Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England, 1600–1900
An Historic Deerfield Forum, Deerfield, MA, September 12-13, 2025.
PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 3, 2025
Fashion has garnered great interest in recent decades and research into the history of clothing has yielded new insights into culturally embedded ideas around self-styling and the body. Understanding the mechanisms of stylish dress was the subject of several publications including Extreme Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), Fashioning the Body (Bard Museum, 2015), and Structuring Fashion: Foundation Garments through History (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 2019). Yet, few studies have explored New England’s relationship with styling the body and fashionable dress.
In conjunction with a new exhibition, Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes from the Ideal to the Real, opening May 3, 2025, Historic Deerfield will organize a Fall Forum, “Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600–1900,” that aims to examine men’s and women’s fashion through a specific New England lens by convening a group of experts in the field to explore the rich history of dressing the body in this region.
The Forum seeks to explore the following questions:
- What was distinctive about dress in New England, 1600–1900?
- How did aspirational fashion silhouettes form an aspect of New England dress?
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Cage crinoline, Odessa Skirt Company, Gloucester, Mass, about 1867, Cotton tape, steel hoops, Anonymous Gift, HD 2011.26 Was the cold weather of New England a factor in attaining stylishness?
- What were the connections between the clothing practices of Indigenous peoples and English colonists?
- What was the connection between religion and clothing in New England?
- How did attitudes around the body in New England influence self-styling?
- How were foundation garments a factor in New England clothing?
- What was the role of homespun in New England clothing?
- What can we say about either agency or subjugation in the dress of enslaved New Englanders?
- How was New England a place of innovation in fashion?
- If not aligned with prevailing fashions, how did New Englanders express anti-fashion?
- How was New England’s past revisited in Colonial Revival fancy dress?
- What is the role of painted portraits in documenting clothing styles or presenting an aspirational ideal? Does the representation of clothing in photography play a different role?
Historic Deerfield invites paper proposals for its two-day forum. Priority will be given to paper submissions that present new research and examine topics in non-traditional ways. Submissions beyond the geographical scope of New England but informative to this area are also encouraged.
Topics and themes ranging in date from the colonial period to the turn of the twentieth century might include but are not limited to:
- Object Studies
- Artisan/Artist Biographies
- Analysis and Conservation
- Collectors and Collections
- Social and Cultural Meanings
Please send (as a single email attachment) a lecture title, a 250-word abstract that describes the lecture, and a one-page vita or biography to Lauren Whitley, Curator of Historic Textiles and Clothing and Forum organizer, at lwhitley@historic-deerfield.org. Papers should be 25 minutes in length and must be object/image based. Proposals will be accepted until May 3, 2025. You will be notified of the status of your proposal no later than May 24, 2025.
Speakers whose papers are accepted will be given complimentary registration to the symposium, lodging, and meals. The forum will convene in Deerfield, Massachusetts, as a hybrid program, with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees. Speakers are expected to present their papers on site at Historic Deerfield.