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 rejects 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 that we didn’t get to fully realize because we didn’t have the resources or 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: young women working in the fashion industry there 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 dead-end existence within the fashion system but was 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 shopgirls and worked in mills”) and 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 trying to re-create their stories that were never heard,” Barringer concluded.
One of the main pieces in the presentation 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 was organized following WW II to revitalize the French fashion industry. More specifically, they drew from the tableau created by Jean Cocteau: a derelict room with mannequins in states of distress (one was 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 previous fashion shows, along with images of the aftermath of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. 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 met, and that’s why we hated NYU so much, because the building is haunted,” added McGowan. “Now we met and made our own fashion line instead of having to work at the Shirtwaist factory.”
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 the dark things that have happened here,” said McGowan. “There’s a quality in our work that is always thinking about that.” 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 and 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, enveloped 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 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 leopard-like 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 of the fashion industry itself, as well as the city’s creative ecosystem.
