Here Comes The Bride

When I was a child I was never interested in museums except for the ones that were hands-on especially when museums where I didn’t have to read much. However as I got older I began to appreciate museums and wanted to learn from the exhibits and displays that were in them.

It takes a lot of time, thought, and dedication when it comes to putting a museum exhibit together. Museum exhibits want to create interest in people in order for them to learn about the object or objects and somehow relate to them. That is very difficult to do considering every person has different interests. That is why labels are extremely important when creating an exhibit. Museum labels are not as easy to write as someone might think. There are label-writing competitions in order to help writers enhance and get ideas on how to create labels that will interest their visitors.

In Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach by Beverly Serrell, she talks about how title labels are what captures a visitor to become interested in reading more about the object. This got me thinking on what I should title the wedding dress I am studying in order to really gain the interest of the visitors to want to read and learn more. Perhaps something such as “Here Comes the Bride.” I’m thinking that this could lead people to get the song in their head that goes “Here comes the bride all dressed in white,” and as they sing it realize this dress is not white, why not? This could cause them to wonder and want to read more as Ken Yellis points out in is an important factor in “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars.”

This interest can cause a person to become so interested and want to know everything about the dress, which is the goal. In the article “Exhibit Makeovers: Do-It-Yourself,” by Alice Parman, she describes the theories of Alfred North Whitehead and his ideas on how a person who falls in love with an object will want know everything about it, which he calls the stage of Romance. In order for a person to read any further into it they need to fall in love with it. I think that if you first look at my wedding dress you would not think that it was a wedding dress. When I first saw it I was shocked at the colors it was, brown and blue. Since today’s society tends to think of a wedding dress as white or ivory I think that the title of “Here Comes the Bride,” will intrigue visitors to read more on what they are seeing.