With a lifelong interest in music, no Mainbocher exhibition would be complete without a sampling of the songs that inspired and touched the designer. Many of his clients were performers and composers, and Mainbocher is credited with creating costumes for a total of eighteen Broadway plays, concerts, or musicals from 1941 to 1964. The Making More
As a preview to the opening of Making Mainbocher: The First American Couturier, volunteer Kristin Bernstein explains the process behind building props and determining accessories for the mannequins featured in the exhibition. In Making Mainbocher, mannequins are dressed from head to toe and no detail is lost. A gifted sketch artist who defined luxury in More
Water Tower Place, a seven-story, 758,000 square-foot vertical mall, opened its doors on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile in October 1975. At the time, it was almost completely vacant with the exception of its anchor stores, Marshall Field & Company and Lord & Taylor. However, due to its almost immediate success and prominent location on North Michigan More
Planning an exhibition such as Chicago Styled: Fashioning The Magnificent Mile® requires combing through the entire costume collection to find the most appropriate garments. We start this process by looking through our collection database and old catalog cards and then pulling the actual garments from storage to examine in person. For Chicago Styled, we pulled More
In honor of Chicago Styled: Fashioning The Magnificent Mile®, the Museum blog will publish a series of posts highlighting the stores, garments, designers, donors, and urban developments featured in the exhibition. “The woman who is clever is not a slavish follower of style. She never clings blindly to an arbitrarily prescribed fashion. Individuality is a More