As part of the University of Vermont’s Research Week, history students in professor Abigail McGowan’s Fashion’s Empires class showcase their work investigating articles of clothing they’ve pulled from the Fleming Museum of Art’s closets. Along with Wednesday presentations, the group has created a pop-up exhibition of artifacts ranging from a 19th-century Chinese shoe meant for bound feet to photos taken in the 1930s of Indigenous Hopi Nation women with high-fashion hair. Through Saturday, visitors learn about them from student-written summaries and see these rarely displayed objects, many of them lusciously handmade. “Everybody thinks about fashion,” McGowan said in a phone call. “You can use it as an entry point into all these really complicated questions: of politics and economics and identity and materiality and gender and all kinds of things.” Those abstract ideas, she said, “become so much more meaningful when you can look at them through a particular individual object.”
‘Fashion’s Empires’ Pop-Up Exhibit On view through Saturday, April 18, at Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, in Burlington. Student presentations, Wednesday, April 15, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
This article appears in April 15 • 2026.
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