary Scheme is open to members who are interested in attending any international event or activity related to the museum and heritage sector.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, Metropolitan Museum of Art
“As the curator of a specialist menswear teaching collection, I am very grateful to funding from ICOM UK for giving me the opportunity to travel to New York to see Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to visit the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Based on Monica L. Miller’s book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, Superfine is the f irst menswear exhibition at The Met in over twenty years and is a landmark show in its focus on Black male identity and tailoring across the Atlantic diaspora. The Museum at FIT houses a permanent collection of over 50,000 garments and the 1,500-piece Study Collection.
“We were given a personal two-hour tour of the Superfine exhibition by research assistant Kai Marcel. This gave us an incredible insight into the curatorial processes, layers of interpretation and thinking behind the exhibition from the mannequin design (by artist Tanda Francis) and exhibition staging (by artist Torkwase Dyson), to object selection, loans and acquisitions. Notable examples included the display of two zoot suits from the 1940s. We returned for a second two-hour visit on our final day in New York, and were rewarded with the chance to observe visitor interaction and the time to appreciate the nuances of the exhibition. The exhibition demonstrates meticulous attention to detail in the way that it creates a complex picture of the history of Black male style and how this process is both private and public. We were particularly struck by the large number of Black British fashion and menswear designers included in the exhibition, demonstrating how important their work has been to the invigoration of menswear design internationally.
Calvin Klein display, PVH Archive
“The PVH archive contains hundreds of thousands of garments and paper-based objects from their brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. The company archivists gave us an in-depth tour of their two collections and discussed how they work with their in-house design teams to provide a research resource and understanding of the history of the brands. This research trip has been invaluable. Menswear is underrepresented in narratives of fashion and many Black designers work in that space. The Superfine exhibition is especially significant for its ground-breaking contribution to the curation and collection of this doubly marginalised area – menswear, Black style and Black designers. This has a direct benefit to the Westminster Menswear Archive’s current collection development review and the shaping of our curatorial priorities. Other benefits include international benchmarking with museum, education and commercial fashion collections and developing international relationships.”
