How Women’s History Museum Mines Fashion’s Past

Women’s History Museum transforms fashion from the past into contemporary art. That’s why I was not surprised when Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan—founders of the art collective and clothing line with a community boutique in New York—suggested that they may have met in a past life. Together, they joked “maybe we met in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.”

That infamous 1911 disaster in Greenwich Village took the lives of 146 garment workers—123 of them women, and many, adolescents, some as young as 14. The workshop produced shirtwaists, Edwardian-style women’s blouses that were, by then, going out of style. The fire’s death toll was so high because, when it broke out, on a Saturday, before the workers’ one-day weekend, the doors to stairwells and exits were locked, a practice intended to reduce theft, prevent workers from taking breaks, and keep union organizers out. The factory owners survived, scurrying from their roof to another one nearby and leaving behind their staff, whom they paid as little as five dollars an hour in today’s currency to work 52-hour weeks. Workers who didn’t jump to their death choked on smoke or were burned alive. One couple was reportedly seen kissing before jumping together.

The building ravaged by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire still stands and, more than a century later, is part of the campus of New York University, where Barringer and McGowan first met in 2011, while enrolled in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. “We were never comfortable there,” McGowan said of their time at NYU, when a shared sense of alienation—and style—drew the two together. As Barringer put it, thinking back on their bonding in the form of Women’s History Museum, “maybe we came back because we had to resolve something with clothing?”

SINCE 2015, BARRINGER AND MCGOWAN have presented eight fashion collections and multiple art exhibitions as Women’s History Museum, sharing their practice with many collaborators and working across many mediums, including sculpture, print, video, and performance. All the while, they have grappled with a knot of interlocking themes in the content of their work and with the challenge of how to produce and place work that ping-pongs between art and fashion.

Bridging different worlds—and entire industries—comes with creative advantages but also equal, if not greater, obstacles, since career-making figures such as museum directors, art collectors, shop buyers, and media editors are quicker to support creatives who pick a side. Is it art, or is it fashion? What section—with what budget—do we put this in?

When I first saw the work of Women’s History Museum, I didn’t know what to make of it. Their first five years’ output actually made me nervous. Experimental, sexy, and precarious, their fashion presentations—which were, at first, their primary focus—seemed to give more than they could ever receive, showcasing beautiful, youthful, and often half-naked femmes in a vacuum or a kind of fantasy world where cool art girls could safely wear delicate scraps of deeply meaningful fabric.

Women’s History Museum seemed to me, back then, rather monolithic, like one big metaphor for how—as Ada O’Higgins, one of their repeat collaborators, suggested in an interview with them—“the beauty of imperfect things evokes the archetype of the damaged or ‘used’ woman who, like used clothing, is deemed discardable and forgettable.” To that, McGowan responded: “I think that to be a woman is often to feel damaged or broken, and like there is something wrong with you in some capacity.”

In the early years, before the pandemic, I might’ve said that Women’s History Museum were like the baby punk sister of fashion artist Susan Cianciolo, the Miu Miu to her Prada. Whereas Cianciolo brings things together—the stitching on her garments stands out, like the lines we draw between stars to make a constellation—Women’s History Museum showed things coming apart in the form of a raw hem, a disintegrating mesh, a bare midriff, burn holes. Sexual and gender-based violence loomed.

THEN CAME THE SPRING of 2021. Having received one Covid vaccination and awaiting the second, I went downtown with a friend to see “MORT de la MODE….Everything must go!,” Women’s History Museum’s solo exhibition at Company Gallery on the Lower East Side. Evoking an abandoned boutique with flashy on sale signs, flat paper dresses, windows covered in custom newspapers, a boa made of matchbooks (like a Yayoi Kusama “Accumulation” sculpture), and a necklace bearing badges marked time, the exhibition connected with the greater zeitgeist in a way I’d never seen from the collective, and in a way that very little art was able to in or around that time of lockdown. Since New York was so empty, my friend and I were able to experience the apocalyptic art show as it needed to be: alone.

Planned before the pandemic and delayed because of it, the show landed perfectly in time. This made me realize that Women’s History Museum, while highly attentive to the past, incorporating bonnets and bustles and garters and capes, were always ahead of their time. The duo’s early, hyper-girly assemblages—that sexy, scrappy look that made me so nervous circa 2016—is now a standard mode of undress among Instagram baddies, quirky celebrities, and young brands.

Women’s History Museum’s next exhibition at Company, “The Massive Disposal of Experience” in the summer of 2022, was just as strong, building on the previous one. “The boutique is gone,” Barringer said of the show. “The person’s the boutique now.” Staged in the gallery’s basement, the exhibition suggested a theater of online shopping, where the dark room of the imagination meets the addictive malls of resale sites such as eBay, Etsy, Depop, and Buyee.

Both shows featured magazines that couldn’t be opened. In “MORT de la MODE,” the publications were made of plaster and looked like white sheet cake. In “The Massive Disposal of Experience,” actual magazines were encased in a clear plastic hoop skirt while torn-out pages were stuffed between the layers of a clear plastic top and dress. More magazines showed up in the form of trompe l’oeil stacks made of printed fabric.

When Barringer and McGowan first met, they knew they were destined to collaborate, and their first idea was to make a fashion magazine. They quickly abandoned the idea and were wise to do so, as the internet and social media had scooped the fashion magazine world, moving faster than they ever could. In Women’s History Museum’s hands, fashion magazines are, more aptly, an empty shell, a nostalgic relic, stuffing for a garment. The world Barringer and McGowan have built, though, is very magazine-like. It’s as if they took everything there is to love about magazines—the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of juxtaposition, our need for fantasy and beauty, and the energy of collaboration—and brought it to life.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Women’s History Museum’s namesake boutique on the third floor of a building on Canal Street, where Chinatown meets SoHo in New York. Open five days a week, the store showcases Women’s History Museum’s unique designs alongside vintage clothes and wearables made by a community of friends, among them Gogo Graham and Chloé Maratta. Objects from past exhibitions have been repurposed as display fixtures. The walls and dressing room curtain are painted in signature patterns.

Barringer and McGowan opened the shop in spring 2023 after selling curated vintage fashion online as a side hustle for three years. (Chloë Sevigny bought a Fall 1992 Vivienne Westwood corset with a Frans Hals baby print from them after giving birth to her own baby in 2020.) When Barringer and McGowan are minding the shop, Women’s History Museum is extra-alive, as they explain the story behind every object and compliment their customers endlessly, like true girls’ girls.

The shop is the new SEX, the fabled boutique where Westwood got her start in London in the ’70s. And there’s often plenty of Westwood in stock. The vintage side of the business is so successful—and fashion’s memory is so short—that “many people who come to the store now don’t know that we make stuff,” McGowan bemoaned. “They don’t know who we are.”

That’s part of why she and Barringer went all out for their Fall 2024 runway presentation, their first since 2020. “The lack of memory felt upsetting,” Barringer told me. The need to remind people who they were was “almost territorial.” And it worked, as Women’s History Museum showed up every other brand on the New York Fashion Week calendar around its show in February.

Pillars of Women’s History Museum’s community were given the best seats in the house while celebrities fit in where they could. Actress Hunter Schafer bounced in the second row next to musicians Zsela and Lizzi Bougatsos. The setting was an abandoned bank on Wall Street, and the soundtrack was libidinous, mixed by Amber Bradford, a respiratory therapist in Tennessee. Animals screeched and sirens wailed over a gabber beat as the first model took to the runway in a mohawk made of feathers (hair by Sonny Molina). Two models wore the second look in matching dresses, one representing the Empire State Building and the other, the Chrysler Building. The two dresses were connected by a shared cape lined with words from a poem they wrote about codependency: your boredom is my boredom / your sick is my sick / your happiness is my addiction / your guilt is my anxiety….Disney child star turned human rights activist Rowan Blanchard was next, her anime tits bouncing in a gold gladiator getup. Then it was Yves B. Golden, an artist and poet, in a languid 1930s-style gown with a back cowl so low, her whole thong showed. And it kept going, good from beginning to end, a 23-minute presentation that even incited some people to cry tears seemingly of joy and relief.

The collection was titled “Enfer,” the word for hell in French (fashion’s first language), and the hells explored were three-pronged, like a devil’s pitchfork: the hell of competitive sports, the hell of surviving as a human animal in New York, and the hell of being a woman—high pleasures across the board. Icons of hellishness were repurposed as a survivor’s uniform, represented by things like a wig made of pills, a silhouette of a rat, two pajama sets mapping the human body along cuts of meat (neck, flank, loin, shank…), plenty of animal prints, big cat-paw pumps, real porcupine quills, the words toxic metropolis, and my favorite, a virgin-white hooded gown with bound knees, back-bound wrists, and a fetus print on the abdomen.

In an unscripted moment, one model kept falling, determined to walk in heels with real boxing gloves attached to their toes (a nod to Miguel Adrover’s Fall 2012 middle-finger shoes). The model persisted, falling over and over again, sideways into the front row, crumpling to the runway as many in the crowd (stylist Haley Wollens and me among them) screamed “take them off!” It was good that she didn’t before she made it to the end of the catwalk: There, she took the boxing gloves in her hands, looking like, as Devan Díaz put it in her Substack newsletter, “she’d just won a fight… Victorious.”

That’s how the whole show felt: victorious (but not without struggle), a triumph of art, love, community, and survival. Footage of it shares the same feeling as an early Martin Margiela or Alexander McQueen presentation. Fashion students will watch it for years to come.

But will they know how we felt? For those in the bank that day, heartbreak abounded. Cecilia Gentili, a trans activist and mother, had died unexpectedly just two days prior. War and genocide raged. Work was scarce. Collectors and investors had gotten stingy. It was an election year. Life was hard for people on the ground. And somehow, through fashion, one of the most divisive and shame-inducing fields of production, Women’s History Museum was able to console and uplift.

ONE SEASON LATER, during New York Fashion Week this past September, Women’s History Museum took their community to church: the LGBTQ+-embracing Church of the Village in Greenwich Village, to be exact. Shattered safety glass lined the runway-aisle like lines of salt to ward off evil. More broken glass covered garments and footwear. The model wearing the highest of all the high heels—stilts really, made of narrow pillars of wood fastened to a gold gladiator flat, the lacing of which mirrored the corsetry-like ribbing on the vault of the Gothic Revival church—was escorted down the runway by two other models in an effort that recalled TikTok videos of people learning to walk again after an accident.

The collection was littered with homages and references to Rudi Gernreich’s topless monokini, Alexander McQueen’s ultra-low-rise “bumsters,” Azzedine Alaïa’s jewel-tone hoods, aughts-era graphic slogan tees, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s bandage bodysuit from the 1997 film The Fifth Element, and Barbie’s stiff tall ponytail. Like fellow designer duo Vaquera, their peers in the young alt New York fashion scene, Women’s History Museum don’t hide their influences: They make a show of them while turning fan art into a sort of conceptual practice.

After the runway show, a group of friends went to dinner and discussed what we’d seen. “Very sexy,” we echoed one another. “Very inspiring. Very skinny. Very McQueen.” We all agreed that the not-quite-there-ness of the fantasies that Women’s History Museum presents is what makes us feel a warm sense of belonging. The gap between a brilliant, perfect idea and its manifestation here on earth is evident in elements like the sometimes awkward choreography and the costume-box-meets-couture sensibility. This gap is what commercial brands and entertainment companies try to close. But the gap is sacred and real. It’s where all good things happen in this mortal world. Exhibiting it takes courage because it might not make rent. But it is art.

Although completely self-funded and DIY to date, Barringer and McGowan have an even greater resource than investors or a trust fund: each other.

“Amanda’s my hero,” Barringer told me, holding back tears.

“Mattie’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met,” McGowan said. “She cares so deeply about people and will always win an argument—she could be a lawyer.”

They’re both do-gooders, employing diverse models, recycling found materials, embedding their work with a critique of fashion’s waste, exploitation, and discrimination. Before they met, McGowan, who’s from the Bronx, thought she might “go into pre-med, help people.” Barringer was coming out of an “extremely religious” Mormon upbringing that was “obsessed with modesty in clothing.”

If they hadn’t met, they told me, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing; Barringer wouldn’t have had the courage and McGowan wouldn’t have had the conviction. As their longtime collaborator, the musician and artist Chloé Maratta, noted, “their work is deeply informed by their friendship, this back and forth conversation of references, ideas that bloom when you’ve been friends for years.”

Even their name began as an inside joke—“the museum” is what Barringer and McGowan used to call their closet—and like any such reference, it confused many people at first. Taylor Trabulus, Barringer and McGowan’s dealer at Company Gallery, would find herself explaining, “no, it’s not an actual museum,” before comparing their practice to experimental collectives like the Situationist International and Bernadette Corporation or to the performance artist Colette.

As the number of their exhibitions and fashion collections grew, Women’s History Museum proved to be a perfect moniker, complementing—as accessories do clothing—the questions that their work raises: Does fashion belong in the museum or gallery? Why has it traditionally not been included? Why haven’t women? What do we know about women’s history? Who and what is worth archiving? Can a boutique be a museum? Can a closet? Can a community?