The work of Amanda McGowan and Mattie Barringer, the duo behind the experimental label Women’s History Museum lives right at the edge where the meaning and purpose of clothes becomes unwieldy; where practical needs crash against symbols. It reject notions of propriety, and embraces an unabashed commitment to the female urge to dress up.
Although recently the pair had been doing runway shows tied to the New York Fashion Week calendar, this season they skipped it for something a little different; an exhibition at the Amant in Brooklyn. “Originally we were going to do a full runway show in Paris this September and then also do the show here at the Amant,” said McGowan at the gallery a few days before the exhibition’s official opening. Realizing the amount of work that would entail, they decided instead to “do the art show and then worry about doing another fashion show at another time.” She continued, “We wanted to do a more fleshed-out version of shows we’ve done that we didn’t get to fully realize because we didn’t have the resources or the time.” But they didn’t abandon their Paris dreams entirely, the show, titled Grisette à l’enfer, is inspired by the city, specifically the Grisettes, or the young women working in the fashion industry in the city during the 19th century, who were given the name because their uniform consisted of gray workwear blouses. “She was this very precarious worker who had this kind of dead-end existence within the fashion system, but was also idealized in other ways,” Barringer explained. “There’s also an element of purity, while at the same time she was being sexualized,” McGowan continued, as they often do in conversation, finishing each other’s thoughts. They identified with the character, both in a personal way (“We have a store and they were mostly shop girls and worked in mills”), and also as an object of curiosity. “In our work, we like to think about ways to have this historical futurism where we’re thinking of the identities of people who lived before, and are trying to recreate their stories that were never heard,” Barringer concluded.
One of the main pieces in the exhibition is an installation inspired by the Théâtre De la Mode, a touring exhibit of small mannequins wearing fashions by the top designers of the time that took place following WW II to revitalize the French fashion industry. More specifically they drew from the tableau created by Jean Cocteau, which was a kind of derelict room with mannequins in states of distress, one even dramatically strewn about a bed that was falling apart and covered in hay. In the Women’s History Museum version, the walls of the room “peel off” to reveal screens playing their old fashion shows, along with images of the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. The latter also functions as a point of imaginary connection between history and the designers’ own biography.“We met at NYU and they own the building where the fire happened,” said Barringer. “We made up this narrative where we were in the factory and we met, and that’s why we hated NYU so much, because the building is haunted. And now we met and we made our own fashion line instead of having to work at the Shirtwaist factory,” added McGowan.
New York is an essential element of their practice—both as an agent of freedom and chaos. “We always feel really connected to New York, and all that has happened here, and all of the dark things that have happened here—there’s a quality in our work that is always thinking about that,” said McGowan. Barringer continued: “The real estate driven-ness of New York, the historical amnesia, paving over everything in order to make money; it all feels very related to fashion in a way.”
Looks from previous collections are displayed throughout the gallery, on a mix of vintage mannequins on loan from the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, custom ones made by the designers to emulate specific antique versions (specific body parts or cropped to display jewelry, for example), or bought from contemporary specialty shops. One mannequin, wearing a coin bikini, encased in a shop display case, and contorted in a sexual bridge position comes from a company that makes mannequins for sex shops and yoga stores. McGowan continued, “It’s just very interesting to see how beauty ideals change and then what garments can or can’t work on the mannequins. There was such a stark difference from the antique ones, to the Diana Vreeland era, to the silhouettes of the 1960s and the ’70s.”
Anchoring the show is a short semi-autobiographical film, The Massive Disposal of Experience, starring their friend and frequent collaborator Justine Crawford, as a young woman “obsessed with clothes in a world where clothes are no longer relevant or disappearing.” The film begins with a voiceover monologue reading a list of prized vintage designers and search terms. And then: “I wanted to be a fashion designer, but it was too hard—do you know how many fashion designers have committed suicide? A lot. Besides, people only want things they’ve already seen, they don’t want something new.” Later, the character “jumps” into a kind of online shopping augmented reality world, where she eventually turns into a kind of leopard figure and walks into a vintage store called “Just for Fun: Apocalypse.”
Grisette à l’enfer works both as an introduction to the work of Women’s History Museum and as a vision of their future—and the future of experimental fashion as part the fashion industry itself as well as the city’s creative ecosystem.
