Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising Exhibitions

Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future
Part II: May 6 – August 23, 2025

The philosopher Walter Benjamin used the image of a tiger leaping through time as a metaphor for the way that fashion pulls from the past to create new styles. This exhibition draws on a variety of time periods and styles to investigate the echoes that reverberate across fashion history.

“Dear Old Coat”: Sentiment, Stewardship, Sustainability 

May 27 – December 20, 2025
Curator: DM Graduate Student, Rebecca Evans

This exhibition offers a unique lens to view the current fashion sustainability crisis by exploring historical practices of garment stewardship, including repair, reuse, and care of clothing.

1 idea x 2 objects x 8 histories
May 20 – September 27, 2025

What is the role of the museum in the digital age? How can museums engage their publics while being a forum for scholarly research? How do museum curators use objects to construct and communicate meaning? These were some of the questions considered by students in the graduate seminar “Care and Exhibit of Museum Collections” (DM 563) held in the Spring 2025 semester.

Over the course of the semester, each student developed an idea for a hypothetical museum exhibition. In this installation, the distinct curatorial ideas developed by each student are represented in two objects selected from the Avenir Museum collection.