On Monday, April 21st a group of students accompanied by Kent State professor Dr. Lynda May Xepoleas presented their new exhibition The Way We Wore.

The Way We Wore is an exhibit that displays Kent’s student spirit through a group of four outfits, setup as a timeline which begins in the 1950s and lands in modern times nearly eighty years later. The exhibit itself explores the importance of fashion when it comes to first year students exploring their community through spiritwear, as well garments serving as a placeholder of historical events. 

On Monday night, under the lead of Dr. Xepoleas, a team of student curators, exhibition and graphic designers, all shared how they carefully considered external exhibitions and sourced garments that correctly encapsulated the time they were trying to emulate. Much of the semester was spent conducting research, particularly by analyzing external exhibits and observing what made them work through a visitor’s perspective.

Chief Curator, senior Brianna Keys, led her introduction, prodding the audience to share the question the team answered during the creation of the exhibition, “What story do we want to tell through fashion?” 

One look of the exhibition displays the freshmen uniform of the ‘50s, including a dink cap that would have been worn by students to signify their status as an underclassman within the university, leading to both connectivity and displacement. 

Another of the four looks highlights a t-shirt from the ‘70s donated by the May 4th Memorial Museum, illustrating the events of May 4th 1970. This outfit calls out that graphic t-shirts were and are a representation of student and civilian protest, emphasizing the impact fashion has when looked at dually through historical and present lenses.

Another team member, Vivienne Page Gilmore, shared her experience on the graphics team. She pointed out the fact that fashion shapes one’s sense of self, and that the graphics of the display pages must be cohesive to the displayed garments themselves, hence their choice of blue and gold font. She shared that the putting together the graphics of an exhibition is a step-by-step process that follows the other two teams’ work, yet is completed through collaboration of all three teams. 

Later, Chief Curator Keys shared the same insight, claiming her favorite parts of the process was collaborating between teams and listening to everyone’s perspectives. On curating the garments themselves, Keys spoke on her team’s work in sourcing the garments, explaining they were either borrowed, donated, or purchased– one sweatshirt was even sourced from a team member’s mom that she bought at Kent’s bookstore in the ‘90s. Finally she shared how it was entertaining to observe how fashion represented the student body long before the fashion school itself was established in 1983, and how special it felt to represent that now through the exhibition in the fashion building itself.

The event included a button-making station, with uncolored hand-drawn renditions of each of Kent’s mascots of the past. Encouraging students to participate in the act of making their own spirit-wear emphasized the connections that can be made when students feel like they belong in their community.

Near the end of her opening speech, Dr. Xepoleas noted that, “fashion serves as a highly visible and forceful medium on Kent State campus.” The exhibit reflects this notion—whether you are part of the fashion school or not, dress certainly dictates our own personas, follows the current times, and allows students to feel most connected with themselves. 

The Way We Wore tells a vivid story of student involvement, community and history. It is displayed now on the second floor of Rockwell Hall on the balcony of the fashion library.

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