Dress the history of fashion is a production of iHeartRadio.

Over 7 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.

Every day we all get dressed.

Welcome to Dress the history of fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what, when, of why we wear.

We are fashion historians and your hosts, April Callahan.

And Cassidy Zachary.

So found in everything from the clothes we wear to the pillows we sleep on,

cotton is one of the world's most ubiquitous textiles.

It also happens to be one of the most controversial.

So since its origins, the cotton industry has been inextricably linked to environmental and human exploitation.

Most notably that of the millions of African peoples brought forcibly to North America,

through the transatlantic slave trade, and then of course their descendants thereafter.

So in many ways this legacy survives today in the multitude of extant historic cotton garments and museum collections and personal archives around the world.

Yes, and the complex stories are quite literally woven and sewn into the cotton garments we wear and have worn for centuries.

And this is the subject of a new exhibition, which is entitled History is Rarely Black or White,

which is now on view until March 20th, 2022, at Queens University's Agnes,

Ethering Tin Arts Center in Kingston, Ontario.

And the exhibition features cotton garments from the Queens collection of Canadian dress,

which is comprised of over 2500 pieces dating from the late 1700s all the way up to the 1970s.

And while the inclusion of historic cotton garments in this exhibition is perhaps nothing new to us,

it's how these garments are incorporated into the exhibition narrative that is really truly groundbreaking.

This exhibition sets a profound precedent for the exhibition and interrogation of garments that completely transforms the way in which clothing is typically used in exhibition spaces and fashion narratives.

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