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Returning to Her Roots
An MFIT curator plans an exhibition in Mexico
BY IVANA CEPEDA ’10
As senior curator of education and public programs at The Museum at FIT, Tanya Meléndez-Escalante, Museum Studies: Costume and Textiles ’04, connects exhibition curators and fashion designers to create dynamic learning experiences. For a recent exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ) in Guadalajara, Mexico, though, she seized the opportunity to curate the show herself.
Her show, Julia y Renata: Moda y Transformación (Julia y Renata: Fashion and Transformation), tells the story of Julia and Renata Franco, Guadalajara-born sisters and designers of the label Julia y Renata, which plays with silhouettes and shapes, structure and drape. Guadalajara, the second largest city in Mexico, is a creative hub—home to architects, designers, musicians, painters, and curators.
Meléndez-Escalante has admired the Franco sisters’ avant-garde, feminist approach for a long time. “They believe you can wear what you want and determine what is sexy and what is not,” she says. “They have been very influential for other young Mexican designers.”
To capture their artistry, garments were displayed flat on the walls, like paintings. Others were hung from a cubic wooden structure.
The exhibition, which ran from November 6, 2020, to February 14, 2021, was organized and designed entirely by women—which Meléndez-Escalante calls “a happy coincidence,” indicative of the growing number of women in leadership positions across industries.
The collaboration came about in 2019, after MeléndezEscalante, a native of Mexico City, interviewed the Francos as part of a panel discussion. MAZ Museum Director Vivianna Kuri proposed that she curate an exhibition about Julia y Renata.
“In my current role at MFIT, I hadn’t done installation in a really long time,” she says. “I forgot how much I loved it, being able to touch garments and be hands-on.”
Mounting an exhibition in a pandemic presented many challenges. Garment selection was done through Zoom, and garments on loan could be accepted only from local lenders and collectors, as they feared that pieces could not be shipped in time. While MeléndezEscalante oversaw the final stages of the installation in Guadalajara, a curfew severely limited the hours the team could work. Everything shut down at 7 pm, and people couldn’t leave their homes at all on the weekends.
Her perspective remains consistent across her work as an educator and an exhibition curator. “I am always thinking about the person who is new to the subject matter as well as the scholar. You want to educate, inform, and delight. It is important to give everyone points of entry, make the content accessible, giving people interesting bits that spark their curiosity and make them want more.”
Above: Renata Franco, Julia Franco, and Tanya MeléndezEscalante celebrated a successful exhibition opening in November. Below left: Meléndez dressing mannequins for the show.
Itzel Hernández/courtesy of MAZ
FROM BRICKS TO CLICKS
In the midst of a challenging 2020, a Florida boutique transitions to online
BY VANESSA MACHIR
Courtesy of Lilac and Lilies For many kids, summer vacation means lazy days. Michelle DiMarco, however, spent her childhood breaks learning how to be a boss. “I grew up seeing how a small business operates,” she says of her family’s lawn mower repair and retail company. “My mom would pick us up and we would go to the store. We never really went away to camp.”
After college, DiMarco got her start in retail working for companies like Wet Seal and Liz Claiborne, but she envisioned a more independent future. “I could never see myself working for anyone else, in part because of my family background,” she says.
She enrolled in FIT’s Creative Enterprise Ownership program in 2008 and opened her Fort Lauderdale boutique, Lilac and Lilies, in 2009. Her merchandise reflects her attention to quality and trends without sacrificing affordability; nearly 90 percent of her items retail for under $100. She carries both established brands and Etsy finds, like necklaces made out of vintage Chanel buttons.
DiMarco’s original plan was to concentrate on e-commerce sales, but she launched her brickand-mortar location and website simultaneously. “What took a lot of my time and energy was the storefront,” she says. “I ended up turning the website into a blog featuring inspiring women, and then we kept on growing the store.”
During the COVID-19 lockdown, however, “I had time to take a step back and assess the direction I wanted to go in,” she says. “The universe was telling me to focus on e-commerce … and I was ready to do it.”
DiMarco converted her storefront into an appointment-only showroom and is expanding her website to reach a larger market. Previously, she featured about 60 percent of products on her site, and the majority of sales came from her storefront. Now she’s working with a small team to transition her full inventory online while also overseeing photoshoots, marketing, and public relations.
Part of a successful transition is improved inventory management and more compressed scheduling. Previously, she’d shoot product and then have descriptive copy written. “By the time an item was ready [for online listing], I had already sold three to four of that item in the storefront.” But now, she ensures that the description is written in advance so that the listing can go online the day an item arrives.
To support sales, she’s recently introduced a rewards program where customers receive redeemable points for shopping or even sharing purchases on Facebook. Another popular addition is “WineDown Wednesday” on Instagram and Facebook Live. DiMarco and her manager feature different products and promotions (while drinking wine, of course), and offer 20 percent off purchases for 24 hours.
She’s also launching an affiliate program. Applicants, once approved, get commissions on the products they sell. “We don’t necessarily have to ship them products. They can take images from our website or we can send them a Dropbox link of items to feature during that week.”
BEST SELLER
DiMarco says her ideal customer “wants to look put together, but yet also needs [her wardrobe] to be functional.” Pictured here are the popular Shore Transitional Romper and Buddy Love Snakeskin Maxi.
MAX MEYER: A HIDDEN HISTORY
An online exhibition about one of FIT’s founders shows how French fashions crossed the Atlantic
BY ALEX JOSEPH ’15
In the first decades of the 20th century, French fashion reigned supreme, and New York followed its dictates. A new virtual exhibition sheds light on this relationship, and the early career of one of FIT’s founders, Max Meyer (1876–1953). Meyer’s family immigrated to New York from Alsace, France, when he was a boy. When he was a teenager, his brother-in-law, women’s coat and suit manufacturer Abraham Beller, hired him to sweep snow off the sidewalk and do other menial work. Meyer worked his way up to the position of buyer at age 21, and by World War I, he was traveling to Paris twice a year for A. Beller & Co. There, Meyer’s first language proved useful: His French helped him gain entry into the elite couture salons. Like other buyers, he purchased sketches of the latest styles; A. Beller then manufactured these licensed looks for American women.
In the early 1950s, Meyer donated nearly 9,000 of the watercolor and ink sketches, representing work from top fashion houses, including Chanel, Lanvin, Poiret, and Worth, to what is now known as FIT’s Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC) in the Gladys Marcus Library. For the exhibition, SPARC staff curated a selection of some 200 illustrations. To evoke the period, students from the MA program in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice curated and conserved 14 garments that resembled sketches in the show. These outfits, chosen from a collection of historic fashion pieces used for graduate study, mirror the drawings’ styles and history.
“He was a very good buyer,” says Lourdes Font, professor and acting chair of the MA program, who has studied all 9,000 sketches. “They depict the best of fashion from the early 20th century.” Though commercial in nature, the drawings convey the accomplishment of their anonymous artists through delicate, sinuous lines and whimsical details.
Meyer retired from A. Beller as a partner in 1929. He went on to become a noted labor leader for the garment industry, serving as a mediator for disputes over minimum wage, worker’s compensation, and working conditions, among other issues. He co-founded what became the Central High School of Needle Trades in 1940, and FIT in 1944, and he served as the college’s president from 1952 to 1953.
“He was a very good person, someone we should be proud of at FIT,” says Font, who researched Meyer’s papers at Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation. His passion for the college and high school originated from a personal place. “He never forgot his early days, when lack of education was an obstacle, and he dedicated his life to making it available to others.”
Meyer’s family emigrated to New York from Europe in part so he could avoid compulsory service in the Prussian army. Meyer may have been the first representative of an American manufacturer to gain entry to the Paris couture salons. Late in life, he wrote that his first language, French, helped him win over a skeptical vendeuse (head of sales at a fashion house). In his 39-year career as a buyer and executive for A. Beller & Co., Meyer visited Paris 110 times and purchased designs from top couture houses including Worth (spring 1923, opposite page), Chéruit (1915–20, top left), and Chanel (1917, left). “As many of these sketches appear to have been issued from the same hand, it is clear that they did not originate from the couture houses,” the show’s organizers write. “Instead, A. Beller & Co. hired sketch artists to render the specific Paris creations which were to enter their inventory.” The identity of the artists remains a mystery. A. Beller’s adaptations of imported looks, as well as the company’s original designs, retailed at high-end department stores such as Lord & Taylor and B. Altman. They were considered the gold standard for American clothing manufacturers.
Visit Max Meyer and A. Beller & Co: Interpreting a Hidden History of NYC’s Garment District at sparcdigital.fitnyc.edu/exhibits/show/meyer-beller. An in-person version of the show is planned for FIT’s Art and Design Gallery in the next academic year.
How a grad student made one coat exhibition-ready
Above: Like the coat, the outfit in this sketch has contrasting sleeves and hem, and features Easterninspired or so-called “exotic” embellishment.
Left: The coat lacks a label, and Andreeva wondered if the wearer made it for herself. Whoever it was, “This embroidery was by someone who knew what they were doing.”
FOR THE EXHIBITION, the show’s organizers paired sketches from the Meyer archive with similar outfits from FIT’s graduate study garment collection, thus setting up a conversation between illustration and outfit. This European or American evening coat, of silk with metallic-thread embroidery, was paired with a Meyer sketch of a spring 1923 Callot Soeurs design to illustrate the theme of exoticism in 1920s fashion. Graduate student Anya Andreeva conserved the coat for a class project, not knowing it would appear in the show. As she explains in a video on the exhibition website, studying the piece to prepare it for conservation was not unlike getting to know a person: “You learn their weaknesses and their strengths.” Areas of the green silk were disintegrating, so Andreeva used infills of China silk in a similar color and weight, couched them in conservation stitches, and enclosed them in a layer of net. The original lining was too weak to be conserved, so she left it in place and covered it with a new one to minimize further damage while maintaining the garment’s appearance.
