Avenir Museum Curator and Assistant Professor Katie Knowles, has been selected by juried process to present her field of research and scholarship at a colloquium entitled Fashion Unraveled: Memory, Wear, and Imperfection in Dress at the renowned Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City on September 29.

The Story of a Calico Skirt

In an afternoon session entitled ‘Traces & Tears: Wear & Object Biography’, Knowles will deliver her talk “Altered; Faded; Bleeding; Surviving: An African American Family Story of Slavery and Freedom as Told by a Calico Skirt“. The skirt in question is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., and Knowles studied it as an object of material culture on several occasions while working on her dissertation and working as a cataloger at NMAAHC, before beginning her position at CSU in July 2017.  Her research included speaking with the descendants who inherited and became family stewards of the skirt over several successive generations before its donation to the Smithsonian.

The Avenir Museum is part of the Department of Design and Merchandising in the College of Health and Human Sciences.