Fashion Designer Amanda Phelan '06 Featured in The Museum of Modern Art

2006 Archmere Academy graduate Amanda Phelan, the Creative Director and CEO of designer fashion label "Phelan", will be featured in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) starting in October. This is the first time in 73 years that MoMA has included an exhibit from the world of fashion and design. Amanda's Asymmetrical Metallic Shift Dress from the PHELAN S16 Collection will be featured in the shift dress category of "Items" on the 6th floor of MoMA.

After graduating from Archmere, Amanda attended Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting before completing a degree in textiles. After completing her studies, she worked as a knitwear designer for top-tier labels Alexander Wang and Nicole Miller.

 

As an emerging designer, Amanda distinguished herself by her unusual performance based runway shows, and forward thinking textile fabrications. She debuted her Spring 2016 Collection at New York Fashion Week in September 2015 to critical acclaim and has since been able to forge her own path in the industry, known for incorporating some sort of performance element into what she creates.

The MoMA exhibit details are as follows:

 

"Items: Is Fashion Modern?"

The Museum of Modern Art

October 1, 2017 – January 28, 2018

 

Items: Is Fashion Modern? explores the present, past—and sometimes the future—of 111 items of clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries—and continue to hold currency today. Among them are pieces as well-known and transformative as the Levi’s 501s, the Breton shirt, and the Little Black Dress, and as ancient and culturally charged as the sari, the pearl necklace, the kippah, and the keffiyeh. Items will also invite some designers, engineers, and manufacturers to respond to some of these indispensable items with pioneering materials, approaches, and techniques—extending this conversation into the near and distant futures, and connecting the history of these garments with their present recombination and use. Driven first and foremost by objects, not designers, the exhibition considers the many relationships between fashion and functionality, culture, aesthetics, politics, labor, identity, economy, and technology.

  

For more information about the exhibition, please visit:

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1638