Fashion Unraveled Colloquium: Dr. Carolyn Dowdell “Gertrude Savile’s Green Damask”

Inspired by the MFIT exhibition Fashion Unraveled and organized by MFIT and the Fashion Research Network, this one-day colloquium explored the concepts of memory, wear, and imperfection in fashion. Speakers focused on imperfect garments and the significance of dressing as a habitual, intimate, and ephemeral act.Carolyn Dowdell is a dress historian with an MA and a PhD, both specializing in 18th-century clothing construction with an emphasis on object-based research. Her PhD specifically focused on reuse and alteration of such clothing. To date, she has examined approximately 500 extant 18th-century garments in UK and North American collections. Carolyn contributed to the 2016 DAR Museum exhibition An Agreeable Tyrant: Fashion After the Revolution with an essay and by drafting scaled patterns of displayed garments for the exhibition catalog. She is also interested in reproduction as a research methodology, most recently displaying an alteration project at this year’s CSA symposium in Williamsburg