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A display of ‘articles of clothing, for immediate, personal, or domestic use’: fashion at the great exhibition

This chapter makes use of recently digitized and recatalogued 19th century sources, evidencing the construction of a gendered view in the assimilation of fashion in exhibition form. It offers a novel way to establish reception studies in fashion history via the consideration of material culture and surviving accounts published as journalism. It points to the cultural and economic significance of more recent fashion exhibitions as an articulation of the joint impact of the knowledge economy and the fashion industry. The chapter is relevant to fashion history and theory, history of exhibitions, art historical methodology, reception studies, gender and women’s studies, theories of the gaze and the look, and histories of vision.