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Huntington U: Fashioning the Long 18th Century: Dress and Textiles at The Huntington
Event
Past eventWed., Oct. 15, 2025, 10 a.m.–12 p.m.
Six Wednesdays, Oct. 15–Nov. 19 | Public: $300, Members: $275
Education and Visitor Center, Steven’s Classroom
Join fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell on a six-week course exploring the dress and textiles of 18th-century England, France, and America, as found in artworks in The Huntington’s collections.
Huntington U is a college-style seminar with no homework or tests. This fall, fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell leads a six-week course that traces the history of fashion for men, women, and children from Louis XIV to the Regency period, and introduces the study of clothing and textile vocabulary, construction techniques, and sustainability.
Across six sessions of this seminar, participants will consider:
- How did 18th-century artists use (and sometimes manipulate) real garments to create an idealized or allegorical image?
- How does dress express and reflect power, social status, gender, and identity?
- What is the difference between “fashion” and other kinds of dress?
Participants will make frequent trips into the galleries to study fashion and hairstyles in portraits, as well as rare tapestries, carpets, and needlework.
View/download the course syllabus (PDF)
For questions about this event, email publicprograms@huntington.org
About the Instructor
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a fashion historian, curator, and journalist. A former Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in French Art at The Huntington, she has worked at LACMA and taught at UC Riverside. She is the author of Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (Yale, 2015), Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History (Running Press, 2019),(Running Press, 2020),(Kent State University Press, 2022), (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), and several exhibition catalogues, as well as writing about fashion, art, and culture for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Politico, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal. She was a 2020-21 NEH Public Scholar and a 2021-22 USC Libraries Fellow.
