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The Santa Barbara Fiber Arts Guild invites the public to a free presentation by internationally recognized textile curator and appraiser Melissa Leventon this Saturday, June 6, from 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Goleta Valley Community Center, 5679 Hollister Ave., Goleta. Leventon will present "Fit for a Queen," highlighting the costume exhibition she co-developed with the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.
Hired in 2006 by the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in Bangkok to advise the project architect on transforming a 19th-century office building into a 21st-century museum of fashion and textiles, Leventon and her colleagues were granted access to Queen Sirikit's fashionable Pierre Balmain couture wardrobe dating from the 1960s, a privilege that few other Westerners had enjoyed. Leventon, working with several Thai colleagues, developed the "Fit for a Queen" exhibition based on this wardrobe, which explored the development of the Queen's distinctive sartorial style as envisioned by Balmain, the embroidery house Lesage, and the Queen herself.