Historic

'Indispensable Treasures': Misrepresenting Indigenous Design as Inspiration for American Fashion in Illustrated Lectures

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Abstract

In this paper, we critically examine the creation of lantern slides for a lecture series on the design and construction of ethnological clothing and textiles organized by Morris de Camp Crawford and Dr. Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in 1916. Since the late nineteenth century, museums of art, history, design, and anthropology have shaped the way we view, value, and experience fashion. Critical readings of fashion in the museum, however, tend to focus on the ways in which curators have collected and displayed extant objects within museum exhibitions. By contrast, we investigate another way curators produced culturally recognizable meanings of fashion: through photography and its circulation. Drawing upon primary sources found within the archives of the AMNH, this paper brings to light how several of the museum's curators chose to represent their anthropological collections as primary sources for design research within illustrated lectures. We argue that lantern slides not only became an important technology used to demonstrate the value of their collections, but also led to the normalization of cultural appropriation within the American fashion industry.

Keywords: imaging technologies, anthropology, museum studies, photography

How to Cite:

Xepoleas, L. M. & Green, D. N., (2020) “'Indispensable Treasures': Misrepresenting Indigenous Design as Inspiration for American Fashion in Illustrated Lectures”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 77(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.12222