What started as a simple effort to protect a few interesting items from the jumble of abandoned stage costumes in the theatre department has evolved into a fascinating archive that chronicles through various fabrics, colors, textiles, textures, and clothing styles the untold stories of women’s everyday lives at work, at home, and at play. Housed in the basement of Smith’s Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, the collection has been lovingly expanded, cataloged, curated, and cared for by Kiki Smith ’71, professor of theatre since 1974. “I just knew that some of the pieces that would be destroyed on stage would be much more valuable as a resource—a visual—for research,” she says. “I put a bunch of gray metal cabinets out in the hallway and just kept going through what we had.”
Those gray metal cabinets are still in use today and now contain about 4,000 garments and accessories, some dating from the 1800s. Among these are myriad house dresses, maternity clothes, waitress uniforms, and petticoats in addition to undergarments, period care items, stockings, and aprons—many painstakingly altered, patched, and repaired countless times.
Smith says identifying and getting information about the various garments was slow going at first. “We had no Internet, of course, and certainly nobody was collecting the ordinary stuff, and very few people were writing about it that I knew of,” she says. She persevered, and with the help of Nancy Rexford—former curator of costumes and textiles and director of Historic Northampton, who has written several books on historic clothing—Smith became increasingly adept at reading a garment. She learned how to begin to identify the number and type of alterations, the pattern of faded material, the mended tears, and the types of stains—all intimate details in the story of the life of the woman—or, in some cases, women—who wore the garment.
