Divine Adornment: Community Stories of Belonging
Location: William Mathers Gallery
On Display: October 19, 2024 - May 31, 2025
Curator: Dr. Heather Akou, Associate Professor of Fashion Design, Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design
Divine Adornment: Community Stories of Belonging uses pieces from the museum’s collection to explore fashion from an Islamic perspective. The exhibit will focus on what fashion means to people from source communities and how they inspire contemporary makers of textiles, clothing, and jewelry. It will present a nuanced, caring, and apolitical perspective on Islam that is different from what most non-Muslims learn from the media. Themes of slow fashion, contemporary inspiration, and making and belonging will be explored in this exhibition presented in both Arabic and English.
Community Stories
Please click here to access the community stories featured in this exhibition.
This exhibition would not be possible without those who graciously shared their own experiences of community, identity, and belonging and their relationship to personal adornment. We hope this exhibition does justice to the beauty and deep meaning contained in these stories.
About Dr. Heather Akou
Dr. Heather Akou is a historian of fashion, dress, and the body. Her research interests include African dress and fashion, contemporary Islamic fashion, working-class histories of dress in the United States, uniforms, lawmaking about dress and the body, secret society regalia, and the politics of museum collections. She teaches primarily courses in fashion studies including fashion history, fashion theory, cultural aspects of dress, and autobiographies of dress and the body. Dr. Akou is the co-founder and co- director of the Dress and Body Association and serves on the editorial board of Dress as well as the editorial advisory board for Bloomsbury Fashion Central.
At IU, Dr. Akou is also an adjunct associate professor in Art History, Anthropology, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, an affiliate of the African Studies Program, Islamic Studies Program, and the Center for Studies of the Middle East, and a core member of the MA in Curatorship program.
