“Gender Bending Fashion” Exhibition in Boston Reveals Blurry Boundaries in Male/Female Attire
Colors are vivid. Angles are sharp. But the boundaries in “Gender Bending Fashion” are blurry. The exhibition, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, reveals that people have been disrupting the division between men’s and women’s clothing not just in recent decades but for more than a century. The show’s design by MFA in-house architect Chelsea Garunay features lit triangular displays in pinks, oranges, and blues set against black-painted walls, yielding a “retro-futurism, connecting the current moment in fashion to historical precedents,” the museum notes. The over 60 garments range from an 1895 bicycling corset and a tuxedo worn by Marlene Dietrich in 1930 to a 2012 men’s floral blazer and kilt ensemble by Comme des Garçons and Christian Siriano’s pantsuit with skirt overlay worn by Janelle Monáe in 2018. They’re joined by paintings, photographs, and runway-footage projections by creative agency Black Math.
Read next: Cass Calder Smith Designs Sarah Jessica Parker’s Second Shoe Store in NYC
