Curating the circus: Collaboration and responsibilities in digital costume exhibitions

Abstract

Flights of Fancy: Fashion and Function in Circus Performance is a digital exhibition of circus costumes that examines the complexities, histories and representations of circus through representations of material artefacts, ephemera, print media, photographs and other primary sources. Through curated features of the exhibit, we investigate circus costumes’ sociocultural influence on fashion through aesthetics and functional design. The purpose of this article is to explore how digital fashion exhibitions may be developed to create educational resources and how their curation process may be interpreted through theory. To do this, we examine the curation of Flights of Fancy through an exploration of its use of symbolism as an organizational device. We use multiple theoretical lenses, including Erving Goffman’s concepts of the front and back stage presentations of self, along with Anneke Smelik and Susan Kaiser’s updated view that interprets Goffman in the digital/social media sphere, Paul O’Neill’s composition of exhibitions through background/middle ground/foreground and Susan Kaiser’s time, space and place. Flights of Fancy: Fashion and Function in Circus Performance, digital exhibition (February 2021 – present; Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, Cornell University Library): https://exhibits.library.cornell.edu/flights-of-fancy.