The Fashion Institute of Technology, "Uniformity"

The Fashion Institute of Technology ( FIT) in New York   is  located   in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.  It was founded in 1944  and is ranked among the top five fashion schools in the world.  The Museum at FIT, founded in 1969   includes collections of clothing, textiles, and accessories.   There are three galleries in the Museum.

The lower level gallery is devoted to special exhibitions. The Fashion and Textile History Gallery on the main floor features a rotating selection of approximately 200 historically and artistically significant objects from the Museum’s permanent collection. 

 There are now two interesting    exhibitions in the museum. The first one is "Uniformity". Uniforms are in fact everywhere in American society.  The exhibit  features more than 70 objects from the museum's permanent collection — many of which have never been on view before.

The exhibit is  organized  thematically and  is focused  on four categories of uniforms: Military, work, school and sports.

Though military touches are a common theme in fashion, Uniformity went   even further by paying close attention to the uniforms worn, for example, by chauffeurs in the 1930s, a maids in the 1950s, and nurses during World War I and II.
Items in the exhibit  range from a fireman's uniform from the 1950s and a contemporary schoolgirl uniform from Japan to a U.S. Army uniform from World War I and a football jersey circa 1920.


The  assistant curator of costume Emma McClendon told Vogue.com about the exhibition “Uniforms are all about control, keeping tradition, keeping everything standardized, and creating a uniform aesthetic across every single person, whereas fashion is increasingly about self-expression, breaking the rules, and having a sort of power of creativity in the design.


 They seem like they could never really go together, yet we constantly see uniforms coming up in fashion and getting used by fashion designers in a lot of different ways.”
Uniformity is  on view   through November 19th and it is free for public.