Noon Time Collection Talk with Ingrid Mida

Join Dr. Ingrid Mida, author of The Dress Detective and Research Fellow in the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre (MLC) at Ryerson University, for a talk about Victorian fashions as seen in selected images from the RIC collection. Not long after photography’s invention, the medium allowed families and individuals to stop time, preserving the reflected light of their image for generations to come, and these photographs are embedded with clues related to codes of dress and behaviour that mark them as mirrors of their age. This talk will examine the nuances of late nineteenth-century fashions and give special emphasis to photographs of boys wearing dresses, a little-known facet of Victorian dress codes for children.

Free and open to the public.

William Notman, Instantaneous, Quick as a Flash [Notman trade card], ca. 1866, albumen print mounted on card. Ryerson Image Centre, Gift of Howard and Carole Tanenbaum