Intrusion 2 costume12/28/2022 A row of large, linen-covered wood buttons fasten the full length of the jacket’s centre front. Its simple cut provides the wearer with full coverage: it has a full-length skirt and pagoda-like sleeves that create a cape effect around its back. This example of a duster jacket, likely from the late nineteenth century, is made entirely of linen. The duster-a thin, loose-fitting style of jacket-became popular among women for this very purpose, and was worn as a practical outer layer while travelling. Many of the luxury fabrics and furs used in upper- and upper-middle-class clothing were not washable, and had to be protected when outdoors by overlaying them with simpler, hardier garments. When venturing outdoors, women needed to protect the delicate fabrics of their latest fashions from dirt’s persistent manifestations. Industrial smog filled the air, carriage wheels kicked up dust and splatter, and steam engine smoke passed through passenger car windows. The collection’s astute overseer and later first curator, Margaret Angus, recognized the regional significance and museum quality of select pieces donated from the Kingston community, and separated them out to form a dress collection, which eventually fell under the auspices of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.ĭirt was inevitable when it came to outdoor clothes, and presented itself in many different forms in the late nineteenth century. Fittingly, the Collection of Canadian Dress had its auspicious beginnings as costume wardrobe, performed pieces, for university theatre productions. As gallery goers we perform identities through the clothes we wear, as much on-display as the displays themselves. Decade by decade, spanning the 1860s to 1970s, these outfits and accessories are paired with contemporaneous works of art. What to wear to an art gallery? The exhibition Stepping Out: Clothes for a Gallery Goer draws from the Queen’s University Collection of Canadian Dress to propose garments that one might have worn, perhaps to an opening, at a children’s event, for a study session or on a Sunday afternoon. Today, this cultural activity happens everywhere across the country, and the task of dressing for it goes hand-in-hand. Gallery going emerged as a public pleasure in Canada in the late nineteenth century, with the establishment of its first art museums, in either purpose-built or repurposed spaces.
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