Fall Forum – Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600-1900

2025 FALL FORUM

Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600-1900

Friday-Saturday, September 12-13, 2025
Deerfield, Massachusetts and on Zoom

Fashion has garnered great interest in recent decades and research into the history of clothing has yielded new insights into culturally embedded ideas around self-styling and the body. Yet, few studies have explored New England’s relationship with styling the body and fashionable dress. 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’s 2025 Fall Forum Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600-1900 will convene a group of experts in the field to explore the rich history of dressing the body and self-presentation in this region.

The forum will begin on Friday with demonstrations of historic dressmaking and tours of the exhibition and library, 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, Curator of Costume and Textiles at the DAR Museum in Washington, DC, who will share her insights into the diary of Sylvia Lewis Tyler and what it can tell us about shopping, making, [re] making, fashionability, and thrift in New England clothing.

Saturday’s speakers include Jennifer Swope of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, David E. Lazaro of The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Lynne Z. Basset, freelance curator of fashion and textiles, Chloe Chapin, PhD, Assistant Director of Course Development, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University, Kristina M. Hanson, PhD, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Laura Johnson, PhD, Curator of Costumes and Textiles, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute. Kristina Haugland, independent researcher, Emily Whitted, ABD, University of Massachusetts, and Livy Scott, PhD candidate at MIT. Saturday will include a buffet lunch with free time to walk the old Main Street and view open-hearth cooking demonstrations and 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.