From Rationing to Ravishing: Crossing Lines in Vancouver

From September 17, 2014, to March 8, 2015, the Museum of Vancouver played host to an exhibition that staged the city’s transformation in the immediate post-WWII years as it went from a war-based economy to a burgeoning consumer society. Based on the collections of guest curators Ivan Sayers and Claus Jahnke, it featured 85 garments plus accessories that traced how the female experience in the city went from coping with austerity to showing off the availability of conspicuously sumptuous clothing to their best advantage. Approaching the exhibition as a material form of life-writing, I situate the exhibition both in terms of Sayers’ and Jahnke’s work as collectors and the museum’s as a public institution with the capacity to contribute to Vancouver’s globalizing image. This presentation thus pushes the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes life writing and expands its interdisciplinary methods of study by looking at a display of material artefacts from Vancouver’s immediate post-war period, and specifically at their styling, which I argue infuses some of the city’s current style into the usually staid or gritty representations of Vancouver’s past. By comparing the exhibition with both other exhibitions that the curators have put on in the city and other contemporary cultural productions, I show how “From Rationing to Ravishing” provides the boutique metropolis that Vancouver has become with a backstory that draws attention to key aspects of the present, including the role of fashion in the growth of the city’s retail sector and its ability to cross the lines of gender, class, and race that continue to mark the city’s imaginary.