Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - 07:00 By Joan Hennessy
The Kent State University Museum exhibit examines fashion shifts of World War I. Image: Kent State University Museum.
The Kent State University Museum exhibit examines fashion shifts of World War I. Image: Kent State University Museum.
When you read the words radical fashion, you might think of college students with their low-slung jeans, spiked hair and multiple tattoos in mentionable and unmentionable places. But for all that, the new generation isn’t truly radical. To find radical, travel back a full century. 

    The Kent State University Museum in Ohio does just that with an exhibit, “The Great War: Women and Fashion in a World at War, 1912-1922,” scheduled to run through July 5, 2015. To walk through the exhibit is to absorb an era of sweeping change, when women squared their shoulders and entered the military, worked in munitions plants and largely abandoned those straight-jacket corsets.
    Change was coming even without the war, but “the war is the ultimate expression of the huge social shift that is happening,” observes Sara Hume, curator of the Kent State University Museum, which adjoins a much-respected fashion school.
      That shift, so glaringly evident in the fashions of the time, was part of a long-running narrative in the fight for women's suffrage.

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