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Marine Kisiel

Art historian and curator
January and June 2025

  • Museums
  • New York
  • San Francisco

“I firmly believe that museums only have meaning when they do not isolate the past or its productions from the questions we ask in the present. Through this Villa Albertine residency, I aim to work on making queer identities of the past more visible in fashion museums.”

I am a trained art historian and have been a heritage curator for ten years. Deeply enriched by the proximity to artworks, I began my career specializing in the study of 19th-century Western art: a vibrant century, both assertive and uncertain, whose fierce political and social vitality fascinates me, as it lays the groundwork—both positive and negative—for many of the realities we live in today.

After dedicating myself to the fine arts of the Third Republic, with a strong focus on so-called minor arts, which are crucial for questioning hierarchies, I chose to deepen my practice of cultural and social history through new collections. Far from the “great artists” whose works were central to my daily life as a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, I am now in charge of the 19th-century fashion department at the Palais Galliera, the City of Paris Fashion Museum. There, the clothing of both women and men, often anonymous and from various backgrounds, invites us to explore what the material envelopes of these disappeared bodies reveal about their time, their own agency, and the contexts in which they evolved.

Thus, I now dedicate myself to another history of representations: that of the shaping of individuals, essential testimonies for understanding their self-representations and the world they were part of. Without these, I believe that the history of forms, as well as museums, cannot fully play their role in our contemporary societies. I firmly believe that museums only make sense when they do not isolate the past or its productions from the questions we ask in the present. Through this Albertine residency, I intend to work on making queer identities of the past more visible in fashion museums.

 

Marine Kisiel is a PhD in Art History and a heritage curator, and an associate researcher at the InVisu laboratory (CNRS/INHA). Formerly a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, where she was responsible for international exhibitions, and then the deputy editor-in-chief of the journal Perspective (INHA), she has been in charge of the 19th-century fashion department at the Palais Galliera, the City of Paris Fashion Museum, since 2022. There, she is preparing the exhibitions “Corps in·visibles” (Musée Rodin, 2025), “Worth” (Musée du Petit Palais, 2025), and “Dandykes: Female Dandyism in the 19th Century” (Palais Galliera, 2026). Her thesis, La peinture impressionniste et la décoration (Le Passage, 2021), received the Olga Fradiss Prize from the Fondation de France and the Bernier Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

I am currently working on an exhibition about female dandyism in the 19th century: a fashion exhibition that will explore the dynamics of the masculinization of women’s fashion during this period, as well as an investigation into the visibility regimes of queer identities during a time little explored by historians, spanning from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. By examining the clothing practices of women from this era, I aim to trace the dynamics of emancipation and the assertion of bodies and identities through subtle signals (such as occasional borrowings from men’s fashion) and specific types of clothing (such as the amazon outfit, for example). I also plan to examine practices related to the stage or less exposed social spaces (cross-dressing) and attempt to map the identification strategies through clothing that, I hope, will reveal the codes of 19th-century lesbian fashion.

Such an inquiry, based on the study of material testimonies but opening up to the understanding of forgotten or silenced societal dynamics, is primarily a situated project: inseparable from the context that allows it to come to fruition, namely fashion museums, and the desire to provide gender issues with an accessible and demanding museum treatment, which helps to broaden contemporary representations through the study of the past and its resonances today.

This exhibition on female dandyism will be the focus of my residency at the Villa Albertine: a field of historical and societal explorations that will lead me to engage with American colleagues—curators, academics, archivists, collectors, etc.—in two key cities for LGBTQIA+ struggles and fashion preservation, New York and San Francisco. While deepening my research, I will exchange ideas with my American colleagues about how they bring their museum fashion collections to life and seek to better understand how and with what results they address societal issues, particularly queer issues, in order to enrich my own practice.

My stay will be split between New York and San Francisco. In New York, certainly the city with the most museums and university departments dedicated to fashion worldwide, I aim to engage in discussions with my curator and researcher colleagues about the development of fashion museums. I will also conduct research for the exhibition I am preparing on female dandyism in the 19th century. The directions taken by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum at FIT have greatly influenced the “Dandykes!” project, notably through two pioneering exhibitions addressing gender, identity, and sexuality through the lens of fashion: A Queer History of Fashion (Museum at FIT, 2013) and Camp: Notes on Fashion (Metropolitan Museum, Costume Institute, 2019).

In both San Francisco and New York, I will also explore archives and community resources to refine my understanding of the phenomenon I am studying, while building connections with queer clothing practices closer to our time. The Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, and in San Francisco, the GLBT Historical Society, the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, and Stanford University’s library, among others, as well as collectors and activists in these two major cities for LGBTQIA+ communities, will expand my perspective and help me forge connections with numerous interlocutors and partners through research and encounters.

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