With our annual Art of Motion Picture Costume Design exhibition closing this weekend, the FIDM Museum is looking ahead to coming attractions. This summer will bring to our galleries historic avant-garde fashion, Scarlett O'Hara-style hoopskirts, and fashionable flowers in permanent bloom.

Advertising Illustration
David Croland, c. 1992
Gift of Joan Beer Damask & Donald Damask
SC2013.1250.325

Opening June 11 at the Los Angeles campus, Inspired Eye: The Donald and Joan Damask Design Collection at the FIDM Museum celebrates Donald and Joan Damask's important gift of fashion, world dress, photography, sketches, and art books to the FIDM Museum. The Damasks, who work in luxury marketing and fashion design, have devoted their lives to creating and collecting outstanding design. 

Evening Dress
British, 1820s
Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection
FIDM Museum Proposed Acquisition
L2010.3.3

Two additional shows will feature highlights from The Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection. In Los Angeles, Fleurs: Botanicals in Dress from the Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection (opening July 18) will examine how botanicals have grown around the human body for centuries through trompe l’oeil woven petals, shade-embroidered leaves, and dimensional silk bouquet applications.

 

Detail of L2010.3.3

Fleurs will replace Opulent Art: 18th Century Dress from The Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection, which is on view until July 2nd in the museum's Larson Gallery. Fundraising is underway to keep the Larson Collection at FIDM permanently, offering you a chance to be a part of fashion history, having your name perpetually included in the object's credit line as well as receiving a tax deduction.

 

Day Gown (detail)
British, 1860s
Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection
FIDM Museum Proposed Acquisition
L2011.13.337AB

On FIDM's Orange County campus, Hooped: 1860s Dress from the Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection (opening July 25, by appointment only) will revisit the decade when women’s dress expanded to enormous circumferences thanks to hoopskirts made of graduated sprung-steel rings held together with vertical cotton tapes. This infrastructure suspended many yards of fabric around the waist without the need for multiple starched petticoats, freeing the legs and creating an elegant sway in motion. Watch the FIDM Museum website for special events related to all three of these beautiful exhibitions!