Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls, 1800 to 1960

Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls, 1800 to 1960, a traveling exhibition jointly sponsored by the American Federation of Arts and the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising and curated by Kevin L. Jones and Christina M. Johnson, made its debut at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 2021. The art gallery on the grounds of industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s Clayton estate was a canny choice for an exhibition that examines the dress of women of leisure as they increasingly ventured outside of the domestic sphere from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Frick is the exhibition’s first stop, and additional venues will follow through at least 2024. The stated curatorial mission is to “chart the cultural and material developments that allowed women to make their way outdoors” and to “reconstruct a material history of women in sport through the garments and accessories that enabled them to participate, compete, and excel.” The exhibition consists of 480 objects (some excluded at the Frick, likely due to space limitations) divided among eight themes. The themes are organized around the leisure or sporting activity for which the objects were worn—some narrow, like the evolution of bathing to swimming costume in “Making Waves,” and others broad, like “Further Afield” that ran the gamut from international travel to hunting. The clever use of mannequins in suspended animation, particularly in “Subzero Style” (FIGURE 1), addressed the problem of how one can instill movement in a static exhibition about bodies in motion. A silent-film reel of early twentieth-century women engaged in sporting events also furthered this initiative. Vitrines of sporting accessories and framed print media 1 For six other venues and dates for this traveling exhibition, see . The final venue will be the FIDM Museum in 2024.