Photograph by Jeff Wolk
Rafael Gomes, fashion curator at SCAD FASH, gingerly displays a Chanel haute couture dress that Vogue editor Anna Wintour donated to the school in 2008. He’s whisked it out of the archives just for us. The new Midtown museum devoted to fashion opened in October, and the Brazilian-German Gomes came to SCAD from London, where he’d worked for a decade as an archivist for designer Vivienne Westwood. In the midst of planning future exhibitions for SCAD FASH, he gave us a peek inside the museum’s brand-new archive room, which houses the growing permanent collection, shared between the Atlanta and Savannah campuses. The room is sterile and pristine, the walls lined with original photographs by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, and the Chanel dress lies boxed in archival tissue—“she looks like a sleeping beauty,” says Gomes.
What:
Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel haute couture (spring 2004) pale pink wool tweed dress and bolero
Storage:
Temperature Between 68 and 70 degrees
Humidity Between 50 and 55 percent
Wrapped in Special acid-free archival tissues and boxes
Handling Only in cotton or nitrile gloves
This article originally appeared in our Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Style Book.
