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Preserving the Web at FIT
By Samantha Levin, Curator of Digital Assets The Fashion Institute of Technology’s Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC) is a unique repository. Housed within the college’s library, it holds a number of rare and fragile items, which are carefully stored, organized, and described in detail to ensure that they will last for a long time,…
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Egyptian Elegance: Youssef Rizkallah
One of the great pleasures of working with our collection is rediscovering the myriad of designers represented who—while well-known during their own time—have now faded into annals of history. The name Youssef Rizkallah will ring a bell with few, yet FIT Library Special Collections houses a formidable collection of both…
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Tennis in the ’20s
Three tennis looks, created by an unidentified French designer in 1926, the year women’s professional tennis was established. Material Mode has a quibble. After attending the exhibition The Rise of Sneaker Culture yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum, we left feeling that some of the exhibition labels…
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The Automaton of Marie Antoinette
Material Mode isn’t quite sure how we missed seeing this at The Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year, but we’re kicking ourselves. This 18th century automaton was presented to Marie Antoinette in 1784, created by master furniture maker David Roentgen. Roentgen enjoyed considerable favor with the Queen, not only did she patronize him to…
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The Extraordinary Life of Gerda Wegener
The fact that Danish artist Gerda Wegener was one of the few female artists to find commercial success in Paris during the teens and twenties, is perhaps one of the least intriguing aspects of her extraordinary life. Born in Denmark in 1885, Wegener studied art at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Copenhagen. In 1912, she…
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Welcome to Material Mode…
…the blog of the Department of Special Collections and FIT Archives at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Where we enthusiastically investigate design history mysteries…