Costume Studies
Framing Fashion Fantasies: Windows Into ...
January 18 – March 9, 2025
Broadway Windows*Closing Reception:
March 7, 5–7PM at 80 Washington Square East
Framing Fashion Fantasies: Windows Into… critically engages with the fantasies constructed by the fashion industry, designers, and consumers. The group exhibition critiques and celebrates how fashion creates aspirational dreams and unsettling realities, simultaneously producing and deconstructing the notion of an idealized fantasy.
Broadway Windows – 80WSE's satellite space – is a series of five street-level windows located at the corner of Broadway and East 10th Street. The installations can be viewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The presentation is structured around six central themes: nostalgia, otherness, escapism, the American dream, the myth, and the monster. Each window allows viewers to peek into the world of fashion from a new perspective, inviting them to reflect on fashion’s role in shaping cultural narratives, personal identity, and societal values.
Works on display range include archival objects, contemporary runway ensembles, mass-produced, quotidian garments and span almost a century, with the earliest object dating to circa 1935.
A panel discussion, “The State of Independent Fashion Retail”, will be held on Monday, February 24th at NYU’s Barney Building (34 Stuyvesant Street), and an interactive, multimedia discussion with the exhibition curators will be held on Monday, March 3, also at the Barney Building. Event details forthcoming.
Exhibition Credits: Framing Fashion Fantasies: Windows Into… is curated by the NYU Costume Studies Masters Candidates: Zoé Berteloot, Haley Brown, Kelly Flynn, Marissa Motley, Gillani Peets, and Erin Shaw, under the direction of Stephanie Kramer, Senior Research Associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Scott McPartland, Sak's Fifth Avenue Window Display, 5th Avenue
Image courtesy of Scott McPartland/Archive Photos/via Getty Images