Opening March 23, 2025, Dressed for Success: Fashioning Manhood at the Tampa Bay Hotel offers an intimate portrait of the Hotel’s staff during a transformative decade of American history. This special exhibit will run through December 23, 2025.
 
How can the lives of clerks, cashiers, waiters, and sports professionals at the Tampa Bay Hotel in the 1890s inform present-day conversations about young men’s declining college attendance and dissatisfaction with the job market? The economic depression that began with the Panic of 1893 led many young men to doubt they could achieve the same success as their fathers, especially since the financial downturn coincided with the rise of large corporations and the decline of small business ownership. Even more frightening to some, women invaded the male office as secretaries and bookkeepers, positions previously held by men.
 
This exhibit offers an eye-opening and entertaining glimpse at the strategies adopted by a new generation of men the 1890s to get ahead. In addition to fashion and grooming, they created the modern craze of bodybuilding, not to mention prizefighting and other practices that Teddy Roosevelt dubbed “the strenuous life.” A diverse sample of the Tampa Bay Hotel’s male staff guide viewers through the causes and consequences of the decade’s so-called “Crisis of Masculinity.” Dressed for Success presents stories of real people, brought to life with rare photographs and ephemera, sports equipment, and period garments and accessories. Thanks to a generous grant from the Henry B. Plant Museum Society, the exhibit will feature newly restored objects from the original Tampa Bay Hotel lobby that vividly recreate the workspace of cashiers and clerks.
 

A variety of special programs will accompany this exhibit throughout the year. Check this page for updates!
 

March 22, 6:30 pm: “‘Commanders of the Dining Room’: Headwaiters and their Staff,” a talk by Interim Director Charles McGraw Groh in the Music Room.
 

April 27, 6:00 pm: March of the Black Hussars: Viennese Operetta in America, a short documentary film premier and Q&A with the filmmakers at the Tampa Theater.
 

 This exhibit is graciously underwritten by:

Charles and Elizabeth Harris