Style and Fashion
We Celebrate Smithsonian Craft to Wear
Art meets fashion October 6th through 8th, 2016, when 80 master designers come to Washington DC’s National Building Museum for a Craft2Wear show and sale of hand-crafted wearable arts. Returning artists — all previously juried into the Smithsonian Craft Show — are joined by a group of first-in-show designers recommended by California College of the Arts,The Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Savannah School of Art and Design and the DC Fashion Foundation. more »
A Sort of Drawing-Room Tobogganing Exercise: John Singer Sargent's Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children
Sargent carefully staged his stylishly dressed sitters against 18th century French furniture and architectural elements. The animated Mrs. Meyer is posed just to the right of center at the edge of a canapé. She wears a dress of satin, velvet, and organdy which may have been supplied by Worth in Paris. A rope of oriental pearls drapes across her prominently featured bodice, touching the tips of her shoes. more »
Artistic Interiors at the Met Museum: Satinwood and Purpleheart with Mother-of-Pearl Inlays, Depictions of Hand Mirrors, Scissors, Hair Combs, Brooches, Necklaces, and Earrings
The centerpiece of the three-part exhibition is the opulent Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room from the New York City house commissioned by art collector and philanthropist Arabella Worsham (later Huntington; ca. 1850–1924). A complete work of art, with its elaborate woodwork and decorations, it is a rare surviving commission by the New York-based cabinetmaker and interior decorator George A. Schastey. The room comes from the 4 West 54th Street home of Arabella Worsham, mistress (and later, wife) of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. more »
Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity
The Late Antique textile owners, in choosing from a vast repertory of motifs, represented the prosperity and well-being of their households. The owners represented themselves through the distinctively gendered imagery of manly and womanly virtues in mythological and Christian subjects so that in these textiles, we see distinctly personal manifestations of the religious transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire. more »