Displaying First Nation Women’s Clothing : The Denver Art Museum’s Indian Style Show 
Clothing is a standard item of ethnographic display, usually placed flat in a case or draped on a mannequin. In 1942 Frederic Douglas took 53 historic American Indian and First Nation women’s dresses from the Denver Art Museum to exhibit as an haute couture fashion show. Presented over 150 times between 1942 and 1972, the live exhibit was designed to eliminate racial prejudice by demonstrating that all women liked beautiful clothes. In this paper I discuss the use of First Nation attire in the program.