‘Dieu! Qu’il Fait Froid’ (‘Goodness, Isn’t It Cold?’)

Fashion Forward

Exhibit features women and style over time

“Fashion and Transgression,” on view at the Fisher Gallery through April 12, is an exhibition of representations of the fashionable woman in Europe and the United States between 1900 and 1950. Identity, taste, style, glamour, the new woman, spectacle, Orientalism and the body are among the themes revealed in a variety of materials taken from several Los Angeles collections.

“In today’s image-conscious culture, we cannot avoid dealing with clothing as means of communicating diverse information about identities, including the social construction and bodily performance of gender and class,” says Nancy Troy, art history professor and chair, and curator of the show.

“This exhibition explores the ways in which these issues were visualized in a wide range of materials dating from the first half of the 20th century, when it was becoming increasingly clear that fashion and good taste were only one aspect of bodily performance through clothing; transgressive challenges to acceptable sartorial norms could be equally expressive of changing fashions—and of changing attitudes about gender—in the modern period,” she adds.

The exhibition explores tensions between personal and social identity, as well as the tensions between the liberation and regulation of the body. It is through this exploration that fashion and transgression emerge as complementary rather than mutually exclusive terms. Further, the woman is shown not only as the creator and object of spectacle, but as a spectator who consciously interprets what is presented as fashion. Finally, the exhibition demonstrates how mass media democratizes fashion, allowing a broad female audience to become participants in the process of defining it.

“Graduate students in art history have played a significant role in selecting the objects included in the exhibition and they have written all the essays in the accompanying published catalogue,” says Troy. “Three students in particular, all of whom are enrolled in the Museum Studies Program of the Department of Art History in USC College, have collaborated to organize the exhibition as part of their coursework in that program.”

Admission to “Fashion and Transgression” is free, and the exhibit is open to the public from noon to 5 p.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. For more information, please call (213) 740-4561.