Kent State University is located less than 20km from Akron and its museum’s fashion collection is on CNN’s list of the world’s top fashion museums, on which you’ll find New York’s Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, Paris’s Musée de la Mode, and the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence:

Kent State University Museum
Kent, Ohio

Housed on a university campus in northeast Ohio, the Kent State Museum contains important collections of fashion and decorative arts, with eight galleries featuring rotating exhibitions of work by artists and designers. Affiliated with Kent State’s Shannon Rodgers and Jerry Silverman School of Fashion Design and Merchandising, the museum gives students an up-close-and-personal look at historic and contemporary fashion and costumes from global cultures. Accredited by the American Association of Museums, Kent State’s collections span from the 17th to the 21st centuries.