The LSU Textile & Costume Museum is adding a pop of color to campus with its newest exhibit, “Color Me Fashion.”
Pulling over 40 looks from 1890 to 1990, the museum is highlighting the beauty and importance of color in fashion.
“The power of color is undeniable when attempting to arrange disparate objects cohesively,” the exhibit’s description reads. “In this curatorial process, color merged oppositional styles, silhouettes and fabrications of each garment. While color trends may come and go, the foundational components of color theory provide an everlasting framework in which one can organize different objects to create visually alluring tableaus.”
The Museum’s Director and Curator Michael E. Mamp said there were many influences on the exhibit, one of them being the spring Hindu festival, Holi. The festival celebrates the love of the gods Radha and Krishna and good defeating evil.
Holi is well known for the colorful play that comes with it. During Holi, festival attendees throw gulal, a colorful powder, as they celebrate and spend time with others.
Mamp said he was also inspired by “Color Me Barbra,” a television show featuring Barbra Streisand from 1966, when color television was rare. Mamp’s final inspiration for the exhibit was Vogue’s December issue that he said had heavily saturated fashion and an environment of color.
“I wanted to be able to show a lot of different artifacts from the collection from different time periods and different designers, and so color became the way to unify those different objects across time, space and place,” Mamp said. “Which means unifying them with color.”
Mamp has been reorganizing the museum’s storage. During this process, he took note of collections he wanted to share with the public.
“I started grouping things by color arrangements, so complementary colors, monochromatic colors and analogous colors,” Mamp said. “I continued to narrow down the selections from there until I got to what you see presented.”
The exhibit is organized based on color theory and how colors interact with one another. It is full of beautiful pieces with complementary, analogous and monochromatic colors. There is even a special section for purple and gold fashion.
Color appeared on all of the exhibit walls, joined by famous quotes about color, including “Color is a power which directly influences the soul,” by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and Kermit the Frog’s “It’s not easy being green.”
Mamp hopes the exhibit gives museumgoers some happiness as it adds a splash of color to their day.
“I hope that people walk away with a sense of joy and the celebratory nature of fashion and color,” Mamp said, “and how they work together to hopefully lift one’s spirit.”
“I study fashion because I think it’s a joyful thing. If people can walk away with just a little bit of that joy in their heart and their soul, then we have done our job.”
The “Color Me Fashion” exhibit is free to visit at LSU’s Textile & Costume Museum every weekday until Aug. 15.
