A fashion historian, an expert in costume preservation, and the author of Barbie Takes the Catwalk, Karan Feder is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Her roots are in fashion and costume design, and her expertise is in performance costume history, preservation, and exhibition.

Having served as a costume consultant for the Liberace Foundation and Museum, The Mob Museum, and David Copperfield's International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, she's also authored numerous books.

The latest is titled Barbie Takes the Catwalk.

Karan Feder, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank You.

-And before we talk Barbie, I want to first establish your connection to Las Vegas.

So you moved here from LA.

You told me you were working there in costume design on shows like The Golden Girls, a movie like A River Runs Through It, you also had your own fashion company and we're coming to Las Vegas often and so decided to move here.

But it was your visit to the Liberace Foundation Museum that really kind of sparked something for you.

What was it?

(Karan Feder) Yes.

So it was literally one of my first stops once we landed here.

This was in the early 2000s.

And when I was-- and this was when the museum was still open.

They actually had the physical presence there.

And I was struck by how little research had been done on this unique segment of costume--I call this cabaret costume--and how few examples of this kind of research are found in museums, significant museum collections too.

And I don't get that.

I think this is so fascinating, this unique example of costume.

And it's very, it's very-- even though the origins of cabaret costume sort of come from Europe, it's been Americanized over the years.

And I would say that the Liberace collection is a great example of an American version of cabaret costume.

So I decided at that point in time, I really wanted to study, interpret, and exhibit this form of costume going forward, rather than designing things that I had been doing up until that point.

I really wanted to make sure that we could tell the story of these costumes in the future, that someone had taken the time to preserve them, think about them, and document them for researchers, really, going forward.

So that's-- at that point in time, my career really made a right turn.

-And when you say "interpret" costumes, what does that mean?

-Well, for instance, with the Liberace collection, I think it's interesting to look at what's going on in culture that helps define why Liberace's costumes look the way they did at any point in time.

Even though it's a stage costume, it is still, and especially in Liberace's case, it was still inspired by fashion.

For instance, Liberace had flares, right, in the '70s and the early '80s, which is what we were wearing in fashion at that point in time.

He wasn't wearing stovepipe tight fitting pants, because that's not what's in fashion.

So that's one way to interpret what we see on stage.

There are other technical ways.

There are some things that have been developed over time in terms of putting together costumes that will last for a very long period of time on stage, new materials that have been developed over time that we didn't see in Liberace's era that we now see.

So it's an interesting sort of evolutional look at where we came from in the early '70s with Liberace and where he ends when he dies in the early '80s.

There is an evolution in looking at his costumes.

Near the end, he started adding light fixtures to his costumes.

They actually lit up, which was a totally new concept.

I mean, now it's not that new, but it was then.

You know, little battery packs and stuff like this.

But I think all that is incredibly important and interesting and fascinating.

And Liberace was such a fixture here in Vegas that he really does.

I mean, his identity is forever linked with this town.

And so he's an important figure, and the costumes are so important to his legacy and identity.

-Back to Barbie.

As a girl growing up, how important was Barbie to you?

-Well, it's so fascinating because this-- so the Barbie book and the exhibition was my COVID project.

I was working at the State Museum, Las Vegas State Museum, and one of my colleagues was, still is, a collector of vintage fashion.

Part of his vintage fashion collection was vintage Barbie fashion.

I thought, oh, my God, isn't that fascinating?

He wasn't particularly drawn to the dolls.

He liked collecting the little miniature pieces of fashion.

And I thought, well, that is really interesting.

And there was just no way for me to incorporate that into the mission statement at the State Museum.

So when COVID happened and I no longer was spending my time there, I thought, let's figure out a way to showcase David's Barbie collection.

And so the concept was, let's talk about Barbie fashion.

And let's take a look at the, sort of the artisans behind the scenes who are creating the Barbie fashion.

Is their actual like, does Barbie fashion actually represent what's going on in the culture at any particular moment in time?

Can we prove that?

We just sort of assumed that Barbie was always super fashionable, but can we prove that?

And so the exhibition and the book set out to put, to juxtapose life-size pieces of vintage fashion next to Barbie pieces or moments in time that happened in Vogue magazine or fashion designers' runway catwalks or cultural moments in time, like, you know, Jackie O going to India.

She wears this very famous orange sort of apricot dress, and Barbie gets a dress that looks an awful lot like Jackie O's dress the next year.

So it was, it was juxtaposing those moments in time that actually does-- when we can prove that the evolution of fashion is represented by Barbie through this certain period of time.

And the period of time I'm interested in is '59 when Barbie was born through 1999-2000, that cusp.

-So to be clear, she's certainly played a role in your life currently, but did you play with Barbies?

-I really didn't.

It was-- I think it was a money thing.

My family just didn't have the money.

I do remember we did receive hand-me-down Barbies from the neighbor across the street once she grew out of her Barbies.

And I remember a big case, one of those wonderful vinyl Barbie storage cases, showing up one day at our house just stuffed full of like Barbie pieces and missing shoes and broken things, you know, headless Barbies.

But I-- but I don't know.

It wasn't that appealing to me because they weren't like in pristine condition.

There were pieces missing.

But I knew of Barbie, but I wasn't, until I started this project, I really wasn't an aficionado for sure.

-But at what point in your life did it become important to you to know the story, the history behind a piece of clothing?

-Well, I was born that way.

Yeah, I always-- I never-- you know, when I was in college, I didn't realize that anyone really made a living loving fashion.

It never occurred to me.

For whatever stupid reason, it never occurred to me that people make a living designing fashion.

For whatever reason, I just never thought about it before.

So when I finally realized that, wow, this is something you can make a living on, I just, everything has always been about fashion and clothing.

-Okay.

So the Barbie projects happened you said during COVID.

The Barbie movie comes out last year.

It's almost like you were looking into the future.

You knew what was going to be hot?

-No.

I was just-- I think, you know, when you hear Greta Gerwig, the director, talk about she started writing the screenplay, it was-- Barbie was her COVID project too.

So we both were working in separate, totally separate silos.

We weren't collabing at all.

I didn't know what she was doing.

Now, Mattel did tell us that, that there was a Barbie movie coming.

That's about all the information that we had about it.

So we never talked to each other.

I think it was just there was something in the zeitgeist that we both picked up on.

And it was just lucky that the movie came out when it did.

When I was shopping the book, I reached out to a number of publishers and there was very little interest before the movie came out.

There was very little interest and said, Barbie is not really that relevant anymore.

So it was just within a matter of months, all the buzz and the first trailers of the movie came out and everything, and then it was an easier sell at that point.

But I found that really fascinating that people didn't, weren't yet sort of plugged into that importance of her legacy.

So it's a fascinating-- I mean, the fashion is what I love, but just-- -What did you think of the costumes in the movie?

-I thought they were well done.

I was worried that it would be super easy for the designer to look at the Barbie fashion legacy and make a caricature out of it for the movie.

Because when you're translating from this size to life size, it can start to look ridiculous.

But I thought it was very sophisticated.

Jacqueline Duran is the costume designer on the movie.

I thought she did a really great job.

And it read as Barbie fashion, but not too literal to be a joke.

So that's a fine, that's tricky to do.

And I thought she did it really well.

-I think you're one of the few people in the world that would be able to give that kind of critique.

We talked about Liberace and your contribution to Las Vegas history, the preservation of it, but we have yet to talk about your other book and other project involving The Folies Bergere, the French cabaret show at the Tropicana.

Your role in those costumes, tell me what you did.

-So super, super exciting.

So at the Tropicana-- the show, The Folies Bergere closed in 2009.

-The longest running show for Las Vegas.

-Nearly 50 years it ran.

And so the show over that 50-year period, there's an evolution of costumes.

There was new editions of the show every other year for many, many years.

And there was a lot of costumes in storage backstage when the show finally closed in that 2009 era.

And when I was at the State Museum as a costume, running the costume and textile collection, I had reached out to the Tropicana a number of times and said, you know, we're interested in collecting some pieces for the collection.

You know, there's a reason; it's important.

And I, and the response was, We're keeping everything because we might use these pieces in the future.

And so I just kept bothering them.

And at one point in time, I read that Mamma Mia was going to open at the Trop.

And I thought, I know that show has a lot of costumes in it, and I bet that the Trop is going to need the space where The Folies Bergere costumes are being stored for the Mamma Mia costumes.

So I finally, I reached out again, I said, What do you think?

Can we come and pick up some things?

And they got back to me and said, Yes, in fact, if you at the museum come and take everything out of our storage space right now over the weekend, the State Museum can acquire everything.

So that's what we did.

The State Museum, happily enough, was willing to take responsibility for that entire collection.

And, you know, after all was said and done, there were 8,000 pieces that the State Museum takes care of from The Folies Bergere show.

And it is a very unique look at, again, the evolution of stage costume from that '59 period through 2009.

And it's absolutely fascinating.

This was before-- there was no spandex in '59 through the '60s.

So costumes are made entirely different.

And it's just a fascinating look, and especially this evolution just in Vegas too, right?

I mean, there's no other museum collection that has this evolution in storage where researchers can actually go and take a look and see the differences that happened.

-That's so cool.

Last thing, the favorite piece of clothing that you currently own, what is it?

-Well, when I think of clothing, I also include handbags.

So I have collected some crazy handbags, things that are too fantastic and wonderful to even use and partly because they're a little silly.

The first thing I think of is this one crazy handbag I have that is shaped like a dog, like a wiener dog, and it has a zipper on the top with ears, something I would never wear.

It's not my style, but it's just so wonderfully made and beautiful and charming.

And I just love that about fashion, that there are things that are just like the artistry of fashion.

And for me, that dog purse represents that.

-Karan Feder, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.

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