Denver Art Museum Opens New Fashion Exhibit Conversation Pieces

In the Denver Art Museum’s fashion archive, some garments hang from padded hangers, while others, like beaded dresses and knitwear, lie flat to preserve their quality. It’s dark and quiet inside the storage facility, but when DAM Director and Curator of Avenir Institute of Textile Arts and Fashion Jill D’Alessandro pays the archive a visit, she can almost hear the pieces of clothing talking to each other across styles, cultures and eras.

That’s how she and her team came up with the title Conversation Pieces for the latest large-scale fashion exhibit at the DAM, which features more than sixty unique designs from the museum’s fashion archives — most of which have never been displayed before.

Denver Art Museum Has a Growing Fashion Collection

D’Alessandro estimates that “Conversation Pieces” accounts for about 15 percent of the museum’s total fashion collection, a number that can be hard to quantify when individual pieces of an outfit, plus accessories, are considered.

In recent years, major donations from the family of Veronique and Gregory Peck, New York resident Susan Gutfreund and New York financier Ricardo Zaragoza have grown the DAM’s fashion collection.

“We were thinking, ‘What are they saying to each other?’” D’Alessandro says of the pieces in the exhibit, which opened February 15.

Conversation Pieces explores this by pairing different garments in ways that are expected (a Balenciaga with a Dior) and unexpected (an 1896 House of Worth ballgown with a 2020 Rick Owens gown, for instance). It features everything from designs by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent to Yohji Yamamoto and Ceil Chapman. Some dresses are classically timeless, while others are futuristic sculptures for the body.

A Window Into Denver’s Fashion History

The pieces range in style and era, but there’s an unexpected connectedness to them. One jacket sports a very mod ’60s psychedelic flower pattern, but it’s from the ’20s. Another fur-lined ensemble looks like a ’70s Penny Lane coat, but it’s from the 1800s. Many of the dresses from decades ago seem like they could be found on any modern-day red carpet.

“What I like about the collection here at the DAM is that there are donations from numerous donors,” Alessandro says. “It’s not just one woman’s wardrobe. When you have collections with more donors, you get more diversity.” And more context, too.

The exhibit is a window into Denver’s fashion history, from the city’s pioneering donors to the department stores that once championed American fashion design, such as Neusteters. The DAM started collecting fashion in the 1940s and had an active program through the ’80s, before taking a hiatus and revitalizing the department in 2015 with funding from the Avenir Institute, D’Alessandro says. Because of that hiatus, D’Alessandro describes the collection as “refined,” but touts it for its impressive amount of American-designed clothing, which is rare in museum fashion collections.

There are even dresses from the ’30s and ’40s, which can be hard to come across because they’re from the Depression and World War II era. “The war years were a great time for American design; we weren’t going to Europe for fashion, so American designers really started to shine,” D’Alessandro says.

Conversation Pieces displays an afternoon dress donated by May Wilfley, an inventor who came from a prominent Denver family. The piece dates to between 1905 and 1910 and is an aesthetic dress, demonstrating a shift from a time when women were heavily corseted and wore extensive underpinnings to something more free-flowing and artistic. A silk evening wrap from 1935 by Italian designer Maria Monaci Gallenga, once worn by Mrs. Thomas Patterson Campbell of the Rocky Mountain News family, is also on display.

“Both were from women who were progressive thinkers of their time,” D’Alessandro says. “We knew to research these donors because of what they were wearing. We knew all about Mrs. Wilfey’s adventures because of the Rocky Mountain News. Early on, (the News) had female reporters, which was rare for the time, and the mother and sisters of the Rocky Mountain News family were very influential in the Women’s Rights Movement, as were a lot of the female reporters. We know the history of aesthetic dress and the kind of women who wore aesthetic dress, so it led us to these really rich narratives about Denver.”

Inspiring Fashion in Modern-Day Colorado

Today, Denver is inundated with “Colorado casual”: Patagonia, workout wear, beanies and sweatpants. It’s a major departure from the Denver of decades ago, when department stores held runway shows and commissioned one-of-a-kind designs, and well-to-do residents brought fashion back from France and other countries.

D’Alessandro hopes modern-day Denver residents who see Conversation Pieces will be inspired to lean into the city’s strengths, such as workwear, Western wear and layers. After all, it’s been said that fashion is the most personal of the decorative arts.

“I think you learn about yourself,” D’Alessandro says. “It impacts us on a very personal level. It’s reflective of our times, it’s reflective of how we present ourselves to the world.” She adds that she finds fashion fascinating because it’s multi-disciplinary — there are many angles from which it can be studied.

And Conversation Pieces does feel incredibly personal, like walking into a room full of stories and secrets. But the garments don’t gatekeep. Listen closely, and you might hear what they have to say.

Conversation Pieces is open through October 11 at the Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Ave Parkway; the exhibit is included in general admission.