Fashioning San Francisco: celebrating the style of a city

An immersive new exhibition showcases select pieces from one of America’s largest collections of fashion to pay tribute to the look of San Francisco

Long an integral part of San Francisco’s identity, fashion is also written into the DNA of one of that city’s flagship cultural institutions: the de Young Museum. In fact, the de Young is a major holder of costumes and textiles, with one of the largest collections of fashion in the United States, spanning 3,000 years of human history. A number of the museum’s major holdings, plus pieces lent from many fashionable San Franciscans, are on display at the museum’s delightful new exhibit, Fashioning San Francisco.

Fashioning San Francisco is self-consciously a west coast exhibition and seeks to separate itself from east coast shows. “We don’t want to just be mirroring the programs of museums back east,” said Thomas P Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Here we are in California, at the edge of the Pacific. We want to reflect the physicality of our location and our distinct traditions.”