The Brooklyn Rail

The fashion industry is globally known for its contradictions, breeding the highest levels of self-expression and creative innovation while still upholding vapidity and exclusivity. From body-shaming to worker exploitation, the fashion world and its excess have a long history of demons with which to contend. Hailed by Vogue as “one of New York City's most exciting labels,” Women’s History Museum, a collective comprising Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan, redefines what fashion can be today by unearthing these troubling and complicated histories through gritty and experimental sculptural works of fashion. Women’s History Museum’s Grisette à l’enfer [Grisette in Hell], at Amant is their first institutional exhibition in the United States. The show is framed around the concept of the grisette, a French seventeenth-century trope of working-class women that gruelingly produced fashion while performing various fashion jobs such as seamstresses and shop girls, while also engaging in the glamor and style of their products by consuming the same fashion they produced. Grisettes were full of contradictions; they were stylish laborers, autonomous and financially independent, but sexualized and reduced by society, existing at the intersection of commerce, labor, and femininity. Women’s History Museum utilizes postwar, twentieth-century found objects to create a hall of mannequins, installations, and videos that highlight these stark contradictions, exploring the value of these feminine laborers in the context of a capitalist world informed by past luxury.

In My Husband is a Witch (2025), three eighteenth-century mannequins on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art stand in a Théâtre de la Mode, a post-WWII touring exhibition crafted by top Parisian designers to exhibit their works. The mannequins are eerily placed in decrepitude, surrounded by broken ceramic dollar bills, shopping bags, and resin rats, alluding to the decay of a once-glamorous economic era. Two of the mannequins wear veils that conceal the vintage materials they are clothed in. The presence of found magazine clippings, snakeskins, and 1920s hosiery provide a sinister and uncanny allusion to a time that could never exist again. The third mannequin wears a revealing patchwork dress made of 1800s calicos printed with floral and geometric designs, each pieced together to create a makeshift dress. Draped in a scarf of vintage matchboxes, the mannequin’s shoes are made of brightly colored gelatin pills and animal bone, contrasting the death and age of animal bone to the modernity of brightly-colored pills. Videos of Women’s History Museum’s runway shows from the last decade play on small screens embedded in the apocalyptic landscape, tying this dilapidated Théâtre de la Mode to the collective’s fashion world runways.

In Grisette (2025), a strikingly modern, white mannequin wears a chainmail-esque dress and headdress made of French casino chips from the 1920s and ’30s. At the foot of her decadence are piles of crushed ceramic dollar bills. Porcupine quills adorn the chips along her calves and wrists. The opulent, multi-colored chips—poker currency that in a past context would translate to money—are now only ornamental, like the ceramic cash broken at the mannequin’s feet. This grisette is fashionable but lacks true autonomy, surrounded by embellishments that no longer hold value. Tradition and modernity clash as the coins, made of mother of pearl and cow bones, glisten. The found animal bones and quills provide a sense of traditional overconsumption, while the mannequin poses with a scantily-clad modern sensibility.

In Lit Reliquaire de Mary Magdalene (2025), a new kind of mannequin appears, one with large breasts, a thin waist, and limbs reminiscent of the overly-sexualized mannequins featured in modern-day sex shops. Bent into a Victorian-style antique display case dating to 1800s New York Chinatown, the mannequin’s body is suggestively displayed supine with its chest puffed out, ready and waiting to be consumed in submission. A barely-there chainmail of pennies surrounds the mannequin’s breasts and face, recalling BDSM accessories. The mannequin is not only trapped in glass, but also chained by pennies, the lowest currency utilized in the United States. Scorpions rest on the mannequin’s breasts and along her legs, an aggressive contrast to its submissive pose. This grisette is for the sole purpose of other’s desires. Decaying leaves, found bobcat claws, and cheetah-print flowers surround the mannequin, contributing to a decomposing atmosphere surrounding the sexualized figure. The name of the work translates to “Reliquary Bed of Mary Magdalene,” a tomb-like structure located in southern France that houses Mary Magdalene’s relics. Sex and religion clash in blasphemous portrayals of femininity. Mary Magdalene, a pious figure of ancient times and loyal disciple of Jesus Christ, is personified in a sex-shop mannequin locked in a Chinatown display case. This conflict points to the plight of women across centuries and histories, not only the grisette, where lust and piety, laborer and consumer fold onto each other in multidimensionality.

Women’s History Museum presents fashion in its rawest form: critical and historically-rooted, existing in the realm of complexity and deep research. Sinister and uncanny, the power of the collective’s found materials recontextualizes fashion history, and fittingly, women’s history, in the present. Commerce moves forward, regardless of the individual woman attached to its wares. Commerce can even swallow the individual, regardless of if they create or engage with it. These mannequins are swallowed by their historical contexts, laid bare (sometimes literally) by their perceived value within a post-capital dystopia of symbols. The grisette, in all of its shape-shifting complexity, is a symbol easily mapped to historical and current-day contradictions around femininity and its relation to sexual and economic exploitation, whether through oversexualization or consumption in a post-capitalist society.