BGuthrie Photos: DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Unraveling Identity

DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Unraveling Identity:

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Description of Pictures: Unraveling Identity: Our Textiles, Our Stories
March 21–August 24, 2015
The largest exhibition in Textile Museum history, Unraveling Identity unites textiles from across cultures to explore expressions of individual, cultural, political, and social identity throughout the ages.
Throughout time and around the world, clothing, adornments, and other fabrics have articulated self and status—from ethnicity and occupation to religious belief.
Featuring more than one hundred pieces that span 2,000 years and five continents, this exhibition showcases The Textile Museum’s world-renowned historic collections and key loans of contemporary art textiles and fashion.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] GWMTEX_150418_001.JPG	[2] GWMTEX_150418_004.JPG
[3] GWMTEX_150418_016.JPG	[4] GWMTEX_150418_019.JPG
[5] GWMTEX_150418_022.JPG	[6] GWMTEX_150418_027.JPG
[7] GWMTEX_150418_029.JPG	[8] GWMTEX_150418_040.JPG
[9] GWMTEX_150418_042.JPG	[10] GWMTEX_150418_044.JPG
[11] GWMTEX_150418_049.JPG	[12] GWMTEX_150418_055.JPG
[13] GWMTEX_150418_060.JPG	[14] GWMTEX_150418_065.JPG
[15] GWMTEX_150418_070.JPG	[16] GWMTEX_150418_075.JPG
[17] GWMTEX_150418_077.JPG	[18] GWMTEX_150418_082.JPG
[19] GWMTEX_150418_087.JPG	[20] GWMTEX_150418_092.JPG
[21] GWMTEX_150418_098.JPG	[22] GWMTEX_150418_104.JPG
[23] GWMTEX_150418_112.JPG	[24] GWMTEX_150418_116.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. GWMTEX_150418_004.JPG: Batman 2 Mark Newport
2. GWMTEX_150418_027.JPG: Unraveling Identity Our Textiles, Our Stories
3. GWMTEX_150418_044.JPG: Platform Shoes Worn by Mae West (1893-1980) Many cultures is today's world associate physical height with fashionable beauty, and high-heeled shoes serve as status symbols across the globe. Actress Mae West stood only five feet tall, but she often wore specially designed shoes that could increase her height by more than eight inches. The top, white portions of these shoes, where the feet rested, were concealed when West wore a long dress. Only the sparking gold, shoe-shaped lower-portions of the platform would have been visible beneath the hem of full-length gown.
4. GWMTEX_150418_049.JPG: Shoes for a Manchu Noblewoman Women of the Manchu ethnic group, which conquered China in 1644 and ruled as the Qing dynasty, were forbidden to bind their feet. This physical distinction became a principal differentiating marker between upper-class Manchu and Han women. During the nineteenth century, however, fashionable Manchu ladies began to wear shoes elevated on central pedestals. This forced them to walk with the small steps and swaying gait characteristic of women with bound feet. While the Manchu admired tallness, the elevation in height provided by platform shoes may also have held political connotations, as Manchu women literally looked down on their Chinese subjects who had bound feet.
5. GWMTEX_150418_055.JPG: Woman's Shoes for Bound Feet People across time and place have used textiles to transform the shapes and proportions of the human body. While reflecting culturally specific ideals of beauty, these manipulations of the physical form through clothing and accessories can express wealth and status, cultivation, sexuality, and personal or group identity. Shoes provide perhaps the most widespread and persistent examples of the impulse to impose an idealized shape on the natural anatomy. For more than a thousand years, many Chinese women deliberately reformed their feet through systemic binding. Since a woman with bound feet could not easily engage in manual labor, the binding of a girl's feet signaled her family' wealth and high status. A principal marker or feminine beauty and respectability, bound feet were crucial in ensuring a girl's prospects for a favorable marriage.
6. GWMTEX_150418_060.JPG: My Family's Tennis Shoes Series Teri Greeves, 2003
7. GWMTEX_150418_065.JPG: Hat Worn by a Sixth-Rank Civil Official: Government officials in Qing dynasty China wore fine hats whenever they appeared in public. Hats worn in winter featured fur or black velvet trim, while summer hats were made of silk-covered bamboo. Both types of hats typically included a fringe of red silk cords to cover the crown, as well as a finial (knob) that indicated the wearer's rank. The opaque white glass finial on the top of this winter hat identified the wearer as a sixth-rank official.
8. GWMTEX_150418_070.JPG: Man's Hat: Square hats with corner points were a status marker in the Wari empire, in the ninth and tenth centuries. The style with added colored pile is known mostly from the south coast. The significance of the birds in unclear but the techniques and other designs found in the hats are Wari-influenced and the style as a whole is completely different from the one that preceded it. This kind of drastic style change is one of the clues archaeologists have used, in the absence of written records, to deduce that Wari influence constituted an empire.
9. GWMTEX_150418_075.JPG: Evening Dress During the 20th century, the "little black dress" emerged as a wardrobe staple for women worldwide. Although French designer Coco Chanel (1883-1971) popularized the form in the 1920s, her compatriot Hubert de Givenchy created perhaps the most iconic little black dress for the actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) to wear in the opening scene of the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, released in 1961. Seven years later, Givenchy created the dress displayed here for American socialite and philanthropist Betsy Bloomingdale (b. 1922). The silk velvet body of the dress is decorated with bird feathers, costly embellishments that for centuries have evoked luxury, ostentation, and exoticism.
10. GWMTEX_150418_098.JPG: Boxed Spinning Wheel India, 1920s or '30s
11. GWMTEX_150418_104.JPG: 13 Star Parade Flag from the 1840 Presidential Campaign of William Henry Harrison with Slogan and Log Cabin Image United States, 1840 Before 1912, it was permissible and common to alter the design of the American flag -- especially for presidential elections. Some of the earliest examples come from the 1840 campaign of Whig Party candidate William Henry Harrison, whose victory made him our nation's 9th president. While himself a wealthy man, Harrison evoked humble images of a log cabin and cider (rather than whisky) to position himself as a man-of-the-people. The banner affixed to the rooftop proclaims "Harrison & Reform" to contrast with the entrenched elitism of his opponent, incumbent Pres. Martin Van Buren. Viewers might notice other modifications of the flag, particularly the 15 stripes (rather than 13) and the decorative arrangements of 13 stars (in 1840 there were 26 states and stars on the flag). Through such variations, a patriotic symbol of undisputed national identity was transformed into a divisive proclamation of one candidate's superiority over another.
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