“Refashioning America: Grit to Glamour” Is the First Fashion Exhibition to be Presented by Crystal Bridges

In addition to presenting a more inclusive overview, Finamore wants to “broaden geography in terms of the way we think about American fashion” and upend the “this idea of middle America as a quote unquote ‘fashion flyover zone.’ ” One of the ways she does so is by including a piece from Virgil Abloh’s Nebraska collection, which, the designer Instagrammed in 2014, “is a metaphor for ‘in-the-middle’ Middle American collegiate schools spirit.”

Bookended by the fashion capitals of New York and Los Angeles, the Heartland is the birthplace of many fashion greats, including household names like Abloh and Kanye West (Illinois), Anne Lowe (Alabama), Bill Blass and Norman Norell (Indiana), Halston (Iowa), Geoffrey Beene and Billy Reid (Louisiana), Anna Sui (Michigan), Patrick Kelly (Mississippi), Kate Spade and Jeremy Scott (Missouri), Stephen Sprouse (Ohio), and Tom Ford (Texas). In collaboration with the CFDA, Crystal Bridges will be supporting the Heartland scholarship. “There is enormous interest in fashion throughout the country, and there is enormous talent here,” states Walton.

“Refashioning America” features talents from across the country, and sheds light on unsung designers, like that of Arkansas’s own Lois K. Alexander, founder of the Harlem Institute of Fashion and the Black Fashion Museum, and New Mexico’s Lloyd Kiva New, alongside emerging names.

Is it possible to find some middle ground in a divided country? Walton and Finamore think so, and believe in art as a connector. “I think that fashion is one of these things, like music or food or sports, that is kind of cross-cultural, bipartisan,” says the former. “It is really something that unites us and makes us see our shared humanity.”