Virtual exhibit looks back at fashion worn in the home

Private and public fashion styles have blurred as they morph to maximize comfort during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That's the theme of a new University of Alberta virtual exhibit Innerwear: Liminal Dressing 1820-2020, assembled by material culture professor Anne Bissonnette and her fourth-year human ecology students. The exhibit explores fashion worn in the home over the past 200 years and explores how past trends have influenced how we behave today.

“Fashion has always reacted to people's needs and people's lifestyle and while designers shape the world they're also shaped by the world,” Bissonnette said. “This is part of what we were investigating: how does the idea of dressing at home, this stage that is the home, how has it changed, what were people wearing in the past and what did it express about them.”

The Victorians, for example, had accepted the home could be a public stage and had the concept of “undress.”

“The state of undress is one where you're supposed to be seen in a garment, so a dressing gown for example, but who sees you, is the crux of all of this,” Bissonnette said. “We tend to forget that our homes can be at times private spaces, but at other times, public spaces.”

The COVID-19 pandemic, working from home and the rise of video conferencing has highlighted the blending of public and private fashion, where, for example, an individual may wear business attire on top, but sweatpants on the bottom. There's also the concept of comfort and how it can be physiological in the way it allows us to move, physical in the sense of the clothes being soft, as well as psychological, she said.

In the midst of a traumatic event, people are drastically thinking different about how to work from home and fashion reflects that.