How to Study Clothing?

At a time when courses on clothing draw exceptionally large audiences in the humanities field, and when art museums depend increasingly for audiences and revenue on exhibitions of clothing, accompanying those exhibitions with increasingly ambitious catalogues, it has become pertinent for graduate students in a range of art history sub-fields, as well as in adjacent disciplines such as history, design, or anthropology, to become familiar with the newest options for the study of clothing.  Among the 10 most visited exhibitions in the 150-year history of the Met, for instance, 5 have been devoted entirely or in part to clothing.  The trend toward the incorporation of clothing in temporary exhibitions nominally devoted to painting, or to a period subject, as well as the installation of clothing in permanent galleries, will also be discussed. This seminar reads recent books or museum catalogues, chosen to offer a representative range of approaches, time periods and issues of rank, gender, race, geography, and politics.