Night & Day: On View at The Museum at FIT in New York, December 3, 2009 – May 11, 2010

The Museum at FIT presents Night & Day, an exhibition examining how the rules that dictate appropriate dress for women have changed over the past 250 years. Featured will be more than 100 day and evening garments, textiles, and accessories, revealing the evolution of the rules that govern fashion.

Night & Day will open with two striking pairs of garments that represent evening and day attire from two different eras. Representing the 1920s will be an Art Deco-inspired sportswear ensemble juxtaposed with a heavily beaded evening dress. From the late 1940s, a jaunty Elizabeth Arden trouser ensemble for country weekends will be paired with a dramatic taffeta and velvet dinner suit by Charles James. The exhibition’s theme will be reinforced in the introductory gallery by a group of Christian Dior garments from the 1950s, a decade during which there were multiple categories of day and evening wear.

The chronologically organized exhibition will begin with the 18th century, when clothing was classified by its degree of formality and worn according to the occasion or activity. As the exhibition progresses from the 19th to 21st first centuries, day and evening clothes will be juxtaposed, illustrating what made each piece appropriate for a particular time of day.

Since the early 19th century, women’s clothing has primarily been divided into daywear and eveningwear, categories that are governed by specific dress codes. Early examples in Night & Day will include a white cotton day dress, circa 1815, paired with a silk evening gown, circa 1824. One of the distinguishing features of 1850s fashion was a full skirt. Dresses were divided into two pieces, a bodice and a skirt. It became common practice to have alternate day and evening bodices that could be paired with the same skirt, demonstrated by a chiné taffeta dress with two bodices, circa 1853.

The rules of dress reached their apex during the period from the turn of the 20th century until World War I when fashionable women were required to change their clothes up to six times per day, depending on their social obligations. After the war, fashion permitted a more relaxed set of guidelines. The buoyancy of 1920s nightlife will be represented by a champagne silk cocktail dress and a circa 1924 metallic lace evening dress by Jean Patou.

Some of fashion’s traditional dress codes temporarily collapsed during World War II, partially due to wartime restrictions, but also because women had fewer opportunities for social and leisure activities. However, the war affected fashion differently in France and the United States. This is most noticeable in the stark contrast between an unadorned linen day dress, circa 1945, by the French couturier Piguet, and a circa 1943 evening gown with dramatic beaded embellishment by the American designer Adrian.

Fashions of the 1950s again demanded a strict set of rules corresponding to a renewal of formal society.     These would all but disappear in the 1960s and 1970s. Day and evening clothes were well defined in the1980s, even while undercurrents of the avant-garde and post-modernism led to a multiplicity of styles. The draped knits of avant-garde Japanese fashion, however, looked forward to the deconstructed silhouette of the 1990s, when standard dress codes were not embraced, as demonstrated by a Helmut Lang dress from 1993. True day suits, cocktail dresses, and evening gowns still exist, but contemporary fashion adheres to very few traditional rules and promotes loose definitions of daywear and eveningwear.

Night & Day, presented in the Fashion and Textile History Gallery, is organized by Molly Sorkin, along with Colleen Hill, Harumi Hotta, Lynn Weidner, and Tiffany Webber. The Fashion and Textile History Gallery presents biannual exhibitions examining aspects of the past 250 years of fashion. Exhibitions are curated exclusively from The Museum at FIT’s extensive collection. Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Couture Council.

The Museum at FIT is the only museum in New York City dedicated solely to the art of fashion. Best known for its innovative and award-winning exhibitions, described by Roberta Smith in The New York Times as “ravishing,” the museum has a collection of more than 50,000 garments and accessories dating from the eighteenth century to the present. Like other fashion museums, such as the Musée de la Mode, the Mode Museum and the Museo de la Moda, The Museum at FIT collects, conserves, documents, exhibits, and interprets fashion. The museum’s mission is to advance knowledge of fashion through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Visit www.fitnyc.edu/museum.

The museum is part of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), a college of art and design, business and technology educating more than 10,000 students annually. FIT, a college of the State University of New York (SUNY), offers 44 majors leading to the AAS, BFA, BS, MA, and MPS degrees. Visit www.fitnyc.edu.

The Couture Council is a membership group of fashion enthusiasts that helps support the exhibitions and programs of The Museum at FIT. For information on the Couture Council, call 212 217.4532 or e-mail couturecouncil (at) fitnyc (dot) edu.

MUSEUM HOURS

Tuesday – Friday – noon-8:00 pm
Saturday – 10:00 am-5:00 pm
Closed Sunday, Monday, and legal holidays

Admission is free.

Photos courtesy of MFIT .