Callie O’Connor, assistant conservator at The Museum at FIT (MFIT), was lead author of a feature published in the October 2025 issue of the American Institute of Conservation’s newsletter, AIC News. The article, titled “A Cross-Disciplinary Approach: Forty Years of Conservation Education for Non-Conservators at the Fashion Institute of Technology,” was co-authored by Hilary Davidson, chair of FIT’s Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice program; Melissa Marra-Alvarez, curator of education and research at MFIT; and Anna Muller, curator of collections at East Hampton Historical Society.
In the article, O’Connor, a 2020 graduate of the Fashion and Textile Studies master’s program, examines the 40-year evolution of conservation graduate degree programs and she spotlights what distinguishes FIT’s textile studies program from the rest: the amount of conservation-specific education provided to students on the curatorial (rather than the conservation) track.
“FIT’s master’s program differs from others,” O’Connor writes, “because it is not solely a conservation program. It was developed as a dual degree program to train fashion and textile conservators and curators, with the end goal of producing highly qualified and diversely skilled museum professionals at a time when fashion and textile departments in institutions had yet to clearly delineate between the two.”