So beautiful but so terrible: Academy of Natural Sciences traces the ecology of fashion

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When first lady Jackie Kennedy traveled to India in 1962 with her husband Jack, she wore a leopard-skin coat designed by Oleg Cassini. She looked really good in it.

Kennedy’s image created a shopping frenzy. Everybody wanted that coat. The new exhibition at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, “The Ecology of Fashion,” does not have the original coat, but it has a similar one custom-tailored at the time for one of her admirers. It was later donated to Drexel’s Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection.

“The donor’s mother went to a furrier and said, ‘Make me the same coat,” said Clare Sauro, director of the collection. “The only difference is it only has four buttons while Jackie’s had six, because Jackie was taller.”

Kennedy’s leopard coat came with a heavy cost: Because of the extraordinary popular demand for the garment, it is estimated that 250,000 leopards were killed for their skins, driving the species nearly to extinction. Cassini deeply regretted his creation and spent much of his remaining career advocating for faux furs.

In the exhibition, Sauro put the real leopard fur coat next to an example of a faux fur made from synthetic fibers, likely an acrylic blend.

“It’s a nice-looking coat. It’s pretty terrific. But it is a fossil fuel–derived, petroleum-based plastic, so it’s not going to degrade and it had a lot of pollution in its creation,” Sauro said. “It’s an alternative. We don’t want to endanger the animals. But at the same time the faux fur isn’t so great, either.”

There are few easy answers in “The Ecology of Fashion,” tracing the history of the clothing industry by its environmental impacts. The unique exhibition leverages two of Drexel’s great assets: the artifacts and expertise of the 212-year-old Academy of Natural Sciences and the fabulous clothes of the Fox collection.

The damage done by the fashion industry is fairly well known: Fast-fashion manufacturers tend to overproduce garments 30% to 40% above demand, knowing that much of it will be thrown away having never been worn. An estimated garbage truck–amount of clothes are discarded every second, most made with synthetic fibers that will not biodegrade.

“We have enough clothes on the planet to clothe the next six generations,” said Marina McDougall, vice president of experience and engagement at the Academy.

“The Ecology of Fashion” illustrates one of the driving factors behind all that waste: desire. People want clothes that look good. The clothes in “Ecology” look great.

One of the Fox collection’s most prized dresses is a coral-colored, sleeveless sheath gown donated by Princess Grace of Monaco, also known as Philadelphia’s native daughter, Grace Kelly. It is embroidered with flowers, raffia glass beads and hundreds of pieces of actual coral.

“The coral branches are drilled through at one end, so they’re left to dangle,” Sauro said. “When we move this dress, when we put it on the mannequin, the coral branches tremble and make the most wonderful tinkling noise, like bells.”

This is an example of a dress that only a princess would wear: Not only is it prohibitively expensive, but the idea of harvesting endangered coral just to accent an evening gown would be unthinkable today.

The gown is next to a hat adorned with bird feathers. Upon closer inspection, there is a taxidermied bird nestled in the plumage.

In the late 19th century, the rage for feathers and even whole birds in women’s hats almost led to the extinction of the snowy egret, were it not for two determined women from Boston, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall. They founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and through their intervention Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which protects the hunting of certain species.

But the desire for fashion continued unabated. After World War II, the clothing industry erupted with synthetic fibers like rayon, acrylic and Dacron, which gave consumers an enormous variety of clothes in unprecedented colors and patterns.

“It was super fun,” said Saura, showing off a few examples of the richly colored off-the-shelf garments from that era. “Here was this fashion explosion in ‘50s consumer culture. I need all the colors. I need all the novelty.”

“This is how we got here,” she said.

The exhibition draws a direct line from the mid-century proliferation of synthetic fibers to the fast fashion of the 1990s to today’s ultra-fast fashion, which contributes to the 92 million tons of clothes discarded every year, much of it unworn, accumulating in places like the Atacama Desert in Chile.

There are efforts to change course. The exhibition has a section about the Pennsylvania Flax Project, a regional organization trying to re-establish flax as a staple crop in the state for the production of natural linen. Flax production was a founding industry back when Pennsylvania was still a colony.

A group of Philadelphia artists have recently formed the Philly Dye Club, experimenting with natural dyeing techniques. A designer in Nigeria, NKWO, repurposes discarded denim jeans into creatively piecemeal garments. The New York designer Eileen Fisher has made upcycled garments a central tenet of her successful fashion business.

The most significant change to the fashion industry may lie in the humble blue jean, one of the most consumed articles of clothing in the world. To process a single pair of jeans requires an estimated 1,800 gallons of water.

The exhibition features a waterless pair of Levi Strauss jeans, which claim to be made with 96% less water than typical jeans.

“We really wanted to talk about change can be made with these big companies,” Sauro said. “It doesn’t have to be somebody working in a small boutique somewhere. It can be broad change. It can be meaningful change on a grand scale.”

“The Ecology of Fashion” will be on view until Aug. 31, 2025. Due to the fragile nature of many of the historic textiles on display, midway through the run of the exhibition, most of the clothes will be swapped out for other examples from the collection.