Florida Institute of Technology’s Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts presents another elegant and entertaining symposium, featuring the 9th annual Ruth Funk Lecturer in Textiles, Lauren D. Whitley, curator in the David and Roberta Logie Department of Textile and Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Thursday, Feb. 7
Lecture:
“Hippie Chic”
Free Admission, 6 p.m.
Gleason Performing Arts Center
Florida Tech Campus
In the late 1960s and early 1970s new exuberant forms of dress, inspired by the emerging hippie culture, openly challenged prevailing ideas about clothing. Hippies rejected society’s values, and the minimalist geometric lines of “Mod” styles, in favor of an eclectic, highly-personalized look that combined vintage clothes with apparel inspired by contemporary art, nature, history, and ethnographic art. Hippie style was all about self expression, and fun, and their “DIY” attitude was taken up by hip boutiques and a wave of young designers, many of them fresh out of art schools. As a result, fashion trends actually “trickled up” from the streets to impact established ready-to-wear and haute couture, threatening the hegemony of Paris for the first time.
This talk will explore the revolutionary “hippie chic” fashions that emerged between 1967 and 1973, and the inspirations - retro, fantasy, ethnic, and craft – that informed their varied looks.
Friday, Feb. 8
10:30 a.m.: Lecture, “London Calling: British Fashions from the Titanic to Today”
11:30 a.m.: Reception and Silent Auction
Noon: Luncheon SOLD OUT
Denius Student Center, Hartley Room
Tickets: $60 (Limited availability)
London has been a major player in the fashion world in the past forty years, producing a number of important, innovative designers. Yet, its influence began much earlier than that. This talk will explore London’s contributions to creative fashion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the intrepid designer Lady Duff Gordon, who survived the sinking of the Titanic, through Mod styles of Swinging London in the 1960s, Punk fashions of the 1970s, to the avant-garde designs of international superstars such as John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen. The lecture will conclude with a look at the newest generation of young designers making waves in London’s fashion scene today.