Sonnet Stanfill
Acting Senior Curator of 20th century and contemporary fashion
V&A, London
Sonnet Stanfill is Acting Senior Curator of 20th century and contemporary fashion at the V&A, where she has worked since 1999. Her exhibitions include Ossie Clark (2003), New York Fashion Now (2007) and Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950 (2012). After curating The Glamour of Italian Fashion in 2014, Sonnet joined the curatorial team for Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015). Sonnet holds an MA in the history of dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art and has published and lectured widely on varied aspects of fashion design. Before joining the V&A Sonnet worked as a retail buyer in San Francisco and New York.
Abstract
Anonymous tastemakers: American department store buyers and Italian fashion
In the post-war period, North American department stores resumed the practice of offering original European couture and copies to their vast and affluent markets. To secure the seasonal collections department store buyers travelled to Europe, selected the seasonal styles and arranged for their delivery. Thus, these buyers served as filters of taste for the markets they served.
Despite a buyer’s role as an important tastemaker, the details of their peripatetic work lives are not well understood. In this talk, fashion curator Sonnet Stanfill will discuss how the department store buyers travelled, the countries they covered, the schedules they kept and their influence on both the careers of designers and on the contents of the North American wardrobe. This talk will focus on the first five years of internationally attended fashion shows in Italy and the powerful buying staff of department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and B. Altman of New York, I. Magnin of California and Henry Morgan’s of Montreal.
Unveiling new research undertaken in Italian and American archives, Stanfill will provide a dynamic picture of the process of viewing, selecting and importing garments from Italy to the United States in the first half of the 1950s, a period which coincided with Italy’s emergence as a source of leading fashion design.