Love in Fine Fashion

Translation of the audio text for the exhibition L’Amour sous toutes ses coutures
McCord Museum, Montreal, 2014

The thirty wedding dresses and accessories from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries displayed in this show were each described in popular metaphoric terms reflecting the imagined relationships of those who wore them. The garment-related word plays included “to set one’s cap for,” “to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve,” “to be like hand in glove,” “to be close-knit,” “to tie the knot,” “to get hot under the collar,” “to keep something up one’s sleeve,” “to pull up one’s socks,” “to be down-at-the-heels,” “to come apart at the seams,” “to patch (things) up” and “(to see the) silver lining.”