Notes
1. Beker was also credited as an Honorary Exhibition Chair of Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting, though her role was more symbolic.
2. Just before the exhibition’s launch, Laing announced his line’s closure due to high fashion’s industrial pressures (Beker Citation2014b).
3. In winter 2015, someone used white spray paint to cover a rainbow sticker in the window of Trove, a west Toronto boutique that marked itself as an LGBT- and LGBTQ-friendly business. The white paint on the windows took on an unexpected connotation in this context.
4. In an unfair coincidence, a tartan McQueen dress was included in Fashion Blows.
5. Information on Chalayan referenced critical research, but the team misspelled curator Pamela Golbin’s name as Pamela Goblin. I think also here of Doreen Kondo’s (Citation1997) detailed analysis of Kawakubo and Yamamoto’s practices.
6. In 2011, The Room held When Tommy Met Anna, an exhibition of street-style photographs Canadian photographer Tommy Ton had taken of Italian fashion editor Anna Dello Russo. In 2012, it commissioned an installation from Buenos Aires-based Canadian artist Nigel Nolan.
7. I have edited The Room’s promotional materials and benefit from some knowledge of its mandate. I was not however involved in this exhibition.
8. I draw description from designer credits on placards at the foot of each mannequin.
9. Though spectators could stand close to several pieces in Politics of Fashion | Fashion of Politics, that exhibition still placed DO NOT TOUCH signs throughout the space.
10. Politics of Fashion | Fashion of Politics used the same tactic on a mannequin wearing performer Klaus Nomi’s 1970s tuxedo. Beker and Nickleson revealed during the curators’ tour that Nomi wore the wig prior to his death in 1983 from AIDS-related complications—this fact made it far more haunting.
11. Beker mentioned the strain in McQueen’s relationship with Blow in audio materials that she contributed to Politics of Fashion | Fashion of Politics.
12. An Internet search for similar fashion lines for wheelchair users did find Rollitex, a line with an urban aesthetic, made in Berlin (rollitex.co.uk).
13. Sadly, Turnbull died on May 10, 2015, after a brief illness.
14. New York fashion designer Carrie Hammer sent wheelchair user Dr. Danielle Sheypuk down her runway at Autumn/Winter 2014 New York Fashion Week (Spencer Citation2014).
15. Matthews David received funds from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
16. Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith (2014) praised the Bata Shoe Museum for holding an exhibition that contains “actual historical research and assertion” and incorporates the more “revolutionary” aspects of academia, despite its corporate ownership.
17. Smith makes a similar observation.
18. I think here of Isabella Blow’s frustration at her harsh treatment from the fashion business. Near the end of her life, Blow wore a Victorian mourning ring. In 2006, the Indian press also referred to her as the “Mad Hatter” based on her appearances in Treacy’s creations (Helmore Citation2007).
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Rebecca Halliday
Rebecca Halliday is a PhD Candidate in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation examines the nature and transmission of the contemporary fashion show in a mediatized culture. Her research has appeared in TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies.