Lillian Bassman, The V-Back Evenings, Dress by Pauline Trigère, Model Suzy Parker, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, July 1955. Courtesy of the artist.

Lo and behold cocktail
sippers, there might be more to cocktail culture than what was being portrayed
in Sex and the City and Mad Men. Cocktail Culture: Ritual and Invention in American Fashion,
1920-1980, the first multi-disciplinary exhibition to explore the influence
that the cocktail hour had on fashion from the Prohibition to the Disco eras, runs till July 31 in the RISD Museum.

Put together by the folks at the RISD Museum of
Art’s Department of Costume and Textiles, Cocktail
Culture features an impressive selection of apparel, with more than 220 pieces
of clothing, jewelery, decorative and fine art from the likes of Elizabeth
Arden, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Oscar de la Renta, Hubert de Givenchy,
Norman Norell, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Jewelery pieces were loaned from the Swarovski
jewelery archives in Austria to glam up the hour, while cocktail fashion is
presented in context with photographers, illustrations, decorative arts and
other novelty items. Organized under several umbrella themes such as ‘Travel’
and ‘Day for Night’, Cocktail Culture promises to lure you to an array of
cocktail venues, from urban nightclubs to luxury ocean liners, all in one night
– or day.

RISD Museum