RBG’s influences featured in ‘Fashioning Justice’ exhibit

Cornell graduate. Pioneering attorney and Supreme Court justice. Mother, grandmother, pop culture icon.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg '54 - a.k.a. RBG - was an influencer before it was even a profession, advocating for women's equality. Her personal style, and the substance behind it, will be on display in the Human Ecology Building in an exhibit, "Fashioning Justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg '54 and the Power of Presence."

The exhibit - a collaboration between the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the College of Human Ecology - will run March 16 to May 1, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, in the Rachel Hope Doran '19 and Terrace Level Display Cases in the Human Ecology Building. A celebration event on April 14 will feature remarks by Ginsburg's granddaughter, Clara Spera, an attorney at Hecker Fink LLP who has worked on her grandmother's defining issue, reproductive rights, with the National Women's Law Center.

The exhibit will feature accessories, on loan from family members, from Ginsburg's personal wardrobe, including her signature lacy judicial collars (among them her distinctive "Dissent" collars) along with gloves, COVID masks, handbags, jewelry and scarves. Cornellian yearbooks and a Class of 1954 Freshman Desk Book, from Cornell University Library, will also be displayed.

Pieces from the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (CF+TC)expand the narrative, with examples of fashion and justice influenced by Ginsburg's legal legacy.

"This is a really exciting opportunity to talk about the intersections of fashion, law, freedom of expression, and clothing as symbolic speech" said exhibit curator Denise Green, Lau Family Associate Professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Human Centered Design, in the College of Human Ecology (CHE).