The costumers’ lens: An encounter with The Pink Silk Dress

This visual essay documents the evolution of a performative public encounter with an 'everyday' pink silk dress opening in June 2022. Narratives of Dress: The Pink Silk Dress (2022) was developed as part of the practice for a practice- based Ph.D. exploring how the contract for participation might be renegotiated between ‘everyday’ historical dress and the spectator in exhibitions and encounters with dress.

Narratives of Dress: The Pink Silk Dress (2022) utilized the pink silk dress as a narrative artifact to evolve maker and making narratives informed by a professional practice of costuming for theatre, material culture analysis, and archival studies. A prior emphasis on object- based study in her undergraduate studies and professional practice to inform the interpretation and construction of historical dress for theatre has evolved practices within the research to permit access to the often, ‘hard to reach’ narratives of everyday historical dress.