Topic Introduction - Riley Mason

Hi all!

My name is Riley Mason, and I’m a fourth-year Museum Studies student with a minor in History. My home is ‘Oahu, Hawai’i, where I developed my love of museums (and their gift shops!). This is my second year as a student employee at the RIT Archives, where I’ve developed an interest in collections management, database management, and archival work.

Another significant personal and academic passion of mine is fashion history, which is where I’ve found my inspiration for my thesis project. I’ll be focusing on the GCV&M’s Susan Greene Costume Collection, curating a selection of objects and researching their construction, provenance, and cultural context. From this research, I’ll develop a set of “fun facts,” bite-sized, attention-grabbing pieces of information about each object that facilitate informal learning and make both fashion history and the museum’s collection more accessible and understandable to visitors.

This project aims to be a combination of the best parts of my experience as both a MUSE student and a museum visitor. As a visitor, I enjoy leaving a museum with both a broader appreciation of a collection and more focused snippets of information I can share with others and commiserate over. As a student and aspiring museum professional, I enjoy engaging with and activating collection objects, as well as deeply exploring their individual history and context. I am captivated by the finer details of collections and the novelty of a unique object, both of which can be used as tools to engage and convey information to visitors.

A secondary motivation behind my focus on the subject of fashion history in particular is its increasing relevance and frequent misinterpretation in American popular culture. The rise in popularity of the Met Gala in recent years and the inherently cyclical nature of fashion has led to an increase in the feature of archival garments on the red carpet and the catwalk. In addition, the rise in popularity and production ability of fast fashion has led to rapidly evolving trends and “vintage” styles that bear minimal contextual information about the extant garments and periods in fashion history that inform their silhouettes. Facilitating informal means of education to young visitors of the museum can promote a deeper understanding of modern fashion from a reliable source. This, in turn, can promote educated, well-informed decisions about clothing purchases and veer away from overconsumption and linear fashion practices.

I’m currently compiling sources to inform my research and selecting objects from the Susan Greene Costume Collection, but I enthusiastically welcome feedback on any part of this project. If you’ve got a favorite garment at GCV&M with an interesting history or any relevant insights, please share it with me at ram3077@rit.edu!

Looking forward to sharing the fun facts I find as I go along! :)

Riley