“For Better and For Worse: Sixteen Decades of Wedding Wear at Vassar,” was held in the spring of 2013. The digital exhibition includes photographs from the exhibition, three-dimensional rotating views of featured objects (objectVRs), personal photographs and stories shared by Vassar community members, a video slideshow of photographs with highlights from our oral history interviews, and the full length oral history interviews, with transcripts.
View the exhibit at http://vcomeka.com/vccc/exhibits/show/fbfw
This exhibition of wedding wear from the Vassar community showcased items from Vassar’s research collection of historic clothing, housed in the Drama Department. The exhibition explored changing views of marriage over the last 160 years, including views on marriage equality. In 2007, Vassar received a donation of four wedding dresses from the same Vassar family—three generations of dresses. This exhibition included these four dresses, plus a fifth dress on loan to represent the fourth generation, as well as other wedding wear and photographs collected over the years. Additional items loaned by Vassar community members allowed us also to explore same-sex, inter-faith, and inter-racial marriages, along with issues of divorce. This was one of several exhibitions over the years in Vassar’s Palmer Gallery for which I was the Curator.