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Flying high in style: Women’s fashion in aviation through the ages

Category
Exhibition
Interpretations
MA students
Date
-
Black and white photograph, of Amelia Earhart a white woman with short dark hair. She sits in a wooden chair with her right arm on the chair’s arm. She is wearing a dark heavy looking jacket and trousers with a silk scarf tied loosely around her neck.
Date
11 December 2024 - 1 March 2025
Location
Online exhibition
Category

Did you know that Amelia Earhart was also a fashion designer?

Flying high in style explores women’s fashion in the American aviation Industry throughout the 20th century. The exhibition examines the fashion of the iconic pilot Amelia Earhart and presents the changing flight attendant uniform, through a series of new sketches.

This exhibition is born out of a curatorial collaboration by a group of three female MA students at the University of Leeds, responding to the Smithsonian Institution collection.

We invite visitors to consider the impact that fashion has had on women in the aviation industry and how it dramatically changed throughout the 2oth Century. We hope to encourage visitors to reflect on how fashion has worked alongside women’s liberation in the workforce whilst also questioning how it has been used to control them.

Visit the exhibition

Flying high in style is part of a wider series of online exhibitions curated by Art Gallery and Museum Studies and Arts Management and Heritage MA students from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, as part of an Interpretations course module.

Visit the online exhibition.

Image

Photograph of Amelia Mary Earhart, 24 Jul 1897. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Edith A. Scott, c. 1932, NPG.75.82. Image available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.