Whose work survives long enough for the museum?

The Met's "Women Dressing Women" can only do so much to fix history.

When a photo of a photo is all that remains.

A life’s work, lost

“Despite the visibility of the influential women she dressed, including Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mae West, scant physical evidence of her garments exist today.”

That line stopped me cold. I was wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s terrific—and long overdue—exhibit about female fashion designers, “Women Dressing Women.” (It’s been extended by a week and is now closing on March 10; I highly recommend it if you live in or will be visiting New York City. Go as early in the day as possible: This is an exhibit where reading the captions adds important context, but the Met’s Costume Institute has NOT figured out crowd control.)

“Women Dressing Women” is, somehow, “the first time the museum has ever held a survey dedicated solely to the work of women,” and the exhibit tries hard to live up to that impossible weight. It’s an expansive, and remarkably thoughtful, collection of work by dozens of seamstresses and designers and businesswomen. Some of them always worked in anonymity; some were famous in their era but eventually were forgotten; and some—as in the case of Ann Lowe, the Black designer who created Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress—saw their names deliberately hidden even as their work made headlines.

But even Lowe, however brutal the racism she faced in her era, made dresses that survived to be presented in this exhibit. Zelda Wynn Valdes, another 20th-century Black designer for famous clients, did not. That’s her dress up above—or at least the ghostly remnants of it, in a James J. Kriegsmann photograph of the singer Joyce Bryant. Another photo of that dress ran with Bryant’s 2022 New York Times obituary, which noted that the performer became famous in part for her fashion choices of “striking gowns that accentuated her hourglass figure.”

Yet the gowns themselves—or any of Valdes’s other work—apparently didn’t survive long enough for the Met, or other archivists, to deem them worthy of preserving for the historical record. Now her only entry in “Women Dressing Women” is that photo of Bryant, and its caption.

“Scant physical evidence exists today.” Even though Valdes was a powerful and well-connected businesswoman in her era, with a roster of A-list celebrity clients. By the late 1950s, customers at her Carnegie Hall shop were paying her almost $1,000 for a gown. By the early 1960s, she was working with Hugh Hefner on (the, okay, dubious but iconic pop-culture landmark of) designing and manufacturing the original Playboy Bunny costume. By 1994, when Valdes was 88, the Times even acknowledged some of her accomplishments with a two-column interview in its National section.

So even in a more overtly racist era, when it was even more difficult for Black artists and entrepreneurs to be recognized by white power brokers, Valdes muscled her way into the historical record. But her work didn’t. 

All kinds of vanishing

After I wrote last month about the digital impermanence of our lives today, I heard from friends with many more examples of what we create but don’t own online: Wedding websites and all of the work, and joy, that went into designing them; smartphone photos that have de facto replaced baby albums; collections of family videos that document the lives of children born in the last decade, and that live at the mercy of Apple’s iCloud.  

I started thinking a lot about Emily Dickinson, who famously published very few words in her lifetime—and whose name we only know today because, after she died, her sister Lavinia found hundreds of poems in her room. Lavinia and Mabel Loomis Todd, who had a long affair with Emily’s brother Austin, spent years working to get them published. 

Could we ever have a digital Emily Dickinson? I’m sure there are still writers whose notes and drafts are mostly hand-written, but mine, at least, exist almost entirely in digital form. There are Word documents scattered across USB drives and computers, Google docs tied to my email account, scraps of writing and brainstorming for future projects that live entirely in my phone’s Notes app. If something suddenly happens to me, most of that unpublished work will vanish into the digital ether. 

But what’s the answer? Saving digital records to USB sticks and external hard drives can work for some stuff, but hoarding paper copies of everything I write is neither practical nor healthy. For artists whose work takes up more space—the painters, the fashion designers, let alone the Richard Serra-scale sculptors—physical storage requires a lot of land, and money. 

And, of course, physical records lie, too. We know Emily Dickinson’s name today in large part thanks to Mabel Loomis Todd—who also censored her work. While editing and publishing Dickinson’s poems, Todd erased dedications and other references to the woman who is today known as the love of Dickinson’s life. 

Yet even while warping some of Dickinson’s legacy, Todd still got enough of her poetry published to make her a posthumous cultural force—and to pique the interests of scholars who eventually reversed some of the damage. Now Dickinson is the subject of movies and a prestige TV series about her love life and her genius.

Or there’s this “Delphos” gown from “Women Dressing Women,” which was sold for more than 40 years and “is documented in countless publications, exhibitions, and collections.” This dress was the most famous work of the Italian designer Mariano Fortuny—but, as the Met notes, historians have recently reassigned credit for its creation to his partner, Henriette Nigrin: “Though patents cite Fortuny as the owner, in a recently discovered note from 1909 Fortuny credits Nigrin, claiming an urgency to complete the filing as the reason for the misattribution.” 

Sometimes credit eventually returns to where it was always due. But it still takes so much privilege and luck to make a lasting mark on history: The time and space to do the work in the first place; the money to archive it during your lifetime and after your death; some recognition of your genius while you’re alive; and the support, after you’ve died, of people who can be trusted to preserve and champion your work in your absence.

All of this is so much harder, of course, for women and especially for women of color, whose contributions have been deliberately ignored throughout history. We don’t know how many other Emily Dickinsons or Henriette Nigrins or Ann Lowes or Zelda Wynn Valdeses existed whose work wasn’t recognized or valued in their lifetimes; whose names have been erased from history, or attributed to the more powerful people around them; and whose archives didn’t last long enough to be found, and treasured, and put in a major art museum’s first-ever survey of all the women’s work it ignored for decades. 

So considering all that was stacked against her, Zelda Wynn Valdes was lucky indeed. Her work may not have survived long enough to make it to the museum—but at least her name finally did.