RISD Announces Major ‘Cocktail Culture’ Exhibit

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Saturday, December 11, 2010

GoLocalProv Features Team

As the memorable depictions of early 1960s culture, via Madmen and the retail wave in its wake, continue to inform the contemporary way of being, it is no wonder that the cocktail continues to reassert itself as a dominant cultural event.

How fitting, then that the RISD Museum should announce a major exhibition, slated for April 2011, that both captures and celebrates the phenomenon's influence of fashion.

Cocktail Culture: Ritual and Invention in American Fashion 1920-1980, organized by Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, curator of Costume and Textiles, is one of the largest exhibitions of costume and textiles in the RISD Museum's history. It's also the first major exhibition to look at the social ritual of drinking and entertainment through the art of fashion and design. From Prohibition to Disco, cocktails and fashion ritualized the passage of time, and helped men and women navigate the sweeping social changes that defined 20th-century American life. Cocktail culture - and the fashion that defined it - succeeded in unifying diverse groups of people while providing a means of vibrant personal expression.

Clothing, textiles, decorative and fine art

The exhibition includes more than 150 objects, including clothing, textiles, decorative and fine art, drawn from the Museum's collections and loans from the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College; Condé Nast; Dallas Museum of Art; the Hagley Museum and Library at the University of Delaware; the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the Newark Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; and private collections.

Unparalleled designer apparel

The exhibition features a stunning array of apparel, most from the RISD Museum's vast collection, by major designers such as Elizabeth Arden, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Chanel, Christian Dior, Oscar de la Renta, Hubert de Givenchy, Halston, Mr. John, Oscar de la Renta, Emilio Pucci, Lilly Pulitzer, Scaasi, and many others.

Photographs, illustration, and decorative art will fill in the lounge, as it were, offset by novelty items such as sleek Art Deco celluloid barware and a 1940s Tiki bar from Japan.

Cocktail Culture will open April 15, 2011, at the RISD Museum. For more information, go here.

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