Should These Clothes Be Saved?
Thousands of regular girls’ garb articles are being preserved in lockers in a college basement. But where, precisely, does their cost lie?
It is viable that one of the more telling narratives of ladies’ lives in 20th-century America is housed in 50 metal storage lockers in a basement room in the theater department of a ladies’ college in Northampton, Mass. There, an anthropological street map lines the story from Gibson ladies to the Western Front to the Dust Bowl to bringing home the bacon and onward.
To attain it, you descend a flight of stairs and skip via a cinder block hall right into a windowless area. This is home to the unofficial Smith College Historic Clothing Collection: 3,000 attire, suits, shoes, luggage, and accessories. They are filled amongst gown racks and cardboard boxes jammed on padded hangers, stacked on cabinets, and squirreled away in any to-be-had corner and cranny.
Though the collection includes a few dressmaker names (Claire McCardell, Mary Quant) and some garments that belonged to famous human beings (Sylvia Plath’s Girl Scout uniform), most people have unknown origins. They can be stained, torn, mended, and otherwise unsuitable in a few manners that reflect the necessities of actual lifestyles: households, duty, and difficulty. They are clothes usually omitted or dismissed by museums and creditors to get dressed, who generally tend to pay attention to style as an expression of elitism, artistry, and aspiration.
Other schools and universities keep fabric and apparel collections, which includes Drexel and Iowa State, but Smith’s cognizance on women’s apparel and, especially, on ladies’ “social uniforms” — clothing that signifies identity and features as a part of the archaeology of gender, entire with usage markers — units it apart. “It’s not about couture,” stated Jan Glier Reeder, a style historian who became a curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute display on Charles James in 2014. (She is likewise a Smith graduate.) “It’s about how we examine the past in a very intimate way.”
How much is that certainly really worth? As the destiny of the collection becomes a subject of discussion inside the college, it has stirred up uncomfortable questions about what constitutes “free” in the context of garments, the liberal arts, and cutting-edge communication regarding how we talk about women’s records, even at an organization like Smith: an esteemed girls’ college and the alma mater of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. ‘She looks at underarm stains and sees a clue.’ In 1974, Catherine Smith, a graduate of the college and a costume designer, returned as a professor in the theater department. When she began sifting through the costumes used in productions, she found that many had been historical garments donated using alumnae.
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It came about to her, she said, that while such clothes are typically no longer seen as precious, in terms of providing clues to what it meant to be a woman in twentieth-century America, they will be well worth their weight, if not in gold, at least in semiprecious gems. “We have libraries of books, which are very precious,” Ms. Smith said, noting that just as the university collects and preserves artwork and prints, as well as files like diaries, yearbooks, and letters, the clothes can be visible as “journals into women’s lives from the past.” “I feel that’s a precious commodity to store and have for the future.” Yet, said Valerie Steele, the director and leader curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, traditionally, garments have not been visible.
“Old clothes, in general, are so tied to the frame, and woman bodies particularly, that they’ve now not been valorized as objects, like artwork, which had been visible as examples of male genius,” Ms. Steele stated. “They had been more like rags that had lived on past their time.” (The Museum at F.I.T. Sees its venture as collecting portions that are “traditionally or aesthetically large inside the records of fashion.”)
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A look from throughout the New York Times at the forces that form the get dressed codes we percentage, with Vanessa Friedman as your non-public shopper. Generally, when building gown collections, the most famous museums not dedicated simply to fashion or textiles — the Metropolitan, the Victoria, and Albert — appear to portions described as “extraordinary” and “main.” That is, garmets or textiles that talk to the ornamental arts or moments of tremendous historical importance in place of the quotidian nature of normal existence.
