#museumatfit

"Meet Hop, the squirrel girl protagonizing my first industrially produced line. I suppose my passion is expected to be artisanal work, but I find the sturdiness of high-quality toys produced by industry experts a lot more valuable. It means the figure can stay with you for a long while, and won't crumble.

A mix of worn out and polished captures the essence of the tidy but fun and adventurous girl. "Patched Up" brings together both worlds: the serifed pinks and whites of a clean, soap-smelling child's room; and the handwritten browns and oranges of the autumny outdoors."

-Lucía Pavlov, CABA, Argentina

.HopTheDoll on Instagram

Elizabeth Hawes: Along Her Own Lines Until March 26, 2023

This show at the FIT Museum in NYC only runs a month which hardly seems long enough in light of its subject.

Elizabeth Hawes (1903-1971) was both a designer, who made couture clothing and then tried to work for a ready-to-wear garment company, and a writer. She found she could not make money with custom-made clothing because her own perfectionism made it too costly, and that garment manufacturers expected a frenetic creativity that was impossible to achieve. She wrote best-selling books about the fashion industry and about garment design, and then began to advocate for the rights of workers and improvements in their conditions.

This show look at all these different aspects of her life and works, and shows some of the garments she designed like this purple wool coat from 1950 with a contrasting lining.

"Please meet Midori No Daichi. An original character of mine, shelled using sculpts by Ball Jointed Doll companies Volks and Fairyland. Midori would be the catalyst for my writing during a time of great strife. I purchased this Volks School A Sweet Dreams head (released 2007) back in 2020 during our global pandemic. She would later be put onto a Fairyland Feeple65 Body to truly flesh out who this character of mine might be. Being a medical professional I found the overwhelming nature of this world event to be unsurprisingly terrifying, difficult, and draining. Purchasing the doll that would eventually become my Midori was just a way for me to find joy. Buying dolls is what a life long doll collector does after all. Just a doll purchase. But she would be anything but just another purchase.

After painting, sewing, and wig making I found myself a muse. She would inspire a great deal of writing. A skill I love but hadn’t ever expected to connect to my doll collecting practices. So please enjoy this entry as my earnest gift to the world."

-Joshua Crawford, Somerset

.joshybearhuggies on Instagram

"When I was four, I learned to sew by making Barbie clothes.

I traded my toy gun and holster set to my sister for her. I re-named her Estelle, because I didn’t buy Mattel’s Barbie “teenage fashion model” story.

The sissy kid in Oklahoma got bullied because he sewed and played with dolls.

In my mind, Estelle was a grown-up 27-year-old. Her story: she lived in a Big City, and did grown-up things. My refuge.

We both eventually landed in New York, with designing as my career.

In early 2020, Covid came. Everyone was locked inside with the deadly pandemic raging outside. How to keep myself sane in this crazy time? That thing that kept me company, soothed my nerves, and provided escape from the harsh world outside. I played with Estelle and made lots of doll clothes.

The silver lining of this—the 'Doll Couture' books!"

-Kenneth King, New York

.kennethdking on Instagram

Designing Women: Fashion Creators and Their Interiors at Museum at FIT

Now through May 14, 2023, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology has a show on women fashion designers who also did interior decoration from the late 19th Century onward. As both kinds of designing were part of the decorative arts, this made perfect sense to them. The same principles about the art of composition were used to design both. In fact, one of my early fashion books actually explains how to make each room of a house as harmonious as a woman’s clothing.

You see here a yellow, fur-trimmed tea gown from around 1918 which is attributed to Lucile, then a remarkably fluffy evening cape by Jeanne Paquin, evening cape, 1987, France, and lastly a painting by Henri Gervex which he called “Cinq Heures chez Paquin” or Five Hours at Paquin from 1906 which gives you the idea that women spent a lot of time picking out their purchases at the designer’s salon.