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.^[1]

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.^[2][3]

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.^[4][5] 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.^[6] In 2017, she delivered a TEDx talk that explored the gender imbalance in culture leadership.^[7][8] 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 (EFHA).

Stanfill has curated a number of fashion exhibitions at the V&A, including:

• Ossie Clark (2003)^[9]
• New York Fashion Now (2007)^[10]
• Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950 (2012)^[11]
• The Glamour of Italian Fashion (2014), which toured to four North American venues^{[12][13][14][15][16]}
• Naomi: In Fashion (2024–25), on the supermodel Naomi Campbell, the museum's first exhibition to focus on a Black female creative^{[17][18][19][20]}
• Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art (2026), the first major UK retrospective^[21]

Stanfill has written and edited multiple exhibition catalogues and academic articles. These include:

• New York Fashion. V&A Publishing. 2007. ISBN 978-1-85177-499-9.
• Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950. V&A Publishing. 2012. ISBN 978-1-85177-684-9.
• From Club to Catwalk: Fashion in 1980s London. V&A Publishing. 2013. ISBN 978-1-85177-725-9.
• The Glamour of Italian Fashion. V&A Publishing. 2014. ISBN 978-1-85177-823-2.
• Kries, M.; Eisenbrand, J.; Rossi, C., eds. (2018). "The Night Club as Fashion Catwalk". Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960–Today. Vitra Design Museum. ISBN 978-3-945852-24-8.
• Blaszczyk, R.; Poulliard, V., eds. (2018). "Anonymous Tastemakers: The Role of American Buyers in Establishing an Italian Fashion Industry". European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-2211-7.
• "G.B. Giorgini: Fashion, Florence and Diplomacy, 1950–55". ZoneModa Journal. 11 (1S). 2021. ISSN 2611-0563.
• Naomi Campbell. Rizzoli. 2024. ISBN 978-0-8478-9981-4.
• Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art. V&A Publishing. 2026.

Her 2016 New York Times op-ed "Taking on the Boys' Club at the Art Museum" addressed gender inequality in cultural leadership.^[22]