The Goldstein Gallery recently received gifts totaling $14,000 from two local retailers to help fund the “Fashion for the Millennium” exhibit.
The exhibit is part of the College of Human Ecology’s centennial celebration, which will begin in January 2000. The gifts of $10,000 and $4,000 came from retailers Dayton’s and Target, respectively.
“We wanted to be involved in the art exhibit because it involves fashion and is a high-profile exhibit,” said Heather Faulkner, an employee in the communications department for Dayton’s.
The Goldstein Gallery — which is in the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel — will exhibit fashion trends of the last 100 years and explain the forces that influenced those trends. The exhibit will also incorporate how the retail clothing industry has evolved during the past century.
Gallery Director Lindsay Shen said the items will range from early 19th century dresses from Minneapolis dressmakers to fashions from the 1980s and 1990s. Shen said it was possible that some of the dresses were purchased from Dayton’s and then donated to the gallery by the public.
The garments will be displayed on mannequins rather than worn by models. Shen said once the pieces of clothing belong to the gallery, they become artifacts, rather than clothing. A catalog of scholarly articles, detailing the trends in fashion of the last 100 years, will accompany the exhibit.
The centennial celebration will last all year and commemorate the school’s first offering of college-level classes, which were home economics courses. Originally housed in the Department of Agriculture, the school had its first graduate in 1904.
Throughout the century, the college added schools — such as the School of Social Work in 1983 — and the college took on a name change from the College of Home Economics to the College of Human Ecology in 1990.
The Goldstein exhibit will be one of several celebrations among student organizations, schools in the college, the gallery and alumni of the college.
The planning for the centennial celebration has been going on for about a year-and-a-half, said centennial committee member, Lori Mulberg, human ecology alumni coordinator.