If you've been (or if you still are...) in a hard Coronavirus lockdown, you may have been missing being able to practice your favourite sport. But, in between training at home, venturing to go out maybe running in a park or eagerly awaiting for your gym to reopen in a couple of weeks' time (that will apply to countries such as Italy), you can still dream about sports while looking at fashionable designs via a dedicated exhibition.
"Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960", an event set to explore how women's sporting attire developed, that was going to open this May at FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Los Angeles.
While it has been postponed till 2021 (when it will go on tour to several institutions across the United States), you can still have a little preview on the site of the American Federation of Arts (AFA) that will support the event.
The exhibition will allow visitors to discover 65 fully accessorized ensembles and a selection of sport-related accessories that cover a 160-year period, all of them from the FIDM Museum collection.
Women started practicing outdoor activities from the 19th century and this meant that their attires had to be radically altered to allow freedom of movement.
These garments may look very different from the bright and bold modern designs in technical textiles that improve our sport performances nowadays, but some of the accessories and garments that started marking women's participation in the sporting world as athletes were codified with the designs included in this event.
The subtitle of the event - Outdoor Girls - is inspired by the printed script on a wool scarf from the mid-to-late '40s depicting women engaged in thirteen different sports, from golf and horseback riding to ice skating, and tennis.
The exhibition will include ensembles worn for these sports plus for over forty other outdoor activities over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. So there will be a chance to see ensembles for travelling, calisthenics, motorcycling and promenading. Alongside well-known sportswear brands, such as Keds, Pendleton, and Spalding, there will also be stylish designer pieces by Coco Chanel, Claire McCardell and Jean Patou.
What is striking about the selection we can already see online is the fact that curators paid attention at the aspect of performing a sport, but also at doing it in style, so you could argue that this is an event that looks at fashion and function.
In some cases such as croquet, the ensembles actually ended up preventing mobility and preserving certain social conventions; in others protection was emphasised at times with rather comical results (the ice-skating ensemble wouldn't look out of place in a Comme des Garçons collection inspired by the theme of body morphing...).
There are garments characterised by bold colours and patterns like a cycling suit from 1890s that comprises a jacket with leg-of-mutton sleeves, trousers and even spats in an optically mesmerising green and pink floral print.
Little by little, as it became more acceptable to expose one's skin, garments became more pratical and dynamic as proved by the swimsuits from the '50s on.
Ensembles for cycling, motoring and flying reveal instead a clear derivation from men's athletic gear.
So these garments help us understanding a bit better how women's wear started opening up to more masculine elements, while reminding us at the same time that through these outfits women conquered other spaces - open roads and skies.
There is one motorcycle outfit from the '30s for example that calls to mind the attire of Dave Stevens' dynamic Rocketeer, but it wouldn't look out of place in our days as well and with its gloves, goggles and super wide belt shaping the silhouette, makes us think about our own accessories in this Coronavirus emergency (you could definitely use that waist cinching belt to look stylish while storing at the same time the essential things you need to go out shopping for groceries nowadays, from bank card and smartphone to face mask and protective gloves...).
If you don't want to wait till 2021 to see this event and would like to see more pictures of these wonderful sporting ensembles, you can check out the 344-page catalogue that should be released in partnership with the AFA and Delmonico-Prestel in late summer.
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