Join Ocean Hour Farm for the first in a 3-part series about fiber literacy and sustainable fashion.

What lies beneath the glamour of the Gilded Age, and how has it shaped what we wear today? This talk examines the enduring impact of the Gilded Age on contemporary fashion and textile culture, tracing connections between nineteenth-century excess and today’s systems of fast fashion, consumption, and waste. Moving beyond the era’s surface glamour, it considers the hidden histories embedded in clothing, including labor, extraction, and what conservators term “inherent vice,” the material tendency of textiles to change, decay, and transform over time. Drawing on examples from the RISD Museum’s collections, Kate Irvin reframes wear, aging, and repair not as loss, but as opportunities for storytelling and renewed connection to our clothing, while highlighting slow fashion, mending, and circular approaches as throughlines to more conscious consumption.

Kate Irvin is Curator and Head of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum, where she oversees a global collection of more than 35,000 objects spanning from 1500 BCE to the present. Her work bridges historical research, contemporary practice, and experimental approaches to how we experience and understand fashion and textiles.

Header image credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division