Women’s History Museum Trades New York Fashion Week for a Must-See Show at the Amant

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.