Artifact

Colleen Hill is senior curator of Costume at The Museum at FIT.

All curators have favorite objects—those that spark admiration because of their spectacular appearance, fascinating provenance, or historical significance. A table painstakingly covered in feathers, by milliner-turned-photographer Bill Cunningham, embodies all of these criteria.

The Museum at FIT acquired the table from the photographer Frederick Eberstadt. Early in my career, I received a call from Mr. Eberstadt, asking if MFIT would be interested in a donation of his late wife’s clothing. Isabel Eberstadt, a journalist and author, was also a socialite known for her cutting-edge fashion sense. With impeccable pronunciation, Mr. Eberstadt noted clothing by designers such as André Courrèges, Madame Grès, and Yves Saint Laurent.

In 2007, MFIT enthusiastically received numerous pieces from Isabel’s wardrobe, many from the 1960s—a particularly daring period in her sartorial history. A large, elaborately feathered Adolfo headpiece from circa 1962 highlights her audaciousness. “I guess I don’t mind being laughed at,” she admitted to The New York Times in 1964.

Bill Cunningham, feathered-covered table, 23 by 33 by 29 inches, 1960s. Adolfo, evening headdress with taxidermic bird’s head, pheasant feathers, and coq feathers, circa 1962.

When picking up the clothing from Mr. Eberstadt’s home, my colleagues admired the Cunningham table—an eighteenth-century style piece with cabriole legs onto which varying shades of pheasant feathers were glued, completely disguising its original surface. Several years later, Eberstadt offered it to MFIT, explaining that it had been a gift from Cunningham to his wife. Although the table was a departure from the museum’s fashion-focused mission, it was too captivating to refuse. Cunningham often used feathers creatively in his hat making, and this table is a unique extension of that practice. Its date of creation is unknown, but Cunningham was acquainted with the Eberstadts as early as 1963, when he described Isabel as “the most beautifully exotic woman in America” in Women’s Wear Daily.

Ten years after its acquisition, I prominently featured the table in Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities. This MFIT exhibition, on view until April 20, offers a contemporary adaptation of cabinets of curiosities—proto-museums that centered on rare, beautiful, and extraordinary objects. Like Cunningham, early collectors were fascinated by feathers. I hope that this table—with its connection to two remarkable tastemakers—will pique visitors’ curiosity as much as it has my own.