Costume Society of America

Join us for this FREE webinar with historic preservationist, author, and antique dealer Tanzy A. Ward, whose work sits at the intersection of material culture, decorative arts, and the history of the Black diaspora.

🗓️Wednesday, June 10th at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific

✨FREE Webinar, Open to All

Drawing from her extensive research and writing, Ward explores how antique jewelry and visual archives serve as powerful records of Black Victorian and Edwardian life. As the author of Hidden Legacies: African Presence in European Antiques, Unsung Portraits: Anonymous Images of Black Victorians and Early 20th Century Ancestors, and Precious Black Jewels: The Bijou Material Culture of Black Victorians & Edwardians, she brings a uniquely layered perspective to questions of ancestry, identity, and preservation.

🔗Register for this virtual event at the link: https://costumesocietyamerica.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/costumesocietyamerica/event.jsp?event=703

💬This year’s Scholars’ Roundtable at our 2026 National Symposium brings together four scholars whose work reimagines sustainable, systemic changes across the materials, media, heritage, and education of dress.

Join our panelists, Jennifer Harmon, Sara Idacavage, Katie Baker Jones, and Katrina Orsini, for a discussion and exploration of how “re-cycles of dress” shape both our understanding of the past and our vision for a more ethical future.

🔗If you haven’t already, register today for the symposium at the link: https://www.costumesocietyamerica.com/upcoming-symposium

🗞️ This edition of Dialogues on Dress features Esther Marquis.

Esther Marquis’s work has probably graced your screen on more than one occasion: whether you’re a fan of arthouse cinema and saw The Tree of Life; partial to action or comedy and loved The Nice Guys; or more into TV with mega hits like Westworld and The Morning Show, she was on the costume team for them all.

Her most recent endeavor as Costume Designer of Apple TV’s For All Mankind marks an apex in her career, and is a substantial topic of our conversation, but the years leading up to this were full of dress work running the gamut—from her roots in theater costume design to working on a museum exhibition at a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Even now, Esther designs not just for the camera, but for real life astronauts alike; in 2024, Axiom Space commissioned a flight suit from her.

🔗Read the full interview at the link to hear her discuss the demands of being both an artist and a leader, designing for the stage versus camera, and whether those spacesuits in For All Mankind could really go into space: https://www.costumesocietyamerica.com/dialogues-on-dress-esther-marquis

Photo Credit:
Images 1,3,4 by Patrick Strattner Photography
Images 2,5 courtesy of Sony/Apple TV, For All Mankind