Fashion

Women’s History Museum Makes Clothing for Surviving New York

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2 weeks ago

September 6, 2024

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Women’s History Museum Makes Clothing for Surviving New York

There is a Women’s History Museum in Virginia, and then there is one in New York. I found out about the first when I was trying to understand what the latter was, after seeing it tagged in a handful of photos on social media last February during Fashion Week. In the pictures, models wore fur tails and veils with live butterflies trapped inside; there were no glass display cases or exhibits. As with so many things in New York, Women’s History Museum is not what it appears to be. It’s not even a museum. It’s part art collective, part fashion line, founded by friends Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan.

Their first collection in 2015 featured a hair-comb bra. Their show in February was their return to the runway after a four-year hiatus: Models walked down a runway in a building on Wall Street wearing wigs covered in pills and playsuits made of meat. Women’s History Museum’s most recent show took place Thursday, a day before New York Fashion Week officially began, and was titled “Indestructible Doll Head.” It consisted of 27 looks like a bra affixed with taxidermy pigeons and heels made to resemble animal paws.

The show notes described New York as a city of gods: “Freedom chokes, the Subways scream, coming to a halt while the birds laugh, remembering the feeling of a weathered palm, being held, two degrees from oblivion.” They painted a scene in which we walk among these divinities, “[w]hispering in cigarette smoke something about the bridge and how it crosses us from the inside and makes us want to change the song playing. Over and over, a red echo, a blue flame, a thousand wicks lit for everything we longed for, everything we wanted to become, along the way. The rearview burns and illuminates the cracks, clothed in the word ‘shattered,’ the gods see the martyrs they abandoned, glowing.”

Don Ashby

Women’s History Museum Spring/Summer 2025

womens history museum, spring 2025, new york city, september 5 2024

Don Ashby

Women’s History Museum Spring/Summer 2025

McGowan and Barringer’s goal with the collection was to continue to explore the theme of anthropomorphisms inspired by New York City. They see New Yorkers not just as people, but as an entire breed of their own, “crucified on crosses made of their own dreams.” New Yorkers not only endure but also become.

Don Ashby

Women’s History Museum Spring/Summer 2025

There’s a darkness to the clothing the two design, as if everything is meant to be worn not for fun but when you’re in survival mode—a feeling New Yorkers know well. McGowan and Barringer see the clothing they make as both armor and an expression of love; it shields as much as it reveals.

They use harsh materials like broken glass, sharp teeth, and skunk fur alongside more traditional fabrics to channel this idea of a primal exhale. That aesthetic posed a sharp contrast to the other happening of the evening, Ralph Lauren’s glitzy and fabulously New York show in the Hamptons, but together they both felt like two ends of the same spectrum representing a city, complex in its duality and beautiful contradictions.

Tara Gonzalez is the Senior Fashion Editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Previously, she was the style writer at InStyle, founding commerce editor at Glamour, and fashion editor at Coveteur.