Current Exhibition
COVET: VINTAGE & THE COLLECTOR
Curators: Cyana Madsen and Anthony Sylvester
Date: 28th March - 6th April 2025
Central to anthropologist Igor Kopytoff's paper The Social Life Of Things (1986) is the idea that every object has a life cycle; moving through different social and cultural contexts, gaining new meanings and values as it is used, traded, passed on, forgotten and discarded. While every object is initially created for a specific function, as it interacts with the world, it develops its own narrative, its own biography.
Tangible examples of this biography can be found in collections of vintage clothing. A garment created for a specific purpose may outlive its original utility and find new life in a new environment, under new circumstances. For example, attire designed to be worn by military personnel might be marketed for sale as 'surplus' to be bought and worn by civilian owners far removed from its martial origins.
Senior cords (c. 1966) and pages from Peru Highschool Yearbook, Narcissus (1966)
Collectors on Collecting (Video with English Captions, 4min 49sec)
Jonathan Swanston (Antique Dealer, Kestrel Antiques)
Dr. Sara Idacavage (Fashion Historian, Southern Methodist University)
Ted Allott (Consultant and Archivist, Worne Vintage Clothing)
These trousers originate from the mid 1960s and were made specifically for an alumnus of Peru High School in Indiana, United States of America. It was a state tradition, originating back in 1904 at Perdue University, for students to don 'senior cords' to celebrate their graduation year. Local tailors would make up trousers or skirts of pale yellow or cream cotton corduroy that students would then embellish with drawings of personal motifs and iconography of their favourite subjects, pastimes, and passions: creating a 'wearable yearbook' (Christopher Bernard, New York Times, 2023). The practice was dormant by the end of the 1970s, though its influence can be seen in the output of contemporary American design houses such as Ralph Lauren and Bode.
Senior cords (c.1966)
Despite the hyper-localised (both in geographical and temporal terms) nature of the senior cord tradition, vintage clothing enthusiasts obsess over and trade rare examples as they appear on the market, creating a new audience for the trousers far away from the American Midwest and from the trousers’ original intention and meaning.
The pair on display here are part of the archive collection of studio co-founder Anthony Sylvester and were bought from an East London vintage clothing dealer in 2019. The beige corduroy is embellished with hand drawn marker pen depicting sports team mascots, scholastic topics, and the namesof 1966 class members and teammates. The illustrations on these trousers provide vital clues in identifying the fellow students and faculty members in the text and images, though the name of the original owner and wearer is lost to time.
“The appeal of the ‘Senior cords’ for a clothing collector such as myself is manifold. They represent a great example of classic ‘Ivy League’ Americana that is high on my personal list of items I like to collect. Secondly, they are explicitly linked to the original owner’s biography in a way that is actually tangible and researchable. Corduroy is also a very appealing cloth to me, but most of all, they are entirely unique - there is no other identical pair in existence. If I had passed up the opportunity to pick these up when I did, I doubt another similar pair would ever have crossed my path.” (Anthony Sylvester, 2025)
These senior cord trousers are symbolic not only of the memories of the person who originally modified and wore them but have become recontextualised and are now the coveted possession of a contemporary collector.
Previous Exhibitions
Exhibition 5: Jamaica Fashion Guild Ltd: Designing Paradise
Curator: Elli Michaela Young
Date: 23rd February - 2nd March 2025
‘A wise suggestion to the first-time lady visitor is to pack a half filled suitcase, only the barest essentials. She’ll want to take home a variety of sun dresses and original evening gowns styled by the island’s classic designers’ (Brady, 1968)
Jamaica Fashion Guild Ltd: Designing Paradise was curated by academic and creative practitioner Dr Elli Michaela Young. This exhibition showcased the output of designers in the Jamaica Fashion Guild Ltd (JFG) in the context of packing for a Caribbean holiday, and was the first time this rare and unique collection of garments had been publicly exhibited.
Exhibition 4: Enmesh
Curator: Alexia Marmara
Date: 2nd December 2024 - 4th January 2025
"'The Archive is this kind of place that [has] to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam.'
- Carolyn Steedman
Personal archives are borderless and unlimited visions of the past and contain invaluable testimonials to the unfixed nature of our worlds. The objects within Enmesh are points of entry into disjointed and hospitable narratives. There is an entrenched connectivity within self and what we encounter through archival objects that opens internal and private passages: a collection of disused cloth, paper or metal becomes a means of constructing and understanding self-hood on top of disused artefacts. Though being surrogates for the vanished past, it is the trust in the beauty and strength of these archives that has enabled a variety of artists and keepers to translate them all into new contexts. Despite its crumbling, shattering or disappearance, the vulnerability of the archival piece finds new power. Through the work of the artists, archivists and fashion designers featured in Enmesh I have traversed the ways in which these virtuosos have enfleshed archives and enmeshed themselves within. Tightly squeezed together and pulsating separately within a small window, consider this a petri dish of precious components of the ever expanding worldwide dust hysteria and archive fever." (Alexia Marmara, 2024)Enmesh (2nd December 2024 - 4th January 2025) was an exhibition exploring evolving negotiations between self and archives, curated by Alexia Marmara (co-curator and co-programmer at The Horse Hospital; previously HYMAG).
You Should Have Been There (Rachelle Francis, 2023)
detail, refurbished found photograph (Chris Neate)
detail, repurposed Victorian linen robe (Indépendantes de Cœur par Valériane Venance)
Exhibition 3: PROTRUSION: a collaboration with the artist Samuel Eyles
Curator: Cyana Madsen
Date: 6th September 2024 - 19th October 2024
In the painting REQUIEM FOR A BROKEN BOWL (2020), one of the most intimate and utilitarian garments, the sport sock, becomes a symbol of self-loathing, indignity, and solitude. In response to this painting by multidisciplinary artist Samuel Eyles, Cyana Madsen curated PROTRUSION: a collaboration with the artist Samuel Eyles (2024).
This installation materialised Eyles' fraught emotional world by producing a series of ribbed cotton talismans to boredom, repetition, and filth. The socks crawled out of the canvas to transform Eyles' symbol of shame into a coveted object which is beautiful, functional, and provides tactile pleasure.
REQUIEM FOR A BROKEN BOWL is not for sale, and Eyles' practice is now focused on writing and filmmaking. Each pair of socks thus became both an essential part of the exhibition design, and an editioned work. Socks were available to purchase through AWMS, and were delivered to owners after the exhibition closed on 19th October 2024. Each pair uniquely reflected the impact of exposure on their colouring and structure: embodying and memorialising the ephemeral nature of practice and display.
In celebration of MADSEN SYLVESTER STUDIO’s first collaborative project, a durational event was held on the evening of Friday, 6th September 2024 and was exhibited until Monday, 9th September 2024. Visitors to the private view of PROTRUSION: a collaboration with the artist Samuel Eyles were invited to contribute a participatory response to Eyles’ painting Iv changed Sam, I wear a hat now (2018). Using discarded glassware they had drunk from, visitors created their own protrusion in the membrane between the world rendered on Eyles’ canvas, and the exhibition space.
Exhibition 2: Curare, or toward a studio ethos
Curator: Cyana Madsen
Date: 28th July 2024 - 4th September 2024
Madsen Sylvester Studio is a space for exhibiting any aspects of the wide remit of the dressed body and fashion, and for interrogating curatorial methods. In establishing the studio and its focus, I decided that while the studio will host curators and support their exhibitions, it will keep no physical collection. This decision has two motivations: dictated by the considerations and capacity of the space, and ideologically motivated by a need to unsettle and question the hierarchies imposed by collecting methodologies.
As a site of experimental praxis, the studio ethos must be explicit in its intention to provide a creative working space to fashion curators. Yet, I acknowledge that this ethos is generated from my own research and experience, and is therefore open to questioning from external practitioners, to ensure its ongoing relevance and utility.
The initial mandate for Madsen Sylvester Studio is that:
· the exhibitions on display at the studio will temporarily highlight a research or personal preoccupation of the specific fashion curator working with the space;
· all visiting curators will be asked to provide a biography which contextualises the exhibition in relation to their practice;
· while at the studio, any objects will be cared for and presented to a standard agreed in dialogue with the visiting curator, the commissioning curator, and any relevant stakeholders;
· the studio will not operate as a permanent site for storing fashion histories.
Curare, or toward a studio ethos thinks about what it means to be a curator without a collection. Is it the location, the objects, or the act that makes us? When not in functional use, the curatorial tools on display: the archive box, acid-free tissue, measuring tape, pencil, nitrile gloves become disembodied objects of dress themselves. Without a collection to document and store, they are both remnants of the performance of collections care, and the materialised symbols of the curator’s implicit promise to care for objects.
Exhibition 1: Introducing the Dressed Self
Curator: Cyana Madsen
Date: 1st July 2024 - 24th July 2024
Introducing the Dressed Self, 2024
“[…]we may take the term 'personal front’ to refer to the other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As part of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing[…]”
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956, p. 14)
In his mid-20th century study of human social life, Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that we individuals live our lives in a state of constant performance. To participate in social life we continually perform our version of reality for our audience, the society of observers which surround us, and we perform this reality for ourselves.
White cotton t-shirt with hand drawn self-portrait (c. 1987)
Worn to elementary school, 1987-1988.
An essential aspect of this performance is how we construct and conduct ourselves through our personal appearance, an appearance which includes our clothing. The garments we choose to wear in public, those we don in private at home, and even those that we would never dare to wear in front of even our closest loved ones are all part of this performance of the self.
Black suede block heel shoes with black grosgrain ribbon “Miu Miu” (c. 2014)
Worn on various nights out, 2017 - 2024.
If our clothing informs how we are positioned in the social world and thus how we experience the world around us, it also collects the marks and signs of this experience in its material: the soles of our shoes become worn as we walk through town; our trousers crease around the knees as we move; from our actions in everyday life we get stains, marks, and holes in our clothing.
Black cotton drill boiler suit with metal zipper (c. 2018)
Worn to defend PhD thesis, 2023.
Using items of worn clothing from the collection of curator Cyana Madsen, this installation considers how the clothing of the “Public, Private and Secret” (Eicher, 2020) selves come together to create our social identity, and in the process, collect the memories of our worn experience in the material.
Grishko Pro pointe shoes (c. 2016)
Worn for weekly pointe class, 2016-2017.
Beginning with this exhibition of worn clothing, the vitrine window of Madsen Sylvester Studio will be an experimental site for curators, artists, and researchers to explore all aspects of clothing, the self, and our world through a rotating series of installations and interventions.
Pink velvet slippers embroidered with gold wire lamb of god CMS crest (c. 2018)
Worn constantly, 2018-2024.
Further reading:
Eicher, J. (2020) ‘Dress, the Senses, and Public, Private, and Secret Selves 1’, Fashion Theory, 25(4), pp. 1-21.
Goffman, E. (1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre.
Sampson, E. (2020a) Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear. Bloomsbury Publishing: USA, 2020.
Stone, G. (1995) ‘Appearance and the Self’, in Eicher, J.B., Johnson, K.K.P. and Roach-Higgins, M.E. (eds.) Dress and identity. Reprint. New York: Fairchild Publications, pp. 19-39.
Exhibitions & Workshop.
Ramsgate, UK.