Dr Alison L Goodrum invites you to ‘get away from it all’ by joining her as she travels back through time to the Golden Age of the dude ranch vacation: The Interwar Era. For this Wyoming Community Bank Discovery Speakers Series program on May 27 at 7pm via Zoom.
Dr. Goodrum’s richly illustrated presentation will unpack the history of the vacation wardrobe in the American West and will consider the outfits, those who wore them, the etiquette and dress codes surrounding their wearing, as well as the related commercial supply chain that served dudes – and dudettes – alike. Brimming with intriguing facts, figures, and lots of fashion, her presentation will interpret primary archive material in the form of dress artifacts, vacation brochures, diary accounts, magazine articles, photographs, and advertisements. She will establish how dressing for a dude ranch vacation was potentially more complex than it first appeared. Thus, she will explain how such themes as ‘casual’, ‘technical’, ‘specialist’ – and ‘romantic’ – all may contribute to a nuanced understanding of ranch- and vacation-wear as fashionably progressive for the Era.
Dr Alison L Goodrum is both an interdisciplinary researcher, traversing dress history, cultural geography and the creative arts, and an international scholar, with some twenty years of experience in Universities spanning the UK, USA and New Zealand. Currently, she is Professor and Director of Research at Norwich University of the Arts, Norfolk, England. Alongside her academic career, Alison also pursues her own personal creative practice in millinery, illustration and writing.
This program is free and open to the public, call the Dubois Museum at 307-455-2284 for details.