Broadway Costume Designer turned Harvard Historian
Artist, artisan, academic. Across these things I do, I wrestle with the fundamentally human relationship between clothing and identity.
Dress is visual, material, embodied, performed, and political. To be literate in fashion is to be alive in all the senses: it calls us into our selves, it gives us windows into the past, and it allows us to imagine possibility.
As a designer, I costumed Broadway musicals, opera, Shakespeare, contemporary plays, and downtown experimental dance theater. As a maker, I have worked as a welder, carpenter, stitcher, and scenic painter. As a theater practitioner, I have been a dresser, actor, director, designer, and board op. As an artist and craftsperson, I have created portrait paintings, needlepoint cushion covers, and baby quilts. Each of these tangible, imaginative skills also informs my research and writing.
As a scholar, I have PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, and master’s degrees in history (Harvard), fashion and textile studies (FIT), and costume design (Yale Drama School). I have taught fashion history, theater design, anthropology, history, and gender studies at FIT, Parsons, Reed College, and Harvard. I am a former Fulbright Scholar and MacDowell fellow, and I have held research fellowships at the Smithsonian, Mount Vernon, Monticello, Huntington, Winterthur, and the American Antiquarian Society. My work has been published in Dress, Fashion Theory, and Studies in Costume and Performance, and my first book, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men, comes out with Oxford University Press in June 2026.
email: chloe.chapin@gmail.com
Short CV: Chapin_CV_2025_2pgs
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