Student Molly Hogan is on a mission – helping Professor Marcy Linton to document a collection of more than 3,500 pieces of historic clothing, kept in the basement of UVA’s theater building, under one of two stages. The pictures she’s taking will someday be online – not subject to temperature fluctuations that are common under pipes that supply heat and air conditioning.
“The clothes regain a little humidity in the summer, and then they’re extremely dried out in the winter, and it’s going back and forth, and it’s causing things like this – this fracturing of the fabric – just by being in this room," she explains.
Linton has been making costumes since she was 15, so when she got the chance to oversee a historic collection of clothing, she was delighted. She walks past carefully labeled boxes and racks of garments – past decades of American history.
“This is like a cape from the 1860’s. Wow, beautiful. It is. This is actually monkey. It didn’t matter what the fur was. They would wear it.”
There are outfits designed by Dior, Chanel, Pierre Cardin, Bill Blass, Emilio Pucci – and dresses made from colorful prints on fabric that once contained flour, rice or chicken feed.
“You used to buy it in cotton bags, and then when they realized women were saving the white bags and making undergarments and aprons out of the bags they started printing," Linton says. "An average bag was about a yard, so if you collected two or three yards of a certain pattern, you could make yourself a really nice dress.”
Some brightly colored clothes from the 19th century were dazzling but dangerous – dyed with toxic chemicals like arsenic, which turns fabric a lovely shade of green and mercury that made hat production easier. People knew these things were poisonous, but they figured they weren’t swallowing them. Still, Linton says, these chemicals could take a toll.
“It made people paranoid. It made people depressed. I think it was the same with arsenic," says Linton. "It would make you green and it would make open sores on you, and – yeah – it wasn’t pretty.”
She gets at least 20 items donated each semester from people who figure they’d make a great costume for a campus play, but Linton says she doesn’t put these garments on stage.For one thing, few would fit today’s students.
“I would have to say, on average -- especially in the 19th century garments – there isn’t anything with a
waist over 25 inches.”
And these clothes are, in her opinion, too valuable to risk damage by being worn.
“When you think about all these items, they’re the most intimate cultural heritage we have, because they were worn by the people in that time period.”
Alas, she says, there is no budget for the collection, no climate controlled storage areas or ways to showcase what is now hidden away.She’d like to collaborate with other faculty members in exploring history, sociology, anthropology and other disciplines through clothes.
“Bonnie Hagerman teaches a class called Fashion and Feminism. Everybody in that class took a garment from this collection and did a research project on it, and tied it into the things they were learning in class.”
If she had a space, Linton says, she could build a whole curriculum around this collection. So she keeps writing grant proposals and making plans to put images and details of each intriguing item on a website where the future can find clothing from our past.
