Editor’s note: This is the twenty-seventh entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (@HottyCouture on Twitter) is a fashion historian, curator, and journalist based in Los Angeles. Here’s how she does history.
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. Credit: Adrea Scheidler.
What is your current position?
I call myself a public historian or a fashion historian, because most people know what that means. But in my head I’m a dress historian, because not all dress is fashion. I’ve worked in both museums and academia, but I’ve been totally freelance for 16 years.
What’s a typical work day look like for you?
Even when I worked full-time, there was no typical day. As a curator, I could be cataloging new acquisitions, giving a tour, dressing mannequins, directing a photoshoot, or buried in the library. I still spend a lot of time in libraries, or I might be at my desk working on a book, or a book review, or an obituary for a fashion designer, or doing research for my @WornOnThisDay social media accounts, or giving a talk over Zoom. Museums and galleries hire me to write and edit catalogs, wall labels, audio guides, and communications materials. I’ve advised on historically accurate costumes for movies and children’s books, and I’ve appeared in fashion documentaries. I get calls from journalists and students who want to interview me for their own projects, and, even though I don’t work in academia, I do a lot of the work of a typical academic: evaluating book and article manuscripts, serving on dissertation committees and awards juries, and presenting papers at scholarly conferences. Occasionally, I even teach; I’ve been an adjunct at UC-Riverside, De Montfort University, and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, teaching fashion history.
Lecturing on the research that would become Red, White, and Blue on the Runway at Costume Colloquium IV in Florence, Italy, 2022.
Where has your work taken you as a fashion historian and what cool things have you experienced?
So many cool things! I love traveling and getting to touch beautiful objects. I’ve studied most of the surviving Marie-Antoinette garments, as well as a lot of spurious Marie-Antoinette pieces. Probably the most special object I’ve ever been able to study up close was a court dress worn by Princess Hedvig of Sweden for her wedding in 1774—an incredibly rare and opulent piece that’s relevant to so many of my interests. Working with conservators is one of my favorite parts of the job; I’ve learned so much from them. I’ve done a lot of education programs for the L.A. Opera, which is a dream come true for an opera lover. Lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a career highlight. But the best gig I ever had was as a speaker on a 10-day fashion-themed luxury cruise, in 2018, from New York to Montreal. Whatever you’re imagining, it was even better! And a great learning experience, because when you’re on a cruise ship with a casino and a driving range and a spa and a movie theater and multiple bars and restaurants and nightclubs and activities competing for your audience’s attention, you really have to figure out how to engage them.
Lecture fuel when prepping on a cruise ship, 2018.
What is your earliest memory of a historical event?
Probably waking up extremely early to watch Princess Diana’s wedding (1981) as a kid in Los Angeles. Many years later, I was in storage at Kensington Palace and a curator pulled open a giant drawer and her wedding gown was right there. It was like seeing an old friend. Since then, I’ve written about it in two books.
Performing technical examinations on Houdon’s Diana at the Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. Credit: Jane Bassett.
Tell us about how you became a fashion historian. What made you want to study the history of fashion?
I’ve been fascinated by fashion history for as long as I can remember—I wrote about one early influence for Contingent—but I didn’t know what to do with it. I thought I wanted to be a designer or a fashion journalist. I didn’t know my quirky obsession could be a job in its own right.
Studying a Marie-Antoinette gown in the Museum of London, 1996.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences, especially doing graduate work overseas.
I went to Stanford for undergrad, where I majored in English and fell in love with eighteenth-century literature. But I quickly realized that I was less interested in the rise of the novel than in what all the characters were wearing. In my senior year, I wrote a paper on the hoop petticoat for a history class using Aileen Ribeiro’s book, Dress and Morality, as a source. I read her author bio and immediately applied to the History of Dress MA program at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, where she taught. I got in, and my hoop petticoat paper later got published in Eighteenth-Century Studies. London was an ideal place to study because of all the museums and libraries and archives on my doorstep. I had planned to stay at the Courtauld for my PhD, but the University of Aberdeen made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’d never been there and I had no idea what I was getting into, but it ended up being a wonderful place to live and work, and the university was so supportive of my research. By the time I finished my dissertation on Rose Bertin, Marie-Antoinette’s dressmaker, I’d come to appreciate how many extraordinary eighteenth-century collections Southern California has, and I was thrilled to find a three-year postdoctoral curatorial fellowship at The Huntington Library, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I ended up staying for four years.
Celebrating the 2022 publication of Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century. Credit: Rory Campbell.
You published two books in 2022. What are the books? Please tell us about them.
I published Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century with St. Martin’s Press and Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style with the Kent State University Press Costume Society of America series. The research and writing didn’t really overlap at all, but they came out six months apart, so they made me look much more productive than I really am. The White House book had been in progress for years, but the pandemic gave me time to finish it up and find a publisher. As a popular history with only a handful of illustrations, Skirts was much less research-intensive, but in many ways harder to write. I struggled with the tone, the scope, the twentieth-century subject matter—all very new to me.
Kimberly’s 2019 book, Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History.
Tell us about your earlier books too. What are they and where can we find them?
My first book, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, was published by Yale University Press in 2015. It’s adapted from my doctoral dissertation. Based on the success of that book, I got an agent and published two trade books with Running Press in 2019 and 2020, Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History and The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion. Worn on This Day was adapted from my Twitter account, @wornonthisday, which I started in 2017. I was struggling to come up with a concept for a fashion history book for a trade readership when I realized I was already writing one on Twitter. I never intended to write a book on wedding fashion, but I found so many moving pieces and stories when I was writing Worn on This Day that it became my next book.
Are you currently working on a research project or new book project?
I have a couple of books in progress, but they’re far from being finished. Red, White, and Blue on the Runway actually started out as a footnote in a different book I’m still working on, then spiraled into its own thing. I’m very slow because I have kids and because I’m always taking on freelance projects—I recently wrote the catalog for Style: A Journey of Elegance from Anthony van Dyck to Kehinde Wiley, an exhibition at Robilant + Voena in London.
Dressing a mannequin for photography for Fashioning Fashion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
You also work as a curator. Tell us about some of the museums you have worked at and exhibits you have helped curate.
I began my curatorial career at The Huntington Library, which has an amazing collection of eighteenth-century French textiles, decorative arts, and paintings that I helped catalog for the 2008 Yale University Press book French Art of the Eighteenth-Century at The Huntington. I went on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where I worked on the 2010 exhibition and Prestel catalog Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1715-1900. Since then, I’ve worked on shows and catalogs for museums including The Getty, the National Gallery of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Chateau de Versailles, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Musée Galliera, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Chatsworth House, and the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center, as well as private galleries. The joy of being an independent scholar is being able to work on a wide variety of projects instead of being tied to one institution.
The cover for Kimberly’s 2020 book, The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion.
You have written a lot for the public in newspapers and magazines. Tell us about some of the pieces you are most proud of and what advice do you have for scholars who would like to write or write more for audiences outside the academy?
I had always planned to become a fashion or entertainment journalist, because I didn’t know fashion historians existed. I worked on student newspapers, did summer magazine internships, and took communications and media law classes. I worked at a magazine for a year between my BA and my MA and entered grad school with a pretty solid journalism resumé. I continued to freelance while I was doing my MA, but once I started my PhD, I thought I was finished with journalism forever. I’d done it long enough to know it wasn’t something I ever wanted to do full-time. Years later, when I went freelance, I realized that I could make money and have fun writing about art and fashion for a general audience, using the skills I’d built up in my journalism career. I’m really proud of the work I’ve done for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.
If you’re used to writing for academic publications and publishers, writing journalism or trade books is a big adjustment—there are fast turnarounds and no footnotes, and even online publications have tight word counts and image limits. But probably the hardest thing is learning how and where to pitch. You have to be comfortable putting yourself out there—that’s a muscle you develop as a journalist. In museums, it’s often who you know, but in journalism, it’s cold-calling editors you’ve never met and making a case for why they and their readers should care what you have to say. Social media can be very toxic, but it’s also important as a way of establishing your platform and making your work relevant and accessible outside the academy.
What are some fashion history works (books or articles) that have informed your research? Who are some scholars/historians that have inspired you?
Aileen Ribeiro is the most important one, but my dissertation (which became Fashion Victims) was heavily influenced by Daniel Roche, especially his 1989 book La culture des apparences. The bicentennial of the French Revolution brought a huge wave of scholarship on eighteenth-century France that definitely made an impact on me in high school and beyond. As an undergraduate, I was really lucky to study with Terry Castle, Jay Fliegelman, Lisa Forman Cody, and other Stanford scholars who brought the eighteenth century to life and turned me on to the then-new field of material culture. For anyone new to fashion history, the Batsford Visual History of Costume series is still a wonderful model for how to identify, date, and describe historic dress—those deceptively simple skills you need to master before you can attempt any kind of interpretation.
Celebrating the opening of The Fashion World of Jean-Paul Gaultier at the de Young Museum in San Francisco in 2012. Credit: Hilary Smith.
What’s the best advice you have received or tell people about conducting research?
Two things I always tell people: go back to the primary sources, because the people who transcribed or edited them made mistakes or left out the best bits, and don’t waste your research. Turn it into a conference paper, then turn that conference paper into a journal article, then turn that journal article into a book chapter or an op-ed. You can be the most brilliant scholar in the world, but no one will know or care if you don’t put your work out there where everyone can see it and benefit from it.
Also, if you’re working on anything visual, figure out which images you need and how you’re going to get them and pay for them before you do anything else. It took me 10 years to get my first book published because I didn’t think strategically about the illustrations. I wrote a book that was virtually unpublishable without a bunch of very expensive images that I had to fundraise for it. Part of the reason why I’ve been able to publish pretty consistently since then is that I’ve become much smarter about how I use images. And there are so many more open access images now; that’s been a game-changer.
The first of Kimberly’s 2022 books: Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style.
What don’t people know or appreciate about being a fashion historian? What has surprised you the most about the work?
I think people assume you need a fashion design background. While basic sewing skills are helpful, they’re not essential, and a design program won’t prepare you for museum work or historical research. Having said that, people who do historical re-enactment are often formidable scholars, and they don’t get the credit they deserve from academics.
How has the pandemic affected you? Both when it started, through 2021 and 2022, and now as of this year?
Because I’d been working from home for a long time, my lifestyle didn’t change much, but suddenly I had to work with my whole family under one roof and kids in Zoom school and all that went with that. I had a major overseas research trip, a couple of out-of-state lectures, and an international conference planned for 2020—months of logistics that took a few tearful minutes to cancel. But the hardest part was obtaining and licensing the high-resolution images for my two books in progress while museums and libraries everywhere were shut down. Many kind archivists and registrars went above and beyond to help me out, but I was scrambling right up to the days the books went to press. Now, I’ve started traveling again, but not to the same extent. A lot of institutions are still doing events over Zoom because it’s cheaper and because they reach a much bigger audience—which is great, but Zoom fatigue is real.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
We all tend to picture solitary historians working alone in a dusty library or an ivory tower, but it’s a much more social, collaborative process, especially when you’re dealing with three-dimensional objects that live in far-flung museum collections. They can’t travel and they can’t be displayed or even photographed easily, so it’s always a group effort. People skills and personal connections matter more than you might think. Organizations like the Costume Society of America, the UK Costume Society, the College Art Association, and the Historians of Eighteenth Century Art and Architecture have helped me network as an independent scholar.
Kimberly’s first book: 2015’s Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
I’d love to do more television work—not necessarily on camera, but I think there’s a huge untapped market for fashion history content and I’d like to help deliver that. And I’d love to turn my book on the White House fashion show into an exhibition, or maybe a documentary. So many of the runway pieces have survived, along with other artifacts, photos, and newsreel footage. Many of the models are still alive, too. I’d also like to do more work on lesser-known designers who have been unfairly overlooked by history, in many cases simply because they didn’t have a successful perfume or a savvy business partner, or because of their gender or race or sexuality. The two things I get asked to write most are broad surveys of fashion history and books on Chanel. I’m not remotely interested in writing either of those, and to be honest I don’t know who wants to read them—we already have a lot of both.
If you weren’t a scholar, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I’d probably be a burnt-out journalist, or maybe a burnt-out lawyer. At one point, I considered studying medical history, which was a much more established field when I was in college. But my fantasy career would be opera singer or Broadway lyricist—and it really is a fantasy, because I cannot sing.
