Foreword

Gaskell, Ivan

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Foreword

Ivan Gaskell

Description: An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design,...

An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928

One fitting reason that this project should celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Bard Graduate Center is that it epitomizes the expansion of fields of scholarship within the BGC since its inception...

Author

Ivan Gaskell

PublisherBard Graduate Center

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21663

Foreword

One fitting reason that this project should celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Bard Graduate Center is that it epitomizes the expansion of fields of scholarship within the BGC since its inception.

Western textile and fashion design history has always been an important constituent of the BGC’s world. Anthropology is one of its more recent additions. An American Style ambitiously addresses both. Another scholar might have been tempted to tell the story of the emergence of a self-consciously American design strategy in fabrics and clothing deliberately distinct from European models as World War I raged as a triumphal American achievement. But Ann Marguerite Tartsinis knows that textile and fashion design history is not self-contained. Neither is the propriety of cultural appropriation by designers of European extraction from Indigenous American, African, East Asian, and Oceanic sources to be taken for granted.

Even during the years Ms. Tartsinis examines—1915 through 1928—the idea of devoting the anthropological resources of a leading scholarly institution in the field—the American Museum of Natural History—to support commercial activity that exploited the products and knowledge of what we would call subaltern peoples did not go unchallenged. However, we should be careful not to be anachronistic when assessing either support for the AMNH program that found expression in the museum’s 1919 Exhibition of Industrial Art in Textiles and Costumes or its critics. Pliny Earle Goddard’s reservations about the promotion of the commercial use of the collections by his departmental colleagues, M. D. C. Crawford, Charles W. Mead, Herbert J. Spinden, and Clark Wissler derived from his conception of what was proper to the study of anthropology rather than from ethical doubts regarding cultural appropriation. As Ms. Tartsinis shows, Crawford and his associates’ call for the creation of a textile and sartorial arts department to foster industrial arts education at the AMNH—soon amplified to include ceramics, interior decoration, furniture, and jewelry—came to nothing. Goddard’s emphasis on linguistics proved enduring, and to this day remains an important factor in North American ethnographic scholarship at the AMNH.

In An American Style, Ms. Tartsinis shows how textile and fashion design history intersects with the complex history of museum anthropology. The BGC is, above all, concerned with intersections among seemingly disparate fields in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. There is surely no better way of demonstrating the fecundity of this approach on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the BGC than by presenting a fascinating case study that embraces both textile and fashion design history and anthropology by a former student who is now one of its curators.

—Ivan Gaskell
Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies
Curator and Head of the Focus Gallery Project
Bard Graduate Center

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