NORWALK, CT – The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum will host a talk focusing on Victorian clothing and fashion on October 2 at 2 p.m.
The talk, titled “Victorian Fashion, Dangerous Color and the Killer Mill,” will be hosted by Deborah Kraak, a museum freelancer specializing in historic textiles, costumes and interiors.
Attendees can reserve tickets on the events page of the museum’s website. Admission for members is $10 and $15 for non-members. After the presentation, light refreshments and a tour of the residence will be provided.
Whether it’s the opulent Victorian clothing we enjoy seeing in period dramas or the portraits on museum walls, what we see is a carefully presented image of perfection, but there’s always a “behind the scenes” story of what makes made that illusion. possible. This conversation reveals some of them, from the prosaic to the tragic, according to the museum.
Looking good can be as simple as mending and creatively altering clothing, practices that are newly popular today, but it can also be as dangerous as wearing dyed dresses that were as poisonous as beautiful, according to the museum.
The craze for using feathers or whole birds to decorate hats and bonnets nearly exterminated certain species before the plum trade was effectively eliminated, thanks in no small part to the efforts of two Boston socialites. According to the museum, the fur trade laid the foundation for the Astor family’s astonishing wealth, underlining Caroline Astor’s leadership of members of New York’s “old money” society in the Gilded Age.
Complementing the exhibition Making It Last: Sustainable Fashion in Victorian America, this talk explores the themes of the exhibition in more detail through period clothing, fashion plates, satirical caricatures, photographs and portraits, as well as Victorian clothing depicted in film and television. , according to the museum.
Kraak is a former curator of textiles at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library and assistant curator of textiles and costume at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She is also a consultant to museums, fabric companies and private collectors.
She is an adjunct professor of costume history at the University of Delaware, where her lectures include studies of clothing and textile sustainability issues from the 18th century to the present.
