The exhibit Dress Code at the Art Institute of Chicago shows in photos Black lesbians in their everyday attire. Runs through April 22, 2018 in Gallery 1.

From the Art Institute of Chicago website:

"It is through the cravat that the man reveals and manifests himself," wrote French author HonorÃ�© de Balzac in 1830, recognizing already at this early date the cultural significance of everyday dress. Mere decades later, the modern fashion industry was born, and portrait photography became more accessible. The convergence of these phenomena led elite and aspiring individuals to understand that clothing can shape self-representation in front of the cameraan idea that, consciously or not, has remained central to photographic portraiture ever since.

This focused exhibition, featuring new acquisitions and other works drawn from the Art Institute's collection, presents five series that exemplify the power of clothing in pictures. In each case the subject's dress enhances, alters, or complicates the photographer's point of view. Spanning the 1870s to the present, these groupings suggest portraits as typologies wherein clothing differentiates individuals and indicates their real or desired identities.

Some works in the exhibition exemplify a desire for visibility. Among the collections are Zanele Muholi's portraits of black lesbians in South Africa serving as a form of activism and disrupting the traditions of studio portraits.

The 1984 series Rodeo Drive by American photographer Anthony Hernandez presents candid encounters with shoppers who are dressed to be seen. Finally, more than 100 photo booth snapshots from the 1950s reflect the diversity of small-town society in this countryshowing how American culture, like any other, shapes and is shaped by the language of dress.

The 19th-century periodical Galerie Contemporaine ( 187684 ) featured studio portraits of notable French cultural figures posed in identical formats. The sitters used the subtle codes of clothing to great effect, projecting their precise social standing and even forms of dissent within the compositionally consistent frame. August Sander likewise intended his seminal project, People of the Twentieth Century, begun in the 1910s, to constitute an archive of German society. However, his subjectsfrom farm laborers to aristocratscomplicated Sander's drive to categorize through their individual choice of dress.

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