This project asks a deceptively simple question about the Met’s Costume Institute collection: how diverse is it, which cultures are represented, and whose names receive credit, with a focus on cultural representation, gender representation, and material choices. The motivation is that fashion isn’t just “style”; it’s a major economic sector and a form of artistic and cultural expression that shapes what gets celebrated as history. By treating the collection as a dataset, the project surfaces both dominant narratives (which regions, designers, and houses appear most) and potential gaps in representation that are harder to notice when viewing individual objects one at a time.
The end goal is inspired pudding.cool scrollytelling website that walks users through several connected views: a world overview of where pieces originate, how material usage shifts over time, which fashion houses are most represented, and how gender and nationality patterns appear within specific houses. Technically, the site is built in D3 + SVG: a bubble map loads the Met’s CSV alongside a TopoJSON world map; stacked bars and density curves are computed and rendered in D3; bar charts use SVG rect marks; and dot/area layouts place circles using 2D packing-like positioning. The narrative structure combines a sticky graphic panel plus Scrollama for vertical scrollytelling and a custom HTML/CSS/JS slide “deck” (each slide as a, toggled via an .active class with button/keyboard navigation). Visually, the design moves from image grids to aggregated charts, uses cochineal red as accent pops to echo the Met’s identity, and relies on scroll transitions and slide sections to make changes over time—and shifts between categories—feel legible and intentional.
