Sprecher, Danielle and Groves, Andrew 2023. Invisible Men in Black. ICOM Costume: International Committee for Museums and Collections of Costume, Fashion and Textiles Annual Meeting 2023. National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh 24 - 27 Sep 2023
| Title | Invisible Men in Black |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sprecher, Danielle and Groves, Andrew |
| Type | Conference paper |
| Abstract | In 2019 the Westminster Menswear Archive staged Invisible Men: An Anthology from the Westminster Menswear Archive in London. To date this is the United Kingdom's largest exhibition dedicated to menswear. Divided into twelve thematic line-ups of thirteen garments sections, the exhibition featured two sections devoted entirely to black clothing. The first, Black Jackets, examined tailoring's pervasiveness as a defining feature of twentieth-century menswear. It featured thirteen seemingly identical black jackets created between 1928 and 2010; upon closer inspection, however, each garment revealed its own unique characteristics and relationship to men’s fashion. This section was mirrored later in the exhibition by thirteen black garments produced between 1997 and 2001 by the Italian menswear brand C.P. Company as part of their Urban Protection range. Each of these garments were made of the same industrial quality black nylon giving them visual uniformity but featured different configurations of transformability and hidden technology, such as voice recorders, smog masks, gas readers, and noise-cancelling headphones. At the time of production, these garments were viewed as embodying a utopian vision of the future in which wearable technology would augment the human body to withstand the challenges of the modern metropolis. This paper examines the rationale behind presenting two sections devoted to black garments, and how the decision to mirror these two sections within the exhibition allowed the curators to re-examine interrogate previously held assumptions about the use of black within menswear by comparing and contrasting its use within traditional tailoring and contemporary technical outerwear. |
| Keywords | Menswear, fashion, tailoring, wearable technology |
| Year | 2023 |
| Conference | ICOM Costume: International Committee for Museums and Collections of Costume, Fashion and Textiles Annual Meeting 2023 |
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