Fern Mallis interview, 2019 July 10, 2019 July 10

Phyllis Dillon is an Independent Scholar and Consulting Museum Curator. She has worked for over 35 years in the fields of costume and textile studies, and in museums as a textile conservator, curator and arts administrator. She was a textile conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Textile Conservation Workshop. In the 1980s-90s she was a grants officer at the New York State Council on the Arts in the Museum Program. In that position she oversaw the distribution of millions of dollars to Museum’s statewide.



For the last 20 years she has concentrated her research on the history of the Jewish role in the American garment industry and the history of ready-made clothing. She was Main Researcher and Associate Curator of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded exhibit: “A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry 1860-1960 at Yeshiva University Museum in the Center for Jewish History in 2005 and co-authored the catalogue of the same name. She also had an article in a second book called A Perfect Fit published by Texas University Tech in 2012.



She was Associate Producer and Main Researcher on a documentary film called “Dressing America: Tales from the Garment Center (2014) in collaboration with Pacific Street Films . The film showed in international film festivals and was aired on PBS in 2014 and 2016.



Her latest publication is a chapter co-written with British business historian Andrew Godley about the history of the American garment industry in the book Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism from Rutgers University Press (July 2012).



She holds a Certificate in Museum Studies and an M.A. in anthropology from New York University. She was awarded a Winston Churchill Traveling Fellowship to Great Britain in 1981 to study the differences between American and British Art Conservation Services and has lectured widely. Since 2016 she has researched and done selected oral history interviews of senior members of the Fashion Industry for the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Fern Mallis is a fashion consultant and creator of New York Fashion Week (originally called ‘Seventh on Sixth’). From 1991-2001, Mallis was the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). In 1993, she began the initiative to organize Seventh on Sixth, where American fashion designers to display their clothing in a centralized manner. After NYFW was acquired by IMG in 2001, Mallis became a senior vice president and ambassador at IMG Fashion, through which she was able to expand and add fashion weeks to other cities including Los Angeles, Melbourne, Miami, and Berlin. She left IMG in 2010 and now runs her own fashion consulting business, Fern Mallis LLC.

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