Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC Library is excited to announce a new public exhibition in the Chung Collection exhibition room, “Fashioning the Landscape: Women’s Interwar Sportswear at the Canadian Pacific Railway Resorts.” The exhibition has been guest curated by Klahanie Research.
Interwar CPR brochures courted elite female consumers by advertising resorts as more gender neutral spaces than day-to-day life. Images of progressive women’s sportswear, which borrowed from men’s fashion, were used to rationalize and naturalize the rugged activities of the recreational holiday landscape. Distant, isolated, outdoor locations helped to relax social codes that would have been more vigorously enforced in more formal, populated urban centres. With the removal of city clothes, women symbolically shed workplace and household inequalities and seized pleasure with an outfit for every activity. From arrival to an evening of glamour, this exhibit explores the sportswear of: golf, hiking, skiing, canoeing, swimming, and riding, worn across CPR resorts.
“Fashioning the Landscape: Women’s Interwar Sportswear at the Canadian Pacific Railway Resorts,” which is free and open to the public, will be on display in the exhibition room of the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection, in the Rare Books and Special Collections reading room. The RBSC reading room is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, please contact Rare Books and Special Collections at (604) 822-2521 or rare.books@ubc.ca.