Past Exhibitions 2024-2025

Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities
Special Exhibitions Gallery
February 19 –April 20, 2025

Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities explored the fascinating and longstanding connections between cabinets of curiosities and fashion. Also known as wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities were precursors to the modern museum, and many included examples of clothing. Nearly 200 garments and accessories represented the breadth of objects collected within the cabinets, and they are further selected to pique curiosity through their rarity, beauty, or originality.

An introductory gallery examines the history of cabinets of curiosities, explaining their significance to the Age of Exploration, their ties to colonialism, and the need to think more critically about contemporary museums and their objects. Within the main gallery, selections are organized into ten themed cabinets that highlight the connections between fashion and the natural world, fine art, human anatomy, and illusion. The immersive exhibition design also allows for interaction with objects, encouraging visitors to identify unusual or obsolete objects and to engage with the sensory appeal of fashion.

Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities is curated by MFIT Senior Curator of Costume Dr. Colleen Hill.

Learn more about the exhibition

Image: Mary Katrantzou, "Flyphoon" dress, spring 2019. Courtesy Mary Katrantzou.

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Cross-Pollination: Fashion Diasporas
Museum Lobby
April 2–20, 2025

Cross-Pollination: Fashion Diasporas was a dynamic collaboration between The Museum at FIT (MFIT), Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Inspired by the Fall 2024 MFIT exhibition Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, this display brought together fashion design students from both institutions who conducted research, interpreted their findings, and created projects celebrating diasporas from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. 

The students in New York and Singapore centered their work around three key themes: "Mothers and Motherlands," "Monumental Cloth," and "History Is Political." They drew inspiration from their own backgrounds and countries of origin, as well as from the fashion designers featured in the fall exhibition, to produce a diverse range of works. On view here were 27 projects from various fashion disciplines, including draping, childrenswear, virtual prototyping, accessory design, and 3D illustration.

The Cross-Pollination: Fashion Diasporas student exhibition marked the fourth collaboration between The Museum at FIT, FIT, and LASALLE's School of Fashion in Singapore. It was curated by Campus Exhibitions Coordinator Gabrielle Lauricella.

Learn more about the exhibition

Image: Designer: Brianna Beidler (FIT student)

This piece is inspired by the women within Brianna's family and the opportunities that they have allowed her. The jacket features digitally printed photographs of various generations of her family's eyes as they take on a portal to the soul and have an immortal sense to them. Also featured are the handwritings of these women, transferred with essential oil, that speak to the importance of the mother.

The dress beneath is a series of dyed ropes that intertwine, representing the blending of various lineages and the blood shared between. 

Africa's Fashion Diaspora's Connection: Mothers and Motherlands, Thebe Magugu, Genealogy collection, custom shweshwe cotton ensemble, spring 2022

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All That Glitters...
Museum Lobby
February 26–March 23, 2025

FIT's School of Graduate Studies, in collaboration with The Museum at FIT, presented All That Glitters…, a new exhibition conceived and organized by graduate students in FIT's MA Fashion and Textiles Studies program. All that glitters is not gold—it can be any medium that catches the light, shines, and reflects. The post-World War II era saw a blossoming of new textiles and technologies that changed the relationship between fashion materials and light. All That Glitters… explored surfaces that shine, focusing on themes of material production, social and financial values, and conservation. It examined not only the bright side of these materials, but also their darker side–including their environmental impact and their use in protests, such as "glitter bombing."  

Read more about the exhibition online

Explore virtual exhibition

Image: Paco Rabanne, evening dress, plastic and metal, 1969, France, gift of Montgomery Ward, 81.48.2

 

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Africa's Fashion Diaspora
Special Exhibitions Gallery
September 18–December 29, 2024

Africa's Fashion Diaspora examined fashion as a medium of storytelling and as a vital way for designers to contribute to longstanding and evolving ideas of transnational Black cultural spaces. Whether described as Négritude, Pan-Africanism, the Black Atlantic, Black consciousness, or Afrofuturism, Black thinkers and creatives, from philosophers to writers, musicians, and visual artists, have theorized cultural connections between diverse communities of African descent. This exhibition explored designers from Africa, the Americas, and Europe who interpret and construct the culture of their distinct localities and communities for an international audience and/or reach across geographies to tie Black cultural practices together through their designs.

Examples included South African designer Sindiso Khumalo's textile print inspired by American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, British designer Grace Wales Bonner’s tuxedo informed by the court of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, and French designer Olivier Rousteing's collection for Balmain based on Black American cowboys. Through approximately 60 ensembles, textiles, and accessories, Africa's Fashion Diaspora illustrated how fashion designers have contributed to international dialogues to chronicle, evaluate, and expand modern ideas of Blackness. 

Africa's Fashion Diaspora was curated by MFIT associate curator Elizabeth Way.

Explore the exhibition online.

Image: Sindiso Khumalo, printed cotton dress detail, spring 2021, South Africa, museum purchase, 2023.32.1

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This Must Be The Place
Museum at FIT Lobby/Goodman Resource Center
November 2–December 8, 2024

The Fashion Institute of Technology and the Museum at FIT proudly presented the Photography and Related Media BFA Junior exhibition: This Must Be The Place. This collection, from 42 students, showcased photo based installations ranging from the documentation of intimate life, directed staged narrative tableaus, and visual representations of conceptual ideas. This vast scope of work reflected contemporary trends of fine art photography, showcasing individual creative vision, while reflecting the time and place we all inhabit.

This Must Be the Place was a student led exhibition, produced and created in the Photographic Concepts and Exhibition course where throughout the semester, students produce photographs to push their technical and creative abilities, as well as working collaboratively in committees to bring this show to life.

Image: Coral Day, Jan Edward, Fabiana Torres

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Statement Sleeves
Fashion and Textile History Gallery
January 24 - August 25, 2024

Whether puffed, ruffled, split, or sheer, statement sleeves have been a ubiquitous fashion trend for the past decade. These dramatic, contemporary creations can enliven and update a wardrobe, yet many current sleeve styles have cycled in and out of fashion for decades, if not centuries. Although sleeves can be especially challenging to make, they also inspire countless creative ideas. 

Statement Sleeves took an original approach to the history of fashion. The selected garments date from the 18th century to the present, but they were not presented chronologically. They were instead organized by type. Following an introduction to basic sleeve shapes–from gigot to raglan–visitors encountered the myriad ways in which designers have reinterpreted and remixed sleeves through variations in material, shape, embellishment, and even functionality. More than sixty styles, all from the museum's permanent collection, emphasized how sleeves hold the power to define a look–in both the past and present. 

Explore the exhibition online. 

Image: Madame Grès, evening gown (detail), navy blue silk taffeta, circa 1980, France, gift of Mrs. Mildred Hilson, 82.234.3

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