Hashtagging YSL and Halston: What Museums Can Learn from Hashtags

Academic discourse on fashion—the sometimes-arcane works of high fashion designers—can be baffling to laypeople. While historians of costume think and talk about dress using critical theory and disciplinary jargon, many of those outside the academy with a love of fashion have their own way of talking about their favorite pieces and designers online, perhaps most importantly their use of hashtags, the focus of this case study from my larger monograph project, Textile Collections: Preservation, Access, Curation, and Interpretation in a Digital Age (published by Rowman & Littlefield as part of the AASLH Series earlier this year).

This poster presentation will explore posts made on Tumblr in response to visits to the Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) exhibition Yves Saint Laurent + Halston: Fashioning the 70s. An analysis of these posts reveals rich and consistent use of tagging, allowing other users to follow along with the exhibition. Analyzing user-applied hashtags about fashion and comparing them to those words used in the headings of museum exhibit labels, or to the hashtags used by the museum’s own in-house social media campaign, can be a very enlightening exercise for museum professionals. Ultimately, understanding how laypeople talk about and categorize high fashion (with more of an emphasis on particular colors and fabrics and on the personalities who wore the clothes) can lead to more visitor-friendly exhibit development and museum learning programs.