Cooper Hewitt set to re-open, highlighting contemporary fashion and Historical textile design
As museums and cultural institutions begin to open their doors to the public, Cooper Hewitt is one of many offering exciting programming and exhibitions. Included in the line-up for summer 2021 are three exhibits in particular that focus on fashion, textile design and culture.
Re-opening on June 10th, 2021, Cooper Hewitt is offering FREE ADMISSION to all visitors through October 24th, 2021!
Contemporary Muslim Fashions
Contemporary Muslim Fashions examines how Muslim women—those who cover their heads and those who do not—have become arbiters of style within and beyond their communities. As designers and entrepreneurs, they have shown that clothing can be on-trend and still meet the needs of diverse wearers. As consumers, they have used their influence to shape global fashion markets. And as journalists, bloggers, and influencers, they have confronted a lack of representation in the mainstream fashion narrative and drawn international attention to the vitality of Muslim modest style.
On view now through Sunday, July 11 2021
Portrait of Willi Smith
Willi Smith: Street Couture
During his twenty-year career Willi Smith (1948–1987) united fashion and American culture, marrying affordable, adaptable basics with avant-garde performance, film, art, and design. Smith hoped to solve what he called “the problem of getting dressed,” or the lack of control fashion afforded the everyday person, by using clothing as a tool for the liberation of stereotypes around race, class, sex, and gender, and bringing art into the mainstream. In the wake of the 1974 recession and Vietnam War, Smith founded WilliWear Ltd. with business and creative partner Laurie Mallet to produce clothing, events, and experiences with a wide range of collaborators who used new technologies and progressive ideas to transform their creative fields and instigate social change. At the time of his sudden death from AIDS-related illness, Smith was considered to be the most commercially successful Black American designer of the 20th century and a pioneer of “street couture”—fashion inspired by the creativity of people from the cities to the suburbs that captured the egalitarian spirit of the age. Willi Smith: Street Couture surveys Smith’s pathbreaking imagination of an inclusive, collaborative, and playful new society.
On view now through Sunday, October 24 2021
In addition to the shows, Cooper Hewitt and The Smithsonian Design Museum have released a book and community archive in honor of iconic fashion designer Willi Smith's work, built through memories and contributions of friends and collaborators.
Suzie Zuzek for Lilly Pulitzer: The Prints That Made the Fashion Brand
Suzie Zuzek for Lilly Pulitzer: The Prints That Made the Fashion Brand is the first museum exhibition to reveal the nature and scope of Zuzek’s artistic contribution to the quintessential Pulitzer style. Included in the exhibition are more than 35 original watercolor and gouache design drawings by Zuzek, alongside finished screen-printed textiles and some of the fashions that made them famous. The works on view include ten drawings recently acquired for the museum’s collection through a gift from the Key West Hand Print Fabrics archive, now privately owned.
Zuzek’s designs showcase her creative treatment of subjects ranging from mythical creatures to cosmology to the flora and fauna of the Florida Keys. Her palette was typically naturalistic, employing both the brilliant hues of the tropical flowers and the subtle browns, ochres, and grays used in her renderings of animals. When used as fabrics for the the Pulitzer collections, Zuzek’s designs were printed in the beyond-bright, vivid colors the brand is famous for. The exhibition will demonstrate the process of translating an artist’s rendering to fabric, and ultimately fashion, through silkscreen printing.
On view Thursday, June 10 2021 through Sunday, January 2 2022