Researchers at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore are searching for our region’s history in fashion relics of the past.
For decades, vests, coats, dresses, shoes, and other wearable items sat in boxes lined with tissue paper. The acidic packing materials do no favors to the costume collection.
It doesn’t help that the collection’s current storage space, the historic Enoch Pratt House on West Monument Street, isn’t climate controlled. Over the years, some of the costumes began to split.
Chief Curator Alexandra Deutsch says it will take three to five years to clean, document, and rehouse the entire collection — between 10,000 and 12,000 single pieces — in a new storage facility, designed just for textiles.
picture: vintage inspired wedding dressesDiscovering what’s already in the collection
This summer, the conservation team began to transfer costumes over to the new storage area, which is outfitted with large tables for measuring, examining and cleaning the clothing. MDHS is raising funds to keep the conservation project going.
“We’re just right now going through a process of discovery,” Deutsch says.
“There is a lot left to go,” Registrar Allison Tolman says. “This is the first time that we’ve attempted doing this, so it’s kind of putting our toe in the water, and we’ve been lucky to have interns who were very productive and really intelligent.”
With measuring tape, pen, paper, and a very gentle vacuum in gloved hands, a team of interns does much of the discovering. On Aug. 12, each of the three young women will deliver a public presentation on their findings at MDHS.
They’ve spent the last three months digging through degraded boxes, cataloguing more than 300 objects.
They uncovered wool swimming costumes, military uniforms, fancy dresses, and even underwear. Intern Emily Bach plans to talk about some of the quirky undergarments they’ve found, such as an 1850’s maternity corset.
These days, most moms-to-be wouldn’t think of cinching their baby bump. Bach says this practice often resulted — sometimes intentionally — in miscarriage.
“The main purpose was to actually hide the pregnancy and allow a woman to still have the financial freedom of working or not having to go into bedrest, so it helped give them a few extra weeks or months,” she says.
Other fashion choices came with unhealthy consequences. Intern Lidia Plaza will lecture about the explosion of color that accompanied the development of synthetic dyes. She thinks a few garments in the collection got their bright, emerald hue from “arsenic green.”
“It was one of the first color-fast dyes, which made it very popular in the 19th century,” she says. “A lot of people wore it, and it was also used in wall paper and in toys and candy, and as well as in clothes. Unfortunately, as the name suggests, it contained arsenic.”
Plaza will also talk about a popular shade of purple that caused the “mauve measles.”
“A lot of women developed rashes by wearing these clothes too close to their skin, but they remained popular,” she says. “People loved these colors!”
Lots of history in old objects
Intern Anna-Maria Hand says that throughout this process, she and the other interns didn’t know what they’d pull out of the next box. Her favorite discovery was a beautiful blue gown that came from a prominent Maryland family, the Ridgelys.
“I remember Lidia and I kind of were ‘saving it’ because we saw the quality of fabric when we opened the box,” she says.
It wasn’t just high-quality; it was pristine. For a dress from the 1860′s, that was unusual. Deutsch says the “Ridgeley dress” is a great example of finding clues in clothing.
“It literally looked almost unworn, and then you realize, well because of her husband’s death, this electric blue gown, she stopped wearing because she was in mourning and she didn’t remarry, so you begin to get at a history you might not otherwise find,” she says.
“We were able to date it, so it was really nice to be able to state the provenance of that particular garment,” Hand, a Maryland native, says.
Tolman says it’s interesting to see how much history can be found in the folds of a single object.
“When you look at a dress and you can see hems moved, brought in, brought out, then you can see that this person grew or this person had a younger sister who got to wear the same dress,” she says, “and you can see how things were altered, not only for size, but also because some things go out of style or they need to change the silhouette, but they love the fabric.”
Deutsch says she looks forward to rotating out the outfits on display, showcasing her team’s hard work and the society’s costume holdings, which she says date back to at least 1740. There are women’s, men’s and children’s costumes, including a girl’s dress featuring a handmade lining crafted from numerous pieces of fabric.
There’s also a well-known, whimsical dress by French designer Hubert de Givenchy.
“We have one of the gowns that was worn by the Duchess of Windsor, this ivory, organza gown by Givenchy that has been embroidered with a silk thread, with monkeys that are [in] a band,” Deutsch says. One monkey plays a flute, while another bangs on a hand-stitched drum in this 1950s wearable tribute to 18th century porcelain monkey bands.
Deutsch says Wallis Simpson wore the unique dress once, before giving it to a relative who immediately gifted it to MDHS.
This is the stuff of fashion, and Maryland, history. Deutsch says in the 1980’s, when the museum’s retired housekeeper Enoliah Williams organized, packed and stored the collection in Pratt House, it seemed like a good decision.
“When the costume was originally housed there, the Pratt House was where a lot of our collection was housed,” she says. “But also, the standards of how collections were stored were very different, and the understanding about what objects really need for their own longevity, which is a regulated climate with the proper amounts of humidity, that wasn’t really understood to the extent it is now.”
She says a consistent climate, and keeping the collection in acid-free boxes, will help prevent further damage.
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