To Maintain a Visual Emphasis, Curators Kept Labeling in the Installation to a Minimum

786 The Journal of American History December 2013 To maintain a visual emphasis, curators kept labeling in the installation to a minimum. In almost all cases this is adequate, but in several instances it is less than is necessary for the general public. The photo groupings are succinctly sketched in section labels. Not formulaic, these estab- lish the coherence that unites the images and often anticipate and answer initial questions that might arise from visitors. The labels on individual images provide the basics of title, photogra- pher, date, facts concerning the print, and—if not otherwise clear—the context surrounding the image. The direction of proper visitor flow through the sections is not always intuitive; at several points there is confusion about which section label applies to which photographs. The prose throughout the exhibition is relevant, sharply focused, and appropriate for general audiences. The intellectual foundations of the exhibition are fully developed in the catalog, War/ Photography. The brief text that introduces each of the groupings in the installation is ex- Downloaded from panded in the catalog, providing additional details about the photographs and their dissemination. Those interested in public memory will welcome the excellent essays on dissemination, a topic not easily presented in the installation. Natalie Zelt contributes “Seeing Eye to Eye: The Changing Ways and Means by Which Photographers’ Images Reached the Public Eye.” “ Asserting that published photographs of war have always been a distillation of battle mar- http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ keted for home consumption,” she analyzes three war photographs and discusses how the dissemination of each affected public response. An equally worthwhile contribution is John Stauffer’s “The ‘Terrible Reality’ of the First Living-Room War,” an analysis of the dissemination of war images during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Civil War. The first “living-room war” was not the Vietnam conflict, he argues; a huge public appetite for war photographs emerged during the nineteenth century, sending hundreds of photographers onto Civil War battlefields. Hundreds of thousands of images were made and then reworked as engravings for newspapers. The curators maintain that such dissemination is as signifi- at Knox College on April 3, 2014 cant to the interpretation of photographs as the subject of the picture. In raising that idea, this distinguished catalog extends the reach of an unprecedentedly bold and ambitious exhibition of war photography. Clay Lewis Washington, D.C. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat461 “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair,” Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Ill. http://chicagohistory.org/inspiringbeauty/. Temporary exhibition, March 16, 2013–Jan. 5, 2014. 7,000 sq. ft. Traveling exhibition, Oct. 11, 2014–Jan. 4, 2015, Museum of Design, Atlanta, Ga.; May 22–Aug. 16, 2015, Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, Minn.; Sept. 10–Dec. 16, 2015, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, Mich. Joy Bivens, exhibition curator; Virginia Heaven, consulting costume curator. Fashion seems to be the museum world’s latest obsession. In the summer of 2013 the ven- erable Art Institute of Chicago was host to three fashion-themed special exhibits held together by its much-anticipated “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” exhibition In 2006 the Chicago History Museum (), which housed a dormant collection of some fifty thousand costumes forover twenty years, showcased “Dior: The New Look”with about half of its Christian Dior couture collection. The next year the partnered with Valerie Steele, the celebrated Exhibition Reviews 787 fashion historian and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, for a New York City showing of “Chic Chicago,” an exhibit that showcased the best of the ’s costume collection and the elegant Chicago women who wore them. With the public desire for fashion exhibits still red hot, the is making costume and apparel signature aspects of its acquisition culture and curatorial acumen. In early 2013 the opened “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair,” which was developed by the museum in cooperation with Johnson Publishing Company, presented by the Costume Council of the Chicago History Museum, and put on tour by International Arts & Artists of Washington, D.C. “Inspiring Beauty” is the largest and most ambitious fashion exhibit ever mounted by the . It is the story of Eunice Johnson’s trailblazing fashion event and a history that is deeply rooted in Chicago and in African American middle-class aesthetic sensibilities. Students of fash- Downloaded from ion history may be disappointed by the poor lighting and a layout that does not show the intricate construction of couture handcraft technique at its best, but this awkwardness is part of the make- shift quality that was the essence of the fashion-fair experience. The exhibit works best as a history of racial uplift told through African Americans’ main- stream consumer aspirations. Standard fashion exhibits have explored either the oeuvre of a http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ famous designer, the wardrobe choices of a famous personality, or the interconnections between fine-art movements and apparel design. “Inspiring Beauty” is something different: the fashion it celebrates is less about design and its elite taste makers and more about African Americans’ struggle to access and eventually transform haute couture. Eunice Johnson’s Ebony Fashion Fair was significantly more than a fashion show; it was an annual charity extravaganza that at its height traveled to forty cities and was financed, managed, and curated by African Ameri- cans. Johnson, whoshared theentrepreneurial zeal of herhusband, John,the founderofJohn- at Knox College on April 3, 2014 son Publishing Company and the publisher of Ebony magazine, would charm and cajole her way into the best European couture houses in the 1950s to buy the most striking designer ensembles for a fashion show that was to be directed by black talent, feature on black models, and be shown to black audiences all over the United States. Such taste making required both white-glove diplomacy as well as a backbone of steel. In an era when many elite designers were afraid their wealthy white American patrons would be repelled by seeing their favorite labels marketed to black consumers, Johnson brokered purchases by “beg[ging], persuad[ing] and threaten[ing for] the right to buy clothes.” The Ebony Fashion Fair began in 1958 and delighted its mostly African American audiences until the show’s finale in 2009. The convergence of aesthetics and civil rights history makes curating an exhibit such as “Inspiring Beauty” rich with public-history possibility and equally fraught with design challenges. The garments in each fashion fair reflected Johnson’s burgeoning taste in the rarified world of haute couture culture as well as her deepening un- derstanding of what kind of clothes were crowd pleasers among the African Americans who flocked to the show and were developing layered understandings of their own aesthetic pref- erences. “Inspiring Beauty” might have narrated this story more systematically. The exhibit has no examples of the apparel featured in the early shows of the late 1950s, which, apart from the spectrum of African American fashion models, followed all of the normative protocol of fashion showings in Europe and North America: elegant, stately affairs where models would saunter between tables of lunching women. But as the Ebony Fashion Fair’s popularity grew, its elite black audiences would be mixed with African American middle-class patrons. These women could never afford to buy the Dior and Givenchy clothes that Johnson auctioned off for charity, but they could dream of themselves in dresses with prices that would be more 788 The Journal of American History December 2013 than an average annual household income. The aspirational quality of the fashion fair made the showcasing of couture garments a family affair among its African American patrons. Mothers and their daughters (also frequently with husbands and sons in tow) would dress immacu- lately to attend a show. As explained in the oral histories presented in a video installation at the exhibit, a friendly competition arose between dressed-to-kill patrons and the models waiting outside. Pat Cleveland, one of the first Ebony Fashion Fair models to break through the color barrier and work for white American and Parisian couture houses in the late 1960s, recalled how audience expectations energized the models to “really [put on] a show.” Johnson, aware of the racial politics surrounding black adornment, shifted her purchasing choices toward couture items that were less about each garment’s “wearability” than about its dramatic show- stopping qualities that would delight and mesmerize her audiences. In this way the Ebony Fashion Fair became a kind of costume extravaganza with an African American–inflected verve Downloaded from and performance that made it a unique institution in modern American culture. The chal- lenge for “Inspiring Beauty” was to resist the curatorial protocol of fashion exhibits that focus on aesthetic formalism and design history and instead reconstruct the sense of movement and performativity that was the signature effect of Johnson’s unique fashion shows. http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ The has attempted to stage the exhibit with the feel of a fashion runway. Mannequins are displayed in groups that are dressed in clothes thematically related to each other. For example, an elegant 1997 Bill Blass tweed suit and muskrat fur–trimmed stole from the ready-to-wear collection stood beside a stunning 2001 Jean-Louis Scherrer haute couture leather jumpsuit and a full-length, fur-embellished matching coat. Such haphazard groupings reflect both the eclecticism of Johnson’s buying habits and the contingencies of the fashion-fair enter- prise that make exhibiting this history particularly difficult. All of the exhibit clothing is on loan from private collectors, since Johnson regularly auctioned off the haute couture to ben- at Knox College on April 3, 2014 efit black charities.

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