In early February, Jenny Tiramani, a principal and founding member of London’s famed School of Historical Dress, spent a week at Bard Graduate Center engaging with students, faculty, and the public. Tiramani has published extensively in the school’s Patterns of Fashion series and for the Victoria & Albert Museum on the subject of seventeenth-century dress. Her Olivier and Tony Award-winning costume designs have been seen in the West End, at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, on Broadway, and at the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House. Her visit, organized by BGC’s Department of Public Humanities + Research, brought costume, fashion, and textiles scholars and designers to BGC, but its most significant impact was felt within the BGC community.


One part of Tiramani’s residency included a daylong workshop for BGC students who specialize in the history of fashion and textiles, many of whom are also makers. According to associate curator Emma Cormack (MA ’18), Tiramani began by introducing four important lenses through which to approach the study of clothing worn by people in the past: content, cut, construction, and context. Then the group worked together to create a half-scale paper version of the circa 1705–06 dressing gown that Princess Louise Dorothea of Prussia (1680–1705) was buried in. Cormack said, “Working from the 1:8 scale pattern in the School of Historical Dress’s newly released Patterns of Fashion 6, two groups of students traced, cut, and shaped the two halves of the flat-cut garment, ‘sewing’ the pieces of printed paper together with tape. Throughout the day, the work of transforming a two-dimensional shape into a garment suitable for a three-dimensional body sparked conversations about textile conservation practices, eighteenth-century loom lengths, the importance of sleeve gussets, and how practice-led research can help us better understand the objects we study. It was a pleasure to witness the paper dressing gown come to life and to watch the students learn from Tiramani’s expertise and experience.”

Watch Tiramani’s public lecture, Two Thousand Years of Flat-Cut Garments, on BGC’s YouTube channel.