Dress & Drinks: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
7:00 p.m. Eastern/4:00 p.m. Pacific
FREE Webinar, Open to All

This month, we will speak with Susan Brown, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Leigh Wishner. Brown and Winton are co-curators of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes, and are co-editors of the accompanying book published by Yale University Press. Wishner is a contributor to the publication. Join us to learn all about the exhibition and our speakers’ backgrounds in dress!

Susan Brown is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, where she oversees a global collection of over 27,000 textiles produced over 2,000 years. Her past exhibitions for the museum include Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance; Fashioning Felt; Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay; Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse; Contemporary Muslim Fashions; and Suzie Zuzek for Lilly Pulitzer: The Prints that Made the Fashion Brand.

Alexa Griffith Winton is a design historian and educator. She is currently Manager, Public Programs and Interpretation at Cooper Hewitt. She has researched and published on the work of Dorothy Liebes for over ten years. Alexa's work has been published in scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of Design History, Dwell, Journal of the Archives of American Art, and the Journal of Modern Craft. She co-edited A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes with Brown. She has received research grants from the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, Center for Craft, Creativity and Research, Nordic Culture Point, and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.

Leigh Wishner is a design historian specializing in modern textiles and fashion. She has worked in the museum field for over twenty years, holding positions at the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and at Cora Ginsburg LLC. She received her BA in Art History and Archaeology from Barnard College, and her MA in Decorative Arts and Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center. Leigh has a passion for 20th-century fabrics, fashions, and interiors, lecturing extensively on these intertwined subjects.

Register for Dress & Drinks on January 31, 2024 at 7:00pm Eastern/4:00pm Western below!

Our cocktail for the evening: Glitter & Glamour

Cocktails this month courtesy of our guest, Leigh Wishner!

Ingredients:

1/4 ounce grapefruit liqueur

1 1/2 ounces passion fruit nectar

4 ounces sparkling wine/champagne

edible glitter* (optional, but highly recommended!)

Shake (or stir) liqueur & nectar with ice; pour into a chilled cocktail coupe/flute and top with sparkling wine.

Non-alcoholic drink: Whameroo!

Ingredients:

3 oz guava nectar

1 ½ oz coconut water

½ oz lime juice, freshly squeezed

3 oz ginger beer (or club soda)

edible glitter* (see above)

Shake (or stir) guava nectar, coconut water, lemon juice with ice; pour into chilled tumbler glass, filled with fresh ice. Top with club soda/sparkling water.

*Add edible glitter according to instructions on packaging

Click here to register
Registration closes 24 hours prior to the event.