Approaching America: Myth, Dress, and Belonging 

American fashion constructs a story about who belongs in the national imagination. What is a myth, if not a story worn so often it starts to feel like fact? This exhibition asks what happens when that story confronts its own contradictions: when American myths are pressed up against the labor, land, histories, and people that make them wearable in the first place. Visitors move through the exhibition the way a newcomer might, from idyllic first impressions toward a more complicated understanding of America.

They arrive in search of freedom, clutching onto a dream curated in their mind before they arrive at our front door, passing through the country’s most familiar archetypes—the pioneer, the patriot, the self-made success—before those images complicate and unravel. What emerges is a more contested, more nuanced America than its emblems let on—one stitched with the visitors' own cultures and identities. A complex and ever-changing culture, imbued with stories whispered through the walls as people have come and gone. This exhibition brings together garments selected by different curators to show how American dress expresses, creates, obscures, and ultimately remakes the myths the country tells about itself.

Curatorial Argument: Approaching America reveals how individuals encounter, challenge, and reshape the myths that define America.

Combined Themes 
Made in the USA
Made by whom, under what conditions, and at what cost?
Traditional Americana, national symbols, craft and production, labor, material, industry, and the construction of an “American-made” identity.
Imagining the American Hero
Who gets turned into an American archetype? 
Patriotism, heroism, celebrity and stardom, glamour, aspiration, and the figures through whom American ideals and dreams become visible and wearable.
Redefining the frontier 
Where and what is the “frontier,” and whose history does that mythology depend upon?
Expansion, exploration, reinvention, and the point at which idealized national myths begin to encounter the histories and people they obscure.
Wearing America: A dissenting identity 
Who gets to wear American identity against dominant meanings?
Protest, subcultures, resistance, alternative identities, and dress as a means of challenging the ideals established in the earlier sections.
Self-made 
Who gets to claim self-invention, and what does the myth conceal?
Success, individualism, aspiration, class/mobility, entrepreneurship, but also the possibility of remaking “America” through one’s own identity and experience.