Colleen Hill
Senior Curator of Costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has worked since 2006.
Dr. Colleen Hill is Senior Curator of Costume at The Museum at FIT, where she has worked since 2006. She began in the museum’s textile collection and rose through the curatorial ranks, and today she helps to oversee and expand a collection of some fifty thousand garments, accessories, and textiles.
Hill has organized seventeen exhibitions at the museum, among them Exposed: A History of Lingerie, Paris Refashioned, 1957–1968, Fashion Unraveled, Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the Nineties, Statement Sleeves, and Doll Dressing, which is on view at MFIT until January 3, 2027. Her books have been published by Yale University Press, Rizzoli, Taschen, Bloomsbury, and Skira. Her writing ranges across subjects such as fairy tales, French pop singers, shoes and heels, sustainability and repurposing, and the rose.
She contributed an entry on “Memories and Mysteries” to The Crafts of Fashion: Taxonomies (2025), a book from Éditions B42 edited by Émilie Hammen.1 Her essay on 1990s fashion, “Deciphering Dissonance,” appeared in the catalog for Alexandre Samson’s exhibition 1997 Fashion Big Bang (2023) at the Palais Galliera in Paris.2 A third piece, “Clothes with Fun and Flair: French Fashions of the 1960s,” was published in Culture/Counterculture (2019) by the Kent State University Museum in Ohio.3
Hill has collaborated with artists, designers, curators, historians, and archivists across disciplines. Her symposia have brought Lynn Yaeger, Jason Wu, Mark Dion, Amy de la Haye, Judith Clark, and more to speak at the Fashion Institute of Technology; these events also featured her MFIT colleagues Valerie Steele, Patricia Mears, and Elizabeth Way.
Hill earned a PhD in Fashion Culture and Curation from the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and a BA from Michigan State University. She won the Costume Society of America’s Richard Martin Award in 2011 for Eco-Fashion: Going Green, and received a Bronze MUSE Award from the American Alliance of Museums in 2019. She lectures internationally and lives in New York.
1 · Émilie Hammen, The Crafts of Fashion: Taxonomies (Paris: Éditions B42, 2025).
2 · Alexandre Samson, 1997 Fashion Big Bang (Paris: Paris Musées, 2023).
3 · Sara Hume, Culture/Counterculture: Fashions of the 1960s and 70s (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Museum, 2019).
At a glance
Position
Senior Curator of Costume
The Museum at FIT
State University of New York
PhD
London College of Fashion
MA
Fashion Institute of Technology
BA
Michigan State University
Based
New York, NY