Jessica Herman

Columbia College's new exhibition "Shaken and Stirred: Dress and Cultural History of the Cocktail Era" reminds us that there's more to a dress than the dress, even a great dress.

"We rarely see the historical implications of why we do certain things," says one of the students, Myiesha Gordon. We're giving people an opportunity to think about what we're showing, not just in an aesthetic sense but also to think about what the dresses meant to the people who owned them and made them. There's a cycle with everything."

Curated by a group of mostly graduate students in the Arts, Entertainment and Media Management program as their final class project, the show follows the life of the cocktail party, from its inception in the 1920s to its heyday in the fifties and then again in the eighties. The dresses on display, gleaned from the school's Fashion Study Collection, represent the peak cocktail-party eras.

Informed by a variety of primary and secondary resources---from their grandmothers' own etiquette guides and cookbooks and ads found in vintage copies of Time and Life magazines--the exhibition explores the dress's social, cultural and political implications. Gordon describes how the super-feminine and demure look of the fifties mirrors the role of the housewife: "Be neat and be pretty." In contrast the flamboyant, excessive dresses from the eighties, she says, reflect the play of power and sexuality that emerge with woman's new place in the workforce.

So what should viewers expect? "I hope they will think about not only the beauty and interesting elements of the dresses but elements of women's history and where we've come since the 1950s," says Gordon.

(2005-12-13)

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