Three elaborate gowns are pictured from costume exhibit co-developed by Melissa Leventon with the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles. (Courtesy photo)
Melissa Leventon co-developed costume exhibit with the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles. (Courtesy photo)

The Santa Barbara Fiber Arts Guild invites the public to a free presentation by internationally recognized textile curator and appraiser Melissa Leventon.

The talk will be 9:30 a.m.-noon Saturday, June 6 at the Goleta Valley Community Center, 5679 Hollister Ave.

Leventon’s program, titled “Fit for a Queen,” will feature the costume exhibition she co-developed with the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.

Leventon was hired in 2006 by the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in Bangkok, Thailand, 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 few other Westerners had enjoyed.

Working with several Thai colleagues, Leventon 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, according to the Fiber Arts Guild.

“Melissa brings a remarkable combination of scholarly expertise and firsthand experience,” said Laurie Gross-Schaefer, the guild’s programs director. “Her work with the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles offers a fascinating perspective on fashion history, museum curation, and the stories textiles tell about culture and identity.”

A founding partner of Curatrix Group, Leventon is a specialist in European and American costume and textiles. She formerly served as curator-in-charge of textiles at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

She teaches fashion history and theory at California College of the Arts, and has been a senior consultant to the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles since 2006. She is also the author of “Art Wear: Fashion and Anti-Fashion.”

Guild announcements and social time begin at 9:30 a.m., with the featured presentation at 10 a.m. Free parking is available at the venue. For more, visit www.sbfiberarts.org/upcoming.

The Santa Barbara Fiber Arts Guild preserves and promotes fiber arts through demonstrations, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, publications, and other educational programs.

The guild welcomes the public to its monthly meetings, held the first Saturday of each month. Learn more at www.sbfiberarts.org.