Colleen Hill’s Immersive Cabinet Of Fashion Curiosities

This week the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology opened a new exhibition, by Dr. Colleen Hill, Senior Curator of Costume for the Museum. Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities, is open to visitors until April 20, 2025.

If you don’t already know, Dr. Hill has been with The Museum at FIT since 2006, and during her tenure has curated more than a dozen exhibitions on a wide range of subjects. While I was looking through the promotional materials for this exhibition, I was reminded of my favorite book of hers, Fairy Tale Fashion (2016). The two projects do not use the same objects and the pieces selected for the two shows are not staged in the same way. The themes are even different. What is similar, I decided, was a reverence for the objects and a desire to show the world why apparel matters, all of which is executed through storytelling, or suggestions of stories.

“At this point, I consider within my body of curatorial work,” Dr. Hill told me when I asked if she saw connections, or throughlines maybe, across her own body of work. “I do consider these exhibitions to be kind of similar. The way that both of them are constructed is to do a lot of research in something that is ostensibly outside of fashion, and then determine how in a creative way, I can illustrate or narrate these ideas using fashion. And so obviously, for fairy tales, I looked at a lot of early literary fairy tales and determined how I could pull out references to dress, or even something like gold or red roses, these kinds of motifs that I could illustrate using fashion. I did something very similar for Cabinet of Curiosities.”

Let me pause for a little historical context. Cabinets of curiosities could be described as precursors to the modern idea of a museum. The German version of the phrase, wunderkammer, means ‘cabinet of wonders,’ which I’ve always liked, and may help the uninitiated understand the idea a little better. Many centuries past, either dedicated rooms or literal cabinets were used to house and exhibit collections of treasures that, during the Renaissance, humans did not yet have the scientific knowledge to fully understand or explain. The cabinets themselves, and again, sometimes they were entire rooms in someone’s home, were a popular way to show a collection of objects of scientific, historic or religious value, or items that were novelties to European eyes, which were interesting and different than what viewers may have seen. Literal curiosities.

Of course, this is a fashion exhibition at a fashion museum which is part of one of the world’s best fashion schools. I asked Dr. Hill if the original cabinets often included or featured apparel. “The collections that dated from the late 15th or early 16th through the 18th centuries did have objects of fashion, and those objects were actually more important and prevalent than historians have previously given credit to,” Dr. Hill told me.

Fashioning Wonder includes some exquisite doll sized clothing and accessories, were traditional objects that might have been included in someone’s collection of curiosities? “The dolls were part of the cabinets and miniatures in general were very important within the cabinets,” Dr. Hill explained, “whether in doll form or in another form, because they signaled virtuosity and having this incredible artisanship was very important within the cabinets. But also, other forms of dress, usually from around the world, global fashion, was very important. The cabinets as I am looking at them were European, and it was a time of global travel and trade and of course scientific discovery, and so a lot of collectors felt that owning shoes, for example, were incredibly popular. Owning a pair of shoes from another culture was a way to appreciate and understand that culture. And also, you already saw suggestions for collecting the clothing of emperors or important people in history, and of course we still see that happening today.”

To decide what pieces would be shown, Dr. Hill dove deep into the collections at her museum, looking for interesting pieces, things unexpected, and pieces which were likely to draw attention from museum visitors.“There are fewer dressed mannequins than I typically include in an exhibition,” Dr. Hill said. “Within the Special Exhibitions Gallery, we typically have between 70 and 80 dressed mannequins, this time I think it’s somewhere around 40. It’s fewer full ensembles, but a lot of small accessories, including some of our jewelry collection, which is not something that we often show.”

The exhibition began as a PhD project for Hill, and for the last five years or so, she had been thinking about the best way to stage it. “It really allowed me to keep testing myself,” she told me, “to keep thinking and rethinking what I wanted to include. Part of that process was literally going into our collection storage and looking at every single box of jewelry, looking at every single bag, going through the hanging storage, and just being inspired.”

Even the layout of the show was carefully planned, she wanted it to feel welcoming and to encourage a sense of exploration. In the main gallery space there are many objects, ensembles on mannequins as one would expect. “The themes of the exhibition are tucked away in their own small rooms. So you have to kind of walk around the space really in any way you care to,” said Dr. Hill. “There’s no real set direction. And there are windows that sometimes hold objects that relate to the bigger room. Sometimes there are just peep holes. Sometimes there are large openings that allow you to see the back of an object very close. And then you walk around and you can see the front of that object from a distance. Because essentially when you walk in, you don’t see very many objects. You have to keep moving to get a sense of what’s on view. But I also was thinking a lot about how the original Cabinets of Curiosities were staged and how visitors, who were quite few and usually invited. How those visitors were encouraged to work with the objects and engage with the objects.”

The subsections, the themes, there are about a dozen of them. One is called What Is It? “I think there are 13 accessories within that section,” Dr. Hill told me. “They’re all very beautifully displayed in individual wall cases. But they’re meant to be objects that are potentially confusing or obsolete. There’s one that I’ve included that I didn’t know what it was when I looked at it in the collection. I was immediately engaged by it. And we encourage visitors to examine those objects and literally guess what they are. And then the label copy and a corresponding image that tells you how the object was worn or gives some kind of context. That is under a panel that you actually have to lift up. So we want people to make these guesses before really learning about the object.”

Another area focuses on fashion related tools, and it contains some of the very few pieces on loan for Fashioning Wonder. “I think this exhibition in particular is a very fun way to rethink and reinvigorate our collections,” Dr. Hill explained. “But there were a few things from the New York Historical Society that I was really interested in borrowing and they kindly let me do so. The tool section was actually inspired by one of their objects that is in the exhibition. It’s a knitting sheath, which to me was a mysterious object, one that I had to look up both what it was, and then how it functioned. But it was essentially a carved piece of wood kind of long and narrow into which you would insert a knitting needle, then you would tuck that into your apron strings. And it was meant to allow women to knit more quickly and almost one handed.”

During our conversation I kept wondering if collecting is a human trait. We all collect things, even the most minimalist person has tokens related to their life, what matters to them. Talking to Dr. Hill, I learned that the idea of carrying small collections in our pockets, personal items or interesting small objects, dates back to the 19th century. There was even a fad in womenswear for “novel pockets” designed to be worn over the outside of a dress. The implication of course, being that she had something interesting inside that.

To work through these ideas, a stunning 1948 Molyneux gown, with pockets, is part of a display. “It’s beautiful,” Dr. Hill told me. “And it has eight functioning pockets that go around the waist and the hips. We included that replica as a touchable garment.” One of her graduate students, Katherine Shark, made a replica of the Molyneux gown out of muslin which is part of the exhibit as well. Unlike a typical museum show, visitors are encouraged to gently handle the reproduction, to imagine what one might tuck away out of sight in all those pockets. “The fact is,” Dr. Hill said, “this white muslin gown or dress will deteriorate over the couple of months that the show is on view is actually very much the point, I make that clear. And the original is behind plexiglass next to it.”

Immersive, in a museum context, could mean many things, and I asked Dr. Hill what was crucial to her vision for what needed to be part of Fashioning Wonder. “One of the things that was very important within the cabinets was physically engaging with the objects,” she replied. “So visitors would be encouraged to pick them up. To get a sense of how heavy they were. How they smelled. How they felt. If they made any sound. We can’t do that today. And so I talk about why that is. And then finally, I have a section of objects that are intended to make sound. Which are, of course, typically mute within fashion exhibitions. And we have put those on view. But we’ve also recorded the sounds that they make. And those play on an audio cone for visitors to experience.”

“One of my strategies for this exhibition, was to identify what some of those fashions were,” Dr. Hill explained. “Why they were collected, potentially how they were displayed, though that’s a little bit of a trickier subject. As I was going along, I then decided that I would look a little broader and look at collecting categories within the cabinets more generally, noticing things like natural specimens, which are of course an important subject within fashion as well, so I started to make these interesting connections.”

“For me, the idea of encouraging visitors to explore what makes them curious, considering why seeing objects in real life is special, and making their own connections between objects is really key to this exhibition,” Dr. Hill said. “I’ve been working on fashion exhibitions for nearly 20 years. And I’ve found that fashion exhibition audiences are increasingly sophisticated. I think it’s a really great time to step back from being overly didactic and really allow people to think about what it is they love about fashion. If they have their own cabinet of curiosities, what they might put inside of that. And of course, it also talks a little bit about the history of museums and hopefully underscores why museums and museum collections are still important and relevant.”

Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities, by Dr. Colleen Hill, Senior Curator of Costume for the Museum at FIT is open until April 20, 2025.

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