Dressing the Gilded Age | Washington State History Museum | 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Tacoma Arts Month returns again, rich with art, words, movement, and music. I’ve been writing about this month since its ragged inception — when a few dreamers convinced the city to make space for art to spill out of studios and into October’s damp air. Back then, I was at the helm of the Weekly Volcano, pounding out preview after preview, chronicling open studios and scrappy performances, and eventually receiving an AMOCAT Award myself on behalf of the Volcano. To see Tacoma Arts Month now, 24 years later, is to witness an idea mature into a civic ritual: a proclamation, an award, a kaleidoscope of events that remind us why Tacoma insists on making and remaking itself in color and noise.
OCT. 1: Dressing the Gilded Age: Fashion from the 1870s to the 1910s now drapes the halls of the Washington State History Museum, a parade of corsets, Gibson Girls, and hand-stitched dreams caught at the hinge of history. This is no simple costume show — it’s a vivid map of how fabric became politics, how sewing machines and railroads rewrote class boundaries, how suffragists demanded not just the vote but breathable sleeves. From glittering gowns to work-worn aprons, the exhibit stitches together wealth and want, aspiration and exploitation, the dazzling rise of ready-to-wear and the immigrant hands that made it possible. Step inside and watch the century change at the hemline.
View the complete list of arts activities for the month on the Tacoma Arts Month website.
Cooler Postfunk Pairing: Vice Beer We Are All Made of Stars
After you’ve wandered past corsets, Gibson Girls, and gowns that once dictated society’s pulse, make your way to Peaks & Pints. We’ll be pouring Vice Beer’s We Are All Made of Stars, a hazy constellation in a can — citrus nebulae, mango galaxies, a cosmic shimmer as lush as the silks and satins of the exhibit. Raise a glass to the seamstresses, suffragists, and stylish rebels who stitched change into every hemline. Because in Tacoma, as in the Gilded Age, we are all made of stars.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
