Curating costumes from many lands: Addressing the colonial gaze in two university dress collections through digital curation

Abstract

In this article we reflect on our engagement with a broad spectrum of dress- and textile-related artefacts housed within the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and Department of Anthropology Collections at Cornell University. In recent years, fashion critics and scholars have begun to address the biases and prejudices that continue to inform the collection and display of fashion within museums and academic institutions. In addition to museums of art, design, anthropology and history, universities have contributed to and influenced the public’s perceptions of fashion as an embodied material practice and a social phenomenon through the development and circulation of fashion- and dress-related teaching collections. Drawing upon our experiences co-curating a digital fashion exhibition about the development of two ethnological dress collections on Cornell’s campus, we discuss the opportunities and challenges that we faced working with these objects in a university setting. Our objective is to contextualize the formation of these collections and raise questions and critiques about the ways in which university dress collections have perpetuated – and continue to perpetuate – forms of discrimination like sexism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, classism, ageism and racism amidst an ongoing colonial context. We suggest possible steps for decentring the colonial gaze through digital curation.