\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tThe Women\u2019s History Museum boutique on Canal Street in New York.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Women\u2019s History Museum<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tWhen I first saw the work of Women\u2019s History Museum, I didn\u2019t know what to make of it. Their first five years\u2019 output actually made me nervous. Experimental, sexy, and precarious, their fashion presentations\u2014which were, at first, their primary focus\u2014seemed to give more than they could ever receive, showcasing beautiful, youthful, and often half-naked femmes in a vacuum or a kind of fantasy world where cool art girls could safely wear delicate scraps of deeply meaningful fabric.<\/p>\n \n\tWomen\u2019s History Museum seemed to me, back then, rather monolithic, like one big metaphor for how\u2014as Ada O\u2019Higgins, one of their repeat collaborators, suggested in an interview with them\u2014\u201cthe beauty of imperfect things evokes the archetype of the damaged or \u2018used\u2019 woman who, like used clothing, is deemed discardable and forgettable.\u201d To that, McGowan responded: \u201cI think that to be a woman is often to feel damaged or broken, and like there is something wrong with you in some capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the early years, before the pandemic, I might\u2019ve said that Women\u2019s History Museum were like the baby punk sister of fashion artist Susan Cianciolo, the Miu Miu to her Prada. Whereas Cianciolo brings things together\u2014the stitching on her garments stands out, like the lines we draw between stars to make a constellation\u2014Women\u2019s History Museum showed things coming apart in the form of a raw hem, a disintegrating mesh, a bare midriff, burn holes. Sexual and gender-based violence loomed.<\/p>\n \n\tTHEN CAME THE SPRING <\/strong>of 2021. Having received one Covid <\/strong>vaccination and awaiting the second, I went downtown with a friend to see \u201cMORT de la MODE\u2026.Everything must go!,\u201d Women\u2019s History Museum\u2019s solo exhibition at Company Gallery on the Lower East Side. Evoking an abandoned boutique with flashy on sale signs, flat paper dresses, windows covered in custom newspapers, a boa made of matchbooks (like a Yayoi Kusama \u201cAccumulation\u201d sculpture), and a necklace bearing badges marked time, the exhibition connected with the greater zeitgeist in a way I\u2019d never seen from the collective, and in a way that very little art was able to in or around that time of lockdown. Since New York was so empty, my friend and I were able to experience the apocalyptic art show as it needed to be: alone<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tPlanned before the pandemic and delayed because of it, the show landed perfectly in time. This made me realize that Women\u2019s History Museum, while highly attentive to the past, incorporating bonnets and bustles and garters and capes, were always ahead of their time. The duo\u2019s early, hyper-girly assemblages\u2014that sexy, scrappy look that made me so nervous circa 2016\u2014is now a standard mode of undress among Instagram baddies, quirky celebrities, and young brands.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tView of the exhibition \u201cMORT de la MODE\u2026.Everything Must Go!,\u201d 2021, at Company Gallery, New York.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Company Gallery, New York<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tWomen\u2019s History Museum\u2019s next exhibition at Company, \u201cThe Massive Disposal of Experience\u201d in the summer of 2022, was just as strong, building on the previous one. \u201cThe boutique is gone,\u201d Barringer said of the show. \u201cThe person\u2019s the boutique now.\u201d Staged in the gallery\u2019s basement, the exhibition suggested a theater of online shopping, where the dark room of the imagination meets the addictive malls of resale sites such as eBay, Etsy, Depop, and Buyee.<\/p>\n \n\tBoth shows featured magazines that couldn\u2019t be opened. In \u201cMORT de la MODE,\u201d the publications were made of plaster and looked like white sheet cake. In \u201cThe Massive Disposal of Experience,\u201d actual magazines were encased in a clear plastic hoop skirt while torn-out pages were stuffed between the layers of a clear plastic top and dress. More magazines showed up in the form of trompe l\u2019oeil stacks made of printed fabric.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen Barringer and McGowan first met, they knew they were destined to collaborate, and their first idea was to make a fashion magazine. They quickly abandoned the idea and were wise to do so, as the internet and social media had scooped the fashion magazine world, moving faster than they ever could. In Women\u2019s History Museum\u2019s hands, fashion magazines are, more aptly, an empty shell, a nostalgic relic, stuffing for a garment. The world Barringer and McGowan have built, though, is very magazine-like. It\u2019s as if they took everything there is to love about magazines\u2014the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of juxtaposition, our need for fantasy and beauty, and the energy of collaboration\u2014and brought it to life.<\/p>\n \n\tNowhere is this more evident than in Women\u2019s History Museum\u2019s namesake boutique on the third floor of a building on Canal Street, where Chinatown meets SoHo in New York. Open five days a week, the store showcases Women\u2019s History Museum\u2019s unique designs alongside vintage clothes and wearables made by a community of friends, among them Gogo Graham and Chlo\u00e9 Maratta. Objects from past exhibitions have been repurposed as display fixtures. The walls and dressing room curtain are painted in signature patterns.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tLooks from the Women\u2019s History Museum Fall 2024 collection show.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy firstVIEW<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tBarringer and McGowan opened the shop in spring 2023 after selling curated vintage fashion online as a side hustle for three years. (Chlo\u00eb Sevigny bought a Fall 1992 Vivienne Westwood corset with a Frans Hals baby print from them after giving birth to her own baby in 2020.) When Barringer and McGowan are minding the shop, Women\u2019s History Museum is extra-alive, as they explain the story behind every object and compliment their customers endlessly, like true girls\u2019 girls.<\/p>\n \n\tThe shop is the new SEX, the fabled boutique where Westwood got her start in London in the \u201970s. And there\u2019s often plenty of Westwood in stock. The vintage side of the business is so successful\u2014and fashion\u2019s memory is so short\u2014that \u201cmany people who come to the store now don\u2019t know that we make stuff,\u201d McGowan bemoaned. \u201cThey don\u2019t know who we<\/em> are.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s part of why she and Barringer went all out for their Fall 2024 runway presentation, their first since 2020. \u201cThe lack of memory felt upsetting,\u201d Barringer told me. The need to remind people who they were was \u201calmost territorial.\u201d And it worked, as Women\u2019s History Museum showed up every other brand on the New York Fashion Week calendar around its show in February.<\/p>\n \n\tPillars of Women\u2019s History Museum\u2019s community were given the best seats in the house while celebrities fit in where they could. Actress Hunter Schafer bounced in the second row next to musicians Zsela and Lizzi Bougatsos. The setting was an abandoned bank on Wall Street, and the soundtrack was libidinous, mixed by Amber Bradford, a respiratory therapist in Tennessee. Animals screeched and sirens wailed over a gabber beat as the first model took to the runway in a mohawk made of feathers (hair by Sonny Molina). Two models wore the second look in matching dresses, one representing the Empire State Building and the other, the Chrysler Building. The two dresses were connected by a shared cape lined with words from a poem they wrote about codependency: your boredom is my boredom \/ your sick is my sick \/ your happiness is my addiction \/ your guilt is my anxiety\u2026.Disney child star turned human rights activist Rowan Blanchard was next, her anime tits bouncing in a gold gladiator getup. Then it was Yves B. Golden, an artist and poet, in a languid 1930s-style gown with a back cowl so low, her whole thong showed. And it kept going, good from beginning to end, a 23-minute presentation that even incited some people to cry tears seemingly of joy and relief.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tView of the exhibition \u201cThe Massive Disposal of Experience,\u201d 2022, at Company Gallery, New York.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Company Gallery, New York<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tThe collection was titled \u201cEnfer,\u201d the word for hell<\/em> in French (fashion\u2019s first language), and the hells explored were three-pronged, like a devil\u2019s pitchfork: the hell of competitive sports, the hell of surviving as a human animal in New York, and the hell of being a woman\u2014high pleasures across the board. Icons of hellishness were repurposed as a survivor\u2019s uniform, represented by things like a wig made of pills, a silhouette of a rat, two pajama sets mapping the human body along cuts of meat (neck, flank, loin, shank\u2026<\/em>), plenty of animal prints, big cat-paw pumps, real porcupine quills, the words toxic metropolis, and my favorite, a virgin-white hooded gown with bound knees, back-bound wrists, and a fetus print on the abdomen.<\/p>\n \n\tIn an unscripted moment, one model kept falling, determined to walk in heels with real boxing gloves attached to their toes (a nod to Miguel Adrover\u2019s Fall 2012 middle-finger shoes). The model persisted, falling over and over again, sideways into the front row, crumpling to the runway as many in the crowd (stylist Haley Wollens and me among them) screamed \u201ctake them off!\u201d It was good that she didn\u2019t before she made it to the end of the catwalk: There, she took the boxing gloves in her hands, looking like, as Devan D\u00edaz put it in her Substack newsletter, \u201cshe\u2019d just won a fight\u2026 Victorious.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s how the whole show felt: victorious (but not without struggle), a triumph of art, love, community, and survival. Footage of it shares the same feeling as an early Martin Margiela or Alexander McQueen presentation. Fashion students will watch it for years to come.<\/p>\n \n\tBut will they know how we felt? For those in the bank that day, heartbreak abounded. Cecilia Gentili, a trans activist and mother, had died unexpectedly just two days prior. War and genocide raged. Work was scarce. Collectors and investors had gotten stingy. It was an election year. Life was hard for people on the ground. And somehow, through fashion, one of the most divisive and shame-inducing fields of production, Women\u2019s History Museum was able to console and uplift.<\/p>\n \n\tONE SEASON LATER<\/strong>, during New York Fashion Week this past September, Women\u2019s History Museum took their community to church: the LGBTQ+-embracing Church of the Village in Greenwich Village, to be exact. Shattered safety glass lined the runway-aisle like lines of salt to ward off evil. More broken glass covered garments and footwear. The model wearing the highest of all the high heels\u2014stilts really, made of narrow pillars of wood fastened to a gold gladiator flat, the lacing of which mirrored the corsetry-like ribbing on the vault of the Gothic Revival church\u2014was escorted down the runway by two other models in an effort that recalled TikTok videos of people learning to walk again after an accident.<\/p>\n \n\tThe collection was littered with homages and references to Rudi Gernreich\u2019s topless monokini, Alexander McQueen\u2019s ultra-low-rise \u201cbumsters,\u201d Azzedine Ala\u00efa\u2019s jewel-tone hoods, aughts-era graphic slogan tees, Jean-Paul Gaultier\u2019s bandage bodysuit from the 1997 film The Fifth Element<\/em>, and Barbie\u2019s stiff tall ponytail. Like fellow designer duo Vaquera, their peers in the young alt New York fashion scene, Women\u2019s History Museum don\u2019t hide their influences: They make a show of them while turning fan art into a sort of conceptual practice.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tA look from the Women\u2019s History Museum Spring 2025 collection show.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy firstVIEW<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tAfter the runway show, a group of friends went to dinner and discussed what we\u2019d seen. \u201cVery sexy,\u201d we echoed one another. \u201cVery inspiring. Very skinny. Very McQueen.\u201d We all agreed that the not-quite-there-ness of the fantasies that Women\u2019s History Museum presents is what makes us feel a warm sense of belonging. The gap between a brilliant, perfect idea and its manifestation here on earth is evident in elements like the sometimes awkward choreography and the costume-box-meets-couture sensibility. This gap is what commercial brands and entertainment companies try to close. But the gap is sacred and real. It\u2019s where all good things happen in this mortal world. Exhibiting it takes courage because it might not make rent. But it is art.<\/p>\n \n\tAlthough completely self-funded and DIY to date, Barringer and McGowan have an even greater resource than investors or a trust fund: each other.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAmanda\u2019s my hero,\u201d Barringer told me, holding back tears.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cMattie\u2019s one of the most creative people I\u2019ve ever met,\u201d McGowan said. \u201cShe cares so deeply about people and will always win an argument\u2014she could be a lawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThey\u2019re both do-gooders, employing diverse models, recycling found materials, embedding their work with a critique of fashion\u2019s waste, exploitation, and discrimination. Before they met, McGowan, who\u2019s from the Bronx, thought she might \u201cgo into pre-med, help people.\u201d Barringer was coming out of an \u201cextremely religious\u201d Mormon upbringing that was \u201cobsessed with modesty in clothing.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIf they hadn\u2019t met, they told me, they wouldn\u2019t be doing what they\u2019re doing; Barringer wouldn\u2019t have had the courage and McGowan wouldn\u2019t have had the conviction. As their longtime collaborator, the musician and artist Chlo\u00e9 Maratta, noted, \u201ctheir work is deeply informed by their friendship, this back and forth conversation of references, ideas that bloom when you\u2019ve been friends for years.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEven their name began as an inside joke\u2014\u201cthe museum\u201d is what Barringer and McGowan used to call their closet\u2014and like any such reference, it confused many people at first. Taylor Trabulus, Barringer and McGowan\u2019s dealer at Company Gallery, would find herself explaining, \u201cno, it\u2019s not an actual museum,\u201d before comparing their practice to experimental collectives like the Situationist International and Bernadette Corporation or to the performance artist Colette.<\/p>\n \n\tAs the number of their exhibitions and fashion collections grew, Women\u2019s History Museum proved to be a perfect moniker, complementing\u2014as accessories do clothing\u2014the questions that their work raises: Does fashion belong in the museum or gallery? Why has it traditionally not been included? Why haven\u2019t women? What do we know about women\u2019s history? Who and what is worth archiving? Can a boutique be a museum? Can a closet? Can a community?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_2971.jpg?w=400\")
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