Respectable: Fashion Curatorial Methodologies Explored Through an Exhibition on Black American Women’s Respectability Discourse, 1865-1929

This thesis project explores curatorial methodologies for interpreting marginalised peoples’ historic fashion objects in ways that amplify their experiences and perspectives. Based on the author’s experience as a fashion curator and research background, Black American and diasporic fashion culture serves as a case study. The thesis consists of a theoretical framework that joins theories and practices from history, art, and their curation to expand the methodological possibilities for fashion curation. This framework draws on existing fashion scholarship, such as Carol Tulloch’s work, and forges connections with historians, such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Curatorial methods are also drawn from the analysis of four contemporary (2022-2023) exhibitions on Black identities and the artmaking strategies of the artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis, whose works engage fashion history to innovatively depict historic Black women.

A proposed exhibition, titled Respectable, acts as a practice-based tool to evaluate several of the methodologies documented and theorised from the historians’ work, exhibition analyses, and artmaking strategies. Respectable interprets Black American women’s fashion objects (garments, photographs, texts) dated between 1865-1929 through the ‘politics of respectability’ (Higginbotham, 1993), a pervasive social discourse impacting how Black people expressed themselves through dress. It demonstrates curatorial methodologies through exhibition texts, mounting notes, and curatorial analysis to theorise how existing fashion curatorial practices can be infused with novel approaches to engender nuanced understanding of and empathy for historic marginalised people among contemporary exhibition audiences. The methods analysed and deployed in Respectable go beyond representing the existence of Black women at this crucial period in American history, and instead offer insights into their diverse perspectives and individual contexts.

This thesis makes an important contribution to the field of fashion curatorial methodology, an underdeveloped area of scholarship, by placing a range of scholars from various fields in conversation with fashion studies to create a unique methodological framework for curating the fashion objects of marginalised peoples. This thesis also documents established curatorial practices and demonstrates exhibition curating as a practice-based tool for theorising curatorial method. The proposed Respectable exhibition and related research presents a significant amount of new Black fashion studies research. Outside fashion studies, this thesis also exemplifies fashion objects’ utility as richly informative and dynamic historical documents to access the buried experiences of marginalised people.