Conceived as a hybrid between an exhibition catalogue and a fashion lookbook, as well as a document of their practice and a sculptural object in its own right, the Women's History Museums' first publication interweaves newly commissioned texts with illustrated image spreads that reference iconic precedents, from Matsuda's 1990s lookbooks to early Vivienne Westwood.
Women's History Museum was founded by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan in 2015 and engages with fashion as a medium that has the potential to exist beyond regurgitative spectacle and the ability to change the fabric of reality. Their art practice is dictated by meticulously sourced historical materials and collaborations with other artists who often double as models in their fashion shows.
To coincide with their first institutional exhibition in the U.S. at Amant, they continued their engagement with the figure of the grisette and collaborated for the publication with musician and fashion photographer Wera Nowak to develop two new series of images, as well as commissioned new texts by the historian Patricia Tilburg and the writers Fiona Alison Duncan and Edna Adan.
Women's History Museum (WHM) is the collaborative art and fashion practice of Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan. Working across garments, sculpture, print, video, and performance, WHM examines the visual and material culture of fashion to trace the entanglements of femininity, labor, and value. They often reconstruct historically lost subjectivities shaped by the ways fashion exploits the emotional, psychological, and social desires projected onto the feminine.
