Fashion Is a Verb: Experiencing Creativity and Design at PEM

These shoes complicate notions of performance and power. In 12 Shoes for 12 Lovers, Sebastian Errazuriz reduces his real or imagined former girlfriends to 3-D printed high heels with stereotypical titles like “The Golddigger.”

An American bride wore the wedding gown on the left in 1879. Made of luxurious silk fabric, it has a long train inspired by European courtly fashions. An eighteenth-century Korean bride wore the red silk robe embroidered with symbolic motifs. The peony on the back expresses the wish for prosperity. Both garments reinforce the ritual roles of the brides—intricate performances of class, social and religious norms, and family expectations.

Paris designer Jenny created this Art Deco dress with a low neckline, short skirt, and attention-grabbing beading and embroidery in the 1920s. Its wearer was publicly identifying herself as a “flapper,” a woman energized by her new freedoms and opportunities. She was someone who liked to dance and socialize and wasn’t afraid of being in the limelight.

The Kabuki actor who donned this robe, with its bold turtle and crane designs, was also the center of attention. The stylized performances of the Kabuki theater blended dance, music, and mime, and were noted for elaborate stage sets, costumes, and the distinctive makeup of the all-male performers.

Sho Sho Esquiro (Kaska Dene and Cree) combines couture traditions with the ingenuity of her Native community. Her custom-made Wile Wile Wile dress unites familiar materials in Canada's Yukon Territory—carp skin, animal fur, and feathers—with a European silhouette. The hybrid garment exudes an originality all its own.

Sea mammal intestine and esophagus lend this nineteenth-century European-style overcoat its iridescent sheen and unexpected transparency. Unangan women made the coat from organic materials readily available on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

Nineteenth-century Tlingit artists wove fine basketry to make functional objects, adapting some, such as this hat, into imaginative pieces for non-Native consumers. The hat’s shape recalls a seaman’s cap.

Paul E. LaPier’s (Tlingit and Haida) cap reflects the shapes of contemporary streetwear but is made from red cedar bark. LaPier got his start making nets for his fishing community. When he began weaving, he retained his eye for the relationship between medium and form.

This beaded cap and feather-mosaic fan are cross-cultural art forms made by indigenous artists incorporating new influences. Contact between Haudenosaunee artists and European settlers influenced the decoration of the cap. The Native artists adapted their surface ornamentation and beadwork to the floral motifs of the new settlers.

Indigenous artists in Mexico created the brilliant, iridescent colors and design motifs on this seventeenth-century fan by repurposing pre-Columbian Mesoamerican feather art for the Spanish market.

This chasuble, a garment worn by Catholic priests, was made for a church in northern Spain. It reflects the wealth, power, and international influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the 1600s.

Images symbolizing the universe embellish the back of this Daoist priest’s robe. When a priest wears this cosmic robe, his body becomes a mirror of the universe, allowing him to communicate with the celestial world.

In 1859, an American bride wore this delicate wreath of honeysuckle, orange blossoms, and white lilacs fashioned from silk, wax, wire, and cotton. The selection of flowers followed the “language of flowers,” a Victorian convention that assigned sentiments to individual blossoms.

Headdresses were statements of style and status that formed part of Chinese noblewomen’s attire on festive occasions including weddings. Thirty cranes painstakingly made of tiny coral and pearl beads tremble when this headdress is worn. Kingfisher feathers provide the brilliant blue coloring, while orchids and fruits, symbols of virtue and fertility, add to the elaborate display.

This jacket hybridizes a European scout jacket and continues the Plains tradition of painting biographical and historical narratives on buffalo hides. The garment's design features repeated images of the Morning Star, a symbol of new beginnings, and ahingas, messenger birds, that convey personal and cultural significance, even though it was likely made for the tourist market.

As Nick Cave states, the riotous color and joyfully abundant materials of his soundsuits conceal a charged message. “The first soundsuit happened in 1992. It was in response to the Rodney King incident, which is...connected to the LA riots. The intensity of what I was experiencing was so difficult for me, particularly as a black male, so it made me start looking at ideas of feeling devalued, less than, dismissed. So I started to think of materials in the same sort of way.”

This romantic, nineteenth-century dressing gown is embroidered with multicolored silk flowers. Like the bridal wreath earlier in this exhibition, each blossom on the gown represents a different emotion in the Victorian “language of flowers.” But unlike the wreath or one of Cave’s soundsuits, this dressing gown was worn in private and declared its wearer’s feelings only to her most intimate circle.

Helmets protect wearers from injury and proclaim their identity. General George Washington formed the Washington Life Guards, an elite unit that served as his bodyguards during the American Revolution, in 1776. Captain Michael Titcomb of Massachusetts wore this leather helmet adorned with metal chains and horsehair when he served in the unit from 1777 to 1779.