In spring 2022, Bard Graduate Center (BGC) assistant professor Michele Majer retired after twenty-eight years as a member of the faculty. She taught the history of dress and textiles, and during her tenure many BGC students formed lasting relationships with her. As a tribute to her illustrious career and her impact, current MA student Mackensie Griffin gathered several BGC alumni (Emma Cormack MA ’18, Billy DeGregorio PhD ’21, Kirstin Purtich MA ’15, and Leigh Wishner MA ’01) together with Michele on Zoom to share their memories of studying and working with her.

Mackensie Griffin: Thank you all for being here. I’ll start with some questions for Michele and then I’ll have you all introduce yourselves.

Michele, you came to BGC in the fall of 1994. What had you been working on before that? And how did you hope to apply your previous experiences to your teaching at BGC? What kinds of conversations were you interested in sparking?

Michele: Before I came to BGC, I worked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute on the curatorial staff for almost eight years. And during that time, I did some one-off lectures and classes, but I didn’t teach an entire semester. I think the main thing that I brought to my teaching at BGC was an appreciation of objects and the need to see and study clothing and textiles up close. The context in which these things were produced and used has always been a primary interest to me, and clothing and textiles offer a way into different histories—social, cultural, economic,and political history, also art history and visual representation. So those are the kinds of conversations that I wanted to encourage in teaching.

Mackensie: I also understand you incorporated literature and literary history into some of your coursework?

Michele: Yes, I certainly did that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classes. I’ve co-taught with Ulrich Leben —we did a class on the arts of design between 1780 and 1815. And then twice I’ve taught a course with Freyja Hartzell called “The Green Hat: Fashion in Word and Image,” and every week we read British, French, and American fiction from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Before I knew that I wanted to study fashion history, I majored in French literature as an undergrad, and I have always enjoyed British literature of the nineteenth century. So that was something that seemed obvious to include in classes on those periods.

Mackensie: What are some other highlights from your time at BGC, such as projects or exhibitions you worked on?

Michele: When I started at BGC, I was primarily somebody who worked on eighteenth-century fashion. That’s what I had done at the Costume Institute. But obviously that wasn’t going to get me far, in terms of repeating classes year after year. So, I ventured first into the nineteenth century and then into the twentieth century. I focus on France and Britain in my teaching, and the nineteenth century seemed very daunting to me because it just seemed much more complicated in terms of the changes in fashion and consumption, and also the very complicated regime changes that happened in France during that period. But I really have come to love it and I have never tired of teaching it. We start with the Directory and end in 1900 and there is lots of great stuff in between. And I would say the same with the twentieth century—a challenge because of even more rapid changes in fashion, designers whose names we know, more fashion magazines and the introduction of fashion photography, but I was more familiar with the twentieth century in terms of its fashion history. And given my age, I’m directly familiar with this history from the early sixties when I became, I would say, “fashion aware.” But the first class that I taught on twentieth-century costume history was just so wonderful. It was a really great semester. It was probably the first time that we watched movies for a class. So that was a fun and insightful addition to the course that I’ve continued. After teaching a textile history survey that covered the fourteenth to the early twentieth century, I offered a new course on modern textiles from 1850 to 1970 that was very popular.

Staging Fashion was a favorite project of mine. That was a topic that I’d thought about for a long time and I finally decided to teach a course on the relationship between fashion and theater. It was in the early years that we were doing the Focus Project exhibitions, and initially there weren’t so many takers to do those exhibitions and I thought, well, I’ll volunteer. I had already started to accumulate actress postcards around the same time. I had my A-team: Billy DeGregorio, Maude Bass-Kruger, and Rebecca Perry. And they all contributed significantly to the catalogue and to the vision of the exhibition itself. That was certainly a highlight. It gave me an excuse to get up every morning and go on eBay and buy actress postcards and theater magazines.


Mackensie: That does sound fun. Would you describe what the premise of that exhibition was for those who might not be aware?

Michele: Sure. It was looking at three stage actresses from France, Britain, and the US, who were very popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when you have the emergence of a real celebrity culture. I was looking at their influence on fashion, how that celebrity culture happened in terms of things like photography and postcards that were sent through the mail by the millions, and how the perception of actresses changed at that time. Up until then, they had been essentially reviled as immoral women who slept around. And that image, that perception, really changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they became role models for ordinary women. They were used to promote a range of products from cigarettes to skin lotions, and there is definitely a direct line between what happened then and what we have now, magnified on social media. Before movies, it was the stage actresses who had this influence and clout as tastemakers and style trendsetters.

Mackensie: What year did that exhibition go up?

Michele: In 2012.

Mackensie: Well, it sounds great, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get to see it. Michele, I’m curious to know if you have noticed significant changes at BGC since you began teaching?

Michele: When I first started teaching, there were always a few students each year who were interested in fashion and textiles. But over the last fifteen years or so, the numbers have increased significantly. So for these last ten to fifteen years, I’ve been advising maybe three or four MA students each year and at least one or two doctoral students. Another thing that I’ve definitely noticed is that the incoming students, more so than in the past, have been able to pursue their interest in fashion and textiles at the undergraduate level, which I think was not always the case. They have often come in to BGC already familiar with some of this history, and they often have a particular interest that’s already developed, in terms of a time or a place, or a category of dress like menswear or issues like how women have navigated the world of fashion in terms of being producers or consumers, things like that.

Certainly, the faculty is much bigger than it was when I first started. There were just a handful of us. Over the years, many of my students have also worked with colleagues like Pat Kirkham, Catherine Whalen, Paul Stirton, Amy Ogata, Elizabeth Simpson—who was there from the very beginning—David Jaffee, Freyja Hartzell, Jeffrey Collins, and Andrew Morrall, all of whom have an interest in, or have been agreeable to, students working on fashion or textile topics in the courses that they teach. So I think it’s great that students have been able to pursue these interests in other classes, not just in the fashion history or textile history classes that I offered.

Mackensie: Absolutely. So now I’d like to go around the virtual “room” and have everyone introduce yourselves, your current professions, or current projects that you’re working on.

Leigh Wishner: I’m Leigh Wishner, I graduated in 2001. Currently, I am the digital media and content manager for the FIDM Museum, which is located at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles. We are a historic fashion collection of more than 15,000 objects related to fashion and textile arts. We have ephemera, we have special collections, we have archives. Before that, I worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in the costume and textile department as a curatorial assistant. And prior to that, I was in my happy place, as I now know to call it, which was the Cora Ginsburg Gallery when it was still in New York City. I spent a little over ten very, very happy and formative years there. And Michele had a lot to do with that. In my spare time, I write on modern textile design—it’s also a passion I cultivated alongside Michele at Cora Ginsburg LLC.

Emma Cormack: Hi, I’m Emma Cormack. I’m an associate curator at BGC. I graduated in 2018 from the MA program and started working in the gallery three months later, so I’ve never left. I’m so happy to be working on the Threads of Power exhibition with Michele. So, we’ve probably spent hundreds of hours on the phone together over the last two years. I took a class with Michele in my first year at BGC, and thought, this is amazing. And I took every class she offered after that and then audited a few as well. She was also my QP (qualifying paper) advisor too, along with Paul Stirton, and I’m pretty sure Michele is the main reason I got the job I have now.

Billy DeGregorio: I’m Billy DeGregorio. I started at BGC in 2010 and graduated with my master’s in 2012. I immediately went into the PhD program and finally finished that last year. For a number of years, while I was still in New York, I worked at the Museum of the City of New York in the costume department. And now I am basically a freelance researcher. I still work at Cora Ginsburg as well, and I contribute to the annual catalog every year. I’ve also been working on another project, which came out of Cora Ginsburg connections. It’s a book on the collector, Percival Griffiths, who formed a large, important collection of English furniture and needlework in the early twentieth century. It’s a two-volume work, and I’ve written the volume on needlework that’s being published by Yale, hopefully any day now.

Michele: Billy, I was going to add that your dissertation is on the Museum of the City of New York, and it’s really an exceptional piece of work. I think obviously having worked there is part of why you did the dissertation on that institution, and it’s a fascinating institution to have dug into in terms of its agenda and its early history.

Kirstin Purtich: I’m Kirstin Purtich. I graduated from the BGC MA program in 2015 and hung around BGC, much like Emma, for a year, working with Nina [Stritzler-Levine] on the Artek exhibition. And after that, I went on to work with a lot of BGC alums at the American Federation of Arts for a few years. I was a curatorial associate and tried to move them more towards more decorative arts and fashion and architecture exhibitions. I got to work on the Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960 exhibition with FIDM Museum that’s touring around the country right now. And I believe Michele was a content editor on the catalogue.

Leigh: That’s right, Michele was involved with me at FIDM as well. And yes, the Sporting Fashion exhibition just opened at Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Tennessee last week.

Kirstin: That’s great! So, I spent a few years there before I realized I didn’t want to sit behind a computer all the time because I was doing a lot of curatorial and administrative stuff with traveling exhibitions. So, I actually did a second MA at FIT focusing on conservation in order to get more practical skills in conservation and collections management, which leads into what I’m doing now. I’m currently working as a wardrobe manager at Garde Robe, which is a company that does luxury fashion storage—mostly contemporary stuff, but also some vintage collectors, a lot of corporate clients, and fashion brands that have massive archives. I’m working with them to professionalize certain standards that they’ve developed over the years, because we got bought by Uovo, the fine arts storage company this past year. We have a lot more resources, which are great, so I’m hoping to move towards processes for large format items and how we store those, that sort of thing. That’s where I am now, and I’m immensely grateful for everything that Michele taught me.

Mackensie: It’s fascinating to hear what everyone’s doing. You all have very impressive careers, and it sounds like Michele had a lot to do with that. So now I’d like to open the floor and have everyone share their favorite memories of working with and learning from Michele.

Michele: The chocolate break in the middle of class!

Emma: That’s what I was going to say.

Mackensie: You guys ate chocolate in class?

Michele: Yes, except for the semester we were on the second floor. That was a catastrophe.

Mackensie: What kind of chocolates may I ask?

Michele: Those big bars from Trader Joe’s. Because if you have a group of ten students, you need a lot of chocolate.

Leigh: Or if you’ve been to France, you come back with big Côte d’Or bars! I’ll just jump in and say that I was on a completely different track when I started at BGC. I was interested in antiquities. I had studied art history and archaeology in college, and I was all about the ancient world. It was my first true love, and I was gung-ho about going into it. I was taking classes with Elizabeth Simpson, and I was having a great time with that. But one of my electives happened to be a history of fashion course. I went to Barnard as an undergrad, and there wasn’t one fashion or textile history course offered back then. They had anthropology courses and art history courses, but it was only when I got to BGC and started the survey that I realized that fashion and textile historians are talking about the furnishings in paintings or the clothes that people wore. And I was really excited to discover this was a discipline. I didn’t know that before I got to BGC.

In my second year I started to write my thesis, and at that point, it was a much bigger undertaking than it is now. I just kept sighing and sighing because I had taken Michele’s course in the history of twentieth-century fashion, and I had been having such a blast. I was just so engaged with that. I didn’t feel like doing my topic on the fashion of the ancient world anymore. And I think I complained about it one too many times, and my husband said, “Why don’t you just switch your topic?” And I decided to springboard off an ancient subject into the modern era with the history of leopard print. And I came to Michele and begged, “Would you please be my primary reader now?” She was gracious enough to say yes, and it changed my life. It just shot me off in a different direction. But the thing that changed my life even more was one day in class Michele handed each of us a document of eighteenth-century silk to take home with us, courtesy of Titi Halle [owner of Cora Ginsburg]. We were like, “Are you sure we’re allowed to?” They were in Mylar sleeves, and she said, “Yes, and I expect you to take them out. I expect you to look at them, to touch them and feel them and examine them.” I don’t really remember the actual assignment. I just remember coming home with something precious and feeling like my world had changed.

And then to cap it off, we went on field trips. And Michele, your field trips were ones that I will never forget. We went to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and FIT. And we all had to put on our little white gloves and stand ten feet back. So that was my first taste of what it meant to be in a museum’s costume collection, and that was really valuable. I remember going to Scalamandré, a fabric wholesaler in Queens. It was unbelievable to see the looms and to understand that this is what it’s like to be in a physical space where textiles are being made. That was brilliant. But the field trip to Cora Ginsburg is actually the thing that really changed my trajectory. Walking into the shop, it was so beautiful. It was cozy, it was comfortable. It was approachable and inviting, and Titi is amazing. We passed around shawls and corsets, and I don’t know what else, but we looked at a lot of things, and we were able to really examine them. As graduation approached, I reached out to Michele and said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that I could work one or two days a week there?” My timing was right, and that was ten years of my life. And it was the best continuation of the education I got at BGC, for sure. A continuation of the primacy of the object.

Michele: Yeah, as Leigh was saying, being able to take students to the Met to see a Worth dress, for example, was wonderful. But you’re not allowed to touch. And Titi, given her training and learning process with Cora, understands how vital touch is to understanding this material. So, she is very open to bringing in students and showing them things and letting them handle them—turning something over or inside out. And then sometimes, I would select pieces for students so that they could come back another time and do a catalogue entry on a particular piece. And I think that kind of access maybe wasn’t so possible in some of the other courses, in terms of material, objects, and setting.

Leigh: I mean, I could go on for hours. I love Michele so much and I owe her so much. And not just in the professional realm, in the personal realm as well. She’s been one of my dearest friends for twenty years now; it’s really amazing. And I also got the benefit of working with her as a colleague. Those were fun times and I just kept learning. I would hear about what was going on at Bard, what she was teaching, and the different student papers she was reading. It was a great way to stay connected.

Michele: I want to interject here and say that over the years, I’ve learned a lot from my students, and they have done terrific work. And given this conversation, as you can see, I’ve developed very strong bonds and friendships with former students. And there is no longer, for me, a teacher / student or even a generational divide. They are my friends, and I’m so glad that you are all in my life. I feel like you have added so much to what I have done and what I’m still doing. So that’s a gift that goes way beyond the classroom.

Emma: Leigh, I can totally echo your impressions of Ginsburg. I remember I showed up to BGC as a pretty freaked out and overwhelmed twenty-three-year-old. I moved to New York City for BGC and I didn’t study fashion history in undergrad, but, Leigh, like you said, I was studying the things that were in the paintings. Michele’s class was the first one of my whole BGC career. And I was really nervous beforehand. And luckily, it was a small class of just four of us, and it was so welcoming, and I felt like it was comfortable to say whatever was on my mind, even if it wasn’t correct. And then she brought out the chocolate halfway through and I thought, this is wonderful. And I did a lot of French literature in undergrad too, so that felt like a really nice way to go into fashion. And then I took every class that she offered, and eventually, I think it was in our nineteenth-century class, we took a trip to Ginsburg, and it was sunlit and warm, and we looked at objects and we could touch them and open them and see the stains in the armpits, which was so amazing. And then I came back by myself at a different time, and Michele and Titi brought out a silk moiré gown and a little spencer and were like, here you go. And then they left the room, and I was stunned. I could study and write about them, and it was amazing! And it was so beyond what I imagined coming to BGC, and the whole time Michele was there to answer my stupid questions…

Michele: No, no, no, there are no stupid questions.


Emma: And she would connect me with past students. Her network of people is huge, and she’s so generous with making those connections. And of course, everyone loves her, so everyone’s very happy to be connected with another “Michele person.” And I’m going to get teary, too, but working on this lace project (Threads of Power) has been amazing. Making an exhibition, as you all know, is so much work, and you spend so many hours sitting together and traveling together, and I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to do it with Michele.

Michele: Well, we all know that this project would never have happened if you weren’t in charge of it, Emma, because I’m way too antiquated in so many ways. But it’s such a great swan song for my time at BGC to be able to work on this exhibition and to work with you. I realized when you were my research assistant that I had something very special. I thought, “Oh, this woman is super organized and can do anything.”

Emma: Another favorite memory…So Michele was my QP advisor along with Paul Stirton, and I wrote about these nineteenth-century chromolithograph trade cards that the Bon Marché department store produced between 1853 and the beginning of the twentieth century. And beyond the text of my QP, I spent hours and days and months looking on eBay for these cards, and I made a 220-page appendix of all the cards that I found. It was about ten hours to the deadline, and I was still dropping images in on InDesign and organizing them. And I remember Michele was like, “You have to stop. That’s enough. You have to stop.” So, I would say that she passed her eBay tendencies to her students as well.

Michele: I’m looking at Billy. I think Billy had the acquisition bug from the get-go. I’ve told him he has to stop many times.

Billy: Yes. Every time there was a five-page assignment, mine would come in at fifty. I would say the two things that stand out for me about Michele are patience and trust. I think the people who study the decorative arts and this kind of thing are more neurotic than the general public population, but I think I’m about ten times more neurotic than the BGC population. So, Michele was infinitely patient. And she’s a master editor, so she went through countless drafts of my QP. And as Emma was saying, she also made countless introductions to curators all over the world. You’re kind of fearless when you start as a master’s student so you just write to people and say, “I need to look at something,” and they’ll either push back or not, but it was always great to have Michele’s introduction.

I think it was my first semester as a master’s student when we started working on Staging Fashion. There was a lot of experimenting at BGC, and at the time I was very lucky to also be doing another Focus class that was geared toward an exhibition about George Henschel. And the promise of these classes was that you would get to work on an exhibition and that something you write will probably be published somehow. So, from the very beginning, Michele was looking at my work very seriously. She had already collected binders of postcards, and we started to bond when I volunteered to transcribe all the postcards. And we would just sit for hours saying, “What do you think this word is?” And you know, they were all in French. We’d ask, “Should we transcribe the printed material, the copyright date?” It was the minutia of minutia and she was always patient and game to entertain the questions.

I came to BGC a little differently than most people, I think. I never studied art history; I was an English and Spanish major. But my first job out of college was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the textile and costume department, which is when I realized that this was a profession and a field. After two years there, I was like, okay, I need to professionalize. And there were several other alums who were working at the museum at the time and they recommended BGC. Because I had worked at the museum, I knew about Cora Ginsburg. And I was like, I have to work there at some point. So, I angled for an internship. I guess that was 2010. Michele very graciously put me off for a little while and was like, “Well, we don’t need that right now.” But she knew it was a dream of mine. So, when I was graduating, Leigh was moving back to California. I think Michele talked to Titi and said, “This kid is very enthusiastic, let’s give him a shot,” and basically my job was to photograph all the costumes that had never been photographed. They were just like, “Here are the boxes, go have fun.” And Michele and Titi taught me how to dress any silhouette and various mannequin tricks and photography tricks. That’s where the trust comes in. It’s a small community that studies actual clothing, and you very quickly get the sense of who you can trust: either they know how to touch an old dress or they don’t. And I’m glad that they trusted me. I also took every class Michele ever taught while I was there and did an independent study with her, but in addition to the classroom, there was a lot of learning and discovery on your own, with her guidance. So, it was always great to make those discoveries. And when I get excited about something, I know that Michele, Titi, and a few other people are the only other people in the world that will be as excited as I am about whatever I found. And I can’t tell you how gratifying that is, just as a person.

Leigh: I couldn’t agree with you more.

Michele: And I would like to say here that Billy is a master mannequin dresser. You can see his work in the Ginsburg catalog. Titi would say, “We have to let Billy dress it. Billy will make it look like a million bucks!”

Billy: Well, that was not always the case. I look back at the first photos I took, and they look horrifying, but Titi and Michele would just say, “Okay, well maybe we just add a little more tissue there or I think she needs a different shape there.” And it was so encouraging and just collegial from the beginning, which is such an amazing thing to have in a professor.

Leigh: That’s so true. Another thing that is also related to the classroom and to Cora Ginsburg, et cetera, is that I love writing. Now, I would say that it’s my primary passion and I have grown so much because of what Billy mentioned earlier: Michele’s editing, the attention, the close reading, the suggestions, the very light touch. She was always so helpful, guiding me to be a better writer. I started off with some skills, but I feel like I’ve bloomed because of my work with Michele, for sure. I mean, there’s no question. Working on those Cora Ginsburg catalogues has been a multi-decade long project. The early catalogues featured these tiny paragraphs and now they’re epic essays, and they show the kind of passion that was instilled in us through our education and through our proximity to the material that we’ve grown to love through book learning and object-based learning. They really coalesced in such an amazing way in Michele’s classes. I remember our final presentations for our twentieth century course. I presented on Aloha shirts. And I remember thinking, “What other kind of class can you do this in, and have it taken seriously?” I remember having so much fun with the other students that would gravitate towards Michele’s classes. We had a blast. And I think the final day, I remember Michele wore her Lilli Ann jacket.

Michele: Oh yeah, that comes out on special occasions.

Leigh: And as a vintage fashion lover from a very young age, I could always appreciate Michele’s comportment and her attire. She is aces, a style idol. Just everything about Michele is a delight and a pure joy, and she shares that with everybody.

Kirstin: I would definitely credit Michele with being the first person to really make me realize that fashion history was a pursuit in and of itself. I think my class might have been the first to have the “Approaches to the Object” methodology course. And after the fashion history lecture, it was so obvious to me that that was what I wanted to do. I think you brought some 1820s gown from Cora Ginsburg, and it truly was the first time I’d gotten to handle anything like that and see it up close. I had done costume design in college, but I’d never done research in a formal way. So that was what really kicked everything off. I didn’t actually get to take a class with Michele until the second semester. I think “Fashion in Theater” was the first one I took with you. But I did get the extreme pleasure of getting to take her class with Ulrich in my last year. And just getting to see the two of them playing off each other and having so much fun with the material and the time period was a fantastic way to go out of BGC. And to return to a point Michele made about learning from her students, I always appreciated that she remained so intellectually curious. She would incorporate new research into her lectures and in individual conversations, and nothing was ever stagnant. Somebody who’s been teaching for as long as she has could get that way, but she always kept it fresh and engaging with new scholarship. Especially her interest in non-French fashion. My QP was half on French fashion and half on German fashion— I was comparing men’s fashion in Berlin versus men’s fashion in Paris using two men’s magazines from the twenties. And I was getting to see very different cultural responses to that period.

Michele: And that came out of working on the Reigning Men exhibition, right?

Leigh: That’s what I was going to say. That was how Kirstin and I first met. Michele emailed me and said, “Somebody from BGC is applying for an internship at LACMA, and I think you should get her.” I was like, “Well, I’m not in charge of these decisions, but I think so too.” And we did. And she was my desk mate for a summer, and every time I looked over there, I saw her looking at men’s underwear. And this underscores how small this field is. There are always these crossings of connections, and we all have to really be there for each other. And I’ve learned a lot from Michele on that.

Kirstin: And Michele, I hope to still see you on the street walking Eloise. The fact that I’m so close to you and can count you as a friend is huge to me.

Michele: Yes, we have met several times, at the Chocolate Room in Park Slope, so that tradition continues, and it’s been really nice to see you once every few months, or twice a year, and catch up on what you’re doing.

Kirstin: Definitely. I made great friends in your classes and then great friends with you, so it was just a nice community to be around.

Leigh: She’s leaving big shoes to fill.

Emma: It’s true. I’m sure you can all agree that Michele’s a bottomless well of fashion information. I can mention anything to her and she’s like, “Oh, well you should look at this book by this person. And it’s in chapter three.” It happened this week. We were talking about portraits of men wearing lace and she was like, “There’s this one here and this one here,” and I’m trying to write as fast as possible. So, whenever somebody in the department, or a student, comes with a random fashion question, I’ll probably still be emailing her because she always has an answer.

Leigh: And we’re all excited to see what she does next, if she chooses to do anything or nothing.

Michele: I think the latter is where I’m headed in the future.

Billy: You deserve it. You deserve to relax.

Michele: But I’m so pleased that Mei Mei Rado is coming. Her geographic scope is far larger than mine because she knows Eastern fashion history, which I really don’t, and she has those languages. It’s very meaningful for me that she’s the one who is taking over the position because we have worked together. I know how interested she is in what students are working on and what a good mentor she will be.

Mackensie: I love hearing these stories and all this gushing praise. It’s a true testament to your career, and I think it’s rare to have a professor with all these qualities.

Michele: I recently heard a teacher on the radio say, “You’re not a teacher unless you have students.” And that’s what it’s really been about for me the entire time. It’s being in the classroom with students that’s made me last as long as I have.

Billy: I was going to say, Michele is not a typical professor. She shared that with Ulrich in that they came at it from a real place of genuine love for the stuff. And as amazing as her academic prowess is and her ability to recall amazing bibliographical references is, she engendered that same kind of love for stuff in the students, which you don’t always necessarily get in art history and in this field. So, it was always infectious, and she also made it seem like it was okay. You didn’t have to be so disinterested and disdainful of the material aspects of life. It’s fashion, so have fun with it, you know?

Leigh: That was the spirit I appreciated so much. I came to you with my idea, and the fake leopard skins found in King Tut’s tomb was my starting point. And I said, “I want to do a history of leopard print in fashion.” And Michele didn’t say, “No, that’s not serious enough or that’s tacky.” She was like, “That hasn’t been done; that’s very interesting.” So, I just felt her openness to the “unacademic,” the pop culture stuff, the mundane. She was as open to that as she was to the court dress of the eighteenth century. And I felt very welcomed at that point because I realized I’m never going to be a theorist. Another thing I loved is that her classes were not theory-based. We did have some theory, but I didn’t feel like I came out of a course where I was just thinking about objects in an abstract way. I was thinking about the actual processes of making and wearing. I just loved that her courses weren’t theory-heavy and that they were receptive to the offbeat. And I think that kind of describes you.

Michele: Why thank you!

Billy: You think of some of the projects, the dissertations, and the QPs that Michele has advised, which are totally amazing, and you would never see anywhere else. They’re not just weird quirky things that people have written about. They’re actually huge contributions to the knowledge of this field, and when they are published, I’m so proud of the people that have written them because they’re not what you get every day, and they’re so important.

Michele: I was going to say, Billy, your QP about Augustabernard looked at a designer who had sort of fallen through the cracks. And I remember having a conversation with you about telling the story of somebody who’d been forgotten, and how that had happened, and why it was that she fell through the cracks. And then thinking about the talk that you gave in Paris at that conference, people really responded to it because it was new information on French couture during the twenties and thirties. We don’t need yet another talk about Chanel. But it was this fascinating story of the decisions that Augustabernard made as a designer and the fairly short tenure of her couture house. That’s why she’s not in the big fashion history books, but she was very well known and patronized by elite clients in the interwar period. And recovering those stories is really important.

Billy: And I felt that encouragement from BGC in general, but especially from Michele, and there was never any question of, is this significant? If you could make it significant, and you could find the sources and make a topic about it, she was like, “I can’t wait to read it.” And speaking of her patience and her editing: there were so many drafts of my QP, and as Leigh was saying, because of Michele, I’m a much better writer and I really pay attention to the words more now. Especially repeating words. She’s a great editor.

Michele: You know, our writing was edited for the Threads of Power wall panels, and it was certainly edited for the book. One can always improve one’s writing, but that means a lot to me because I do feel like that was an area where I spent a lot of time—with term papers and QPs—because I do feel strongly about it.

Billy: Yeah, Michele was really precise and would say, “I don’t think this word means exactly that.” And it’s true, you get into your habits, and you don’t think about these things, or maybe you like a word. And she’s just like, “You need to think about what that actually means.” And that’s so helpful, especially in writing Ginsburg catalogues and trying to be a bit more succinct while getting everything in there.

Mackensie: Well, I just want to say thank you so much. This has been amazing. And I’ve learned a lot about all of you and Michele.

Michele: Well, thank you all so much. It’s been a little embarrassing, but it’s been really nice to see you all.

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, curated by Michele Majer, Emma Cormack, and Ilona Kos (Textilmuseum) is on view at Bard Graduate Center Gallery through January 1, 2023.