Sonnet Stanfill
Sonnet Stanfill is an American-born British curator and writer. She is Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Stanfill is known for curating exhibitions that explore modern and contemporary fashion, as well as for her writing and advocacy work in the field of fashion studies.
Early life and education
Stanfill studied history of art at Smith College in Massachusetts, then earned a Master's degree in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.Career
Stanfill began her career in the commercial sector, working as a buyer in San Francisco and New York. She joined the V&A in 1999 as Assistant Curator and was promoted to Curator in 2002. In 2015, she became Senior Curator in the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion department. She has served as a scientific committee member of the Musées Yves Saint Laurent in Paris and Marrakech and chair of the Courtauld Association Committee. In 2017, she delivered a TEDx talk that explored the gender imbalance in culture leadership. She served as a Gilbert Fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is a scientific committee member of the European Fashion Heritage Association.Exhibitions
Stanfill has curated a number of fashion exhibitions at the V&A, including:Ossie Clark New York Fashion Now Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950 The Glamour of Italian Fashion, which toured to four North American venuesNaomi: In Fashion, on the supermodel Naomi Campbell, the museum's first exhibition to focus on a Black female creativeSchiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, the first major UK retrospectivePublications
Stanfill has written and edited multiple exhibition catalogues and academic articles. These include:Her 2016 New York Times op-ed "Taking on the Boys' Club at the Art Museum" addressed gender inequality in cultural leadership.