In 2020, Fashion Studies published an interview that I conducted with Petra Slinkard, the
B. Putnam Curator of Fashion and Textiles at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. This interview actually came about because at the end of 2019, I was about to move back to Boston and wanted to get to know some of the people working with local fashion collections. I remembered that the PEM had a fairly substantial collection of fashion and dress objects, but they weren't really accessible for researchers and that items rarely appeared on display. Since the last time that I had visited the PEM in college, though, they had hired a curator and were in the process of building a Fashion and Design gallery.
Enormous changes were being implemented and fashion was going to be a top consideration, so I had to find out more. Like how did Spooky Town, U.S.A. manage to land pieces of Iris Apfel's personal collection? What were the plans to program around their collection of South Asian dress? I reached out to Petra Slinkard who, at the time, had only been with the PEM about a year and we discussed everything from the plans for the new gallery to interpreting dress objects to future exhibitions.
Comments