May 2019 – Fashion, Textile & Costume Librarians

New Books: Spring 2019

Spring is here! Here are a few new Spring releases:

Yves Saint Laurent: a Biography, Laurence Benaim, Rizzoli Ex Libris March 2019

Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, and Murdered Through History Alison Matthews David and Serah-Marie McMahon, OwlKids April 2019
Middle Grade Non-Fiction

The Indian Textile Sourcebook, Avalon Fotheringham, Thames and Hudson; April 2019

Putting On the Dog: the Animal Origins of What We Wear Melissa Kwasny, Trinity University Press April 2019

Costume Institute Exhibition + Gala

The Metropolitan Museum of Arts’ Costume Institute’s 2019 exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion opens May 9 and runs through September 8. The exhibit showcases hundreds of objects from the seventeenth century through today. Just what is camp? Watch the Met’s video on the exhibition to find out.

The exhibition theme is framed around Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp (1964). You can freely download the essay from Monoskop. Sontag includes clothing as a large part of camp, “emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.” Observer reviewed the exhibit and highlights some of the campiest of costumes included.

Of course, you can also see how celebrities interpreted the camp theme at last night’s Gala. Vogue and CNN have plenty of photos from the red carpet. Find out what camp means to Billy Porter.

Follow the hashtag #MetCamp and get a copy of the catalog for your library!