Event Details
Expressing Norwegian and American Identities through Dress
Lectures and Talks Featured Event

Expressing Norwegian and American Identities through Dress

April 13, 2022
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

A virtual talk with Luarann Gilbertson, Chief Curator at the Vesterheim Norwegian- American Museum.

Register in advance for this meeting: https://nmculture-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rduyprj0vEtOxCNt-cAWpkwYFV9HMjSX7

Laurann Gilbertson received a BA in anthropology and an MS in textiles and clothing from Iowa State University. She is chief curator at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and previously served as textile curator for 19 years. She is the author of essays that have appeared in Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities (2011), Anders Sandvig og Maihaugen (2012), and Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World (2013) with Carol Colburn.

Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe.

Learn more about the companion publication for Dressing with Purpose published by Indiana University Press: https://iupress.org/9780253058577/dressing-with-purpose/

 Photo credits: Laurann Gilbertson