Fall Forum – Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600-1900
September 12, 2025, 9:30 am - September 13, 2025, 5:00 pm
Historic Deerfield 80 Old Main Street Deerfield, MA 01342 + Google Map
Category: Lectures Seminars
2025 FALL FORUM
Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600-1900
Friday-Saturday, September 12-13, 2025
Deerfield, Massachusetts
Organized in conjunction with the current exhibition, Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes from the Ideal to the Real (on view in the Flynt Center), Historic Deerfield will convene a group of experts in the field to explore the rich history of dressing the body and self-presentation through the specific New England lens.
The forum will begin on Friday with historic clothing demonstrations and exhibition and library tours, followed by a welcome reception and the keynote address The Teen, Her BFF, Her Uncle, and Some Tailors: Documents with Clues to New England Fashion by Alden O’Brien, DAR Museum, Washington, DC. The talk will examine the diary of Sylvia Lewis Tyler, along with other documents and garments, for what they can tell us about shopping, making, [re] making, fashionability, and thrift in New England clothing.
Saturday will feature a series of talks on 18th and 19th-century clothing and foundation garments in New England by dress historians Jennifer Swope of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, David E. Lazaro of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, and Lynne Z. Basset of Historic Northampton. Saturday will include a luncheon and free time to walk the old Main Street and view historic houses.
Historic Deerfield is home to one of the finest collections of New England architecture, interiors, and decorative arts, including 18th and 19th- century clothing. Historic dress was a particular interest of Historic Deerfield’s founder, Helen Flynt (1895-1986). In the 1940s she actively acquired high-style European dress as well as clothing made and worn locally in New England. The textile and clothing collection now boasts 8,000 objects including important examples of fashionable 18th – 19th century European, English, and American dresses and suits, the undergarments that were worn with them, and stylish accessories such as shoes, hats, gloves, purses, and aprons. Over the course of the last fifty years, Historic Deerfield has also amassed related materials, from fashion plates to original account books, which document the role of fashion in the lives of New Englanders.
Registration information and a detailed schedule of the Fall Forum will posted here in June.