Our digital version of our 2013 gallery exhibition, “For Better and For Worse: Sixteen Decades of Wedding Wear at Vassar,” is now online.
This digital exhibition includes photographs from the exhibition, three-dimensional rotating views of featured objects, personal photographs and stories shared by Vassar community members, a video slideshow of photographs with highlights from our oral history interviews, and the full length oral history interviews, with transcripts.
In 2007, Vassar received a donation of four wedding dresses from the same Vassar family—three generations of dresses. Inspired by these four dresses, plus a fifth dress on loan to represent the fourth generation, we brought together a variety of other wedding wear and photographs from the Vassar community, and conducted a series of oral history interviews. The stories represented explore changing views of marriage over the last 160 years, including current views on marriage equality.
Even if you did get to visit the gallery exhibition in person, you may find that the digital exhibition gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into the stories represented in the exhibition. While we did have a brief video running on a loop in the exhibition, with highlights from our oral history interviews and a slideshow of candid photos, the digital exhibition also includes the full length oral history recordings, with transcripts. These stories, from the people who wore the outfits on display, speak to more than just what they wore, but also to the culture of the time in which they were married, and their reflections on changes over time, as some marriages endured and others did not.
Each object that was on display has its own page, with photographs, description, an audio player for the oral history interview, a link to the full transcript of the interview, and a mini viewer of the objectVR (a view of the object that you can rotate 360 degrees and zoom in upon). Under the mini viewer is a link to a full size viewer. If you have any trouble viewing any of the pages, or parts of pages, there is a page about “How to View this Exhibition” that may help, or please contact us so we can help troubleshoot.
We look forward to your feedback about the digital version of this exhibition! Please use the contact link on the menu above to share your comments with us.
