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‘Everybody gets dressed’: ‘The History of Costume’ at Special Collections

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French fashion magazines in the History of Costume Exhibit in The Allen Library Special Collections.

Dress history — or the styles of clothing people have worn throughout the ages — has a complex past that extends back as far as humanity has existed.

After all, as rare books librarian and History of Costumes exhibit curator Kat Lewis put it, “Everybody gets dressed.”  

The History of Costume” is Allen Library’s newest curated exhibit, and was organized by UW Libraries’ Special Collections. The project is a year-long exhibition that started in the fall of 2022, with new material being rotated through each quarter.

According to Lewis, fashion is a centuries-old mode of self-expression and connection that can tell its viewers about an individual’s life, socioeconomic status, interests, and heritage.

“It’s one of the most accessible cultural artifacts we have and use,” Lewis said. “It is very much part of our history.”

Despite its rich background, “dress history” as a field of study was kept out of academic circles for a long time, largely due to it being seen as a “woman’s field” and the textile industry as “women’s work.”

Sewing, embroidery, and fashion were — and still are — widely seen as feminine forms of expression, and were looked down on as less academically rigorous fields of study. This exhibit, along with the life work of Blanche Payne, works to change that.

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A pop up book of Elizabethan fashion in the History of Costume Exhibit in The Allen Library Special Collections.

Payne, though not described as one in her time, was a prominent “dress historian” — and she left behind a lot to say about the matter.

Payne was a UW professor at the now defunct School of Home Economics on-and-off from 1927 to 1966, where she taught costume and fashion design courses, in addition to conducting research on Baltic folk dress.

She constantly brought back fashion plates (illustrations in fashion magazines), fabric swatches, embroidery samples, and articles of clothing to her classrooms and colleagues from her various travels.

“The only way that you could get your head around what something looked like was by looking at a picture of it in a book,” Lewis said. “Obviously, [Payne’s classrooms] didn’t have computers, so if they were trying to learn what a different region’s dress looked like, they had to have a fairly extensive collection of images, textiles, weavinging, and different types of embroidery. That’s why she collected all this stuff. It was for learning and education specifically.”

However, the University of Washington dropped home economics from the curriculum in 1980, and the school never resurfaced. While some sections like costume within the School of Drama reappeared within other departments, others, like executive cleaning, never resurfaced.

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Thus, Payne’s life work was moved to Special Collections.

This year, though, Payne’s work has taken the spotlight. Lewis curated the “History of Costume” exhibit  — which shares the name of Payne’s 1965 textbook — as a way to display but an inkling of the boundless materials contained within Special Collections.

Fall quarter focused on Payne, and spring will bring in sections on Latin American dress. Right now, the exhibit contains a myriad of vintage fashion magazines ranging from Bazaar to Vogue, a survey of Elizabethan-era fashion, and a section on the Fashion Group, a female-led organization that helped women find careers in the fashion industry around the 1970s.

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Tapestry of Hours by Anne Greenwood in the History of Costume Exhibit in The Allen Library Special Collections.

The showstopper of the exhibit is undoubtedly the “Tapestry of hours,” a hand-bound book by Anne Greenwood that is embroidered with poetry by Portland poet and seamstress Hazel Hall. It is a remarkable piece of work — even just glancing at it for a moment, the amount of love and skill that goes into making textile pieces is deeply evident.

But the “Tapestry of hours” is only one of thousands of unique artifacts the Special Collections exhibit holds.

“This collection is largely uncatalogued, but well-documented internally,” Lewis said. “You can request [any of the artifacts] and actually look at the material in person and mess around with it. They’re all super fun to flip through.”

So, more than just checking out the exhibit, Lewis encourages students to visit Special Collections — and to investigate the world of fashion history further.

“People view feminine gender presentation — exuberant gender presentation — as frivolous, when in reality, it’s artistic and expressive and beautiful,” Lewis said. “It’s an area that’s ripe with research material.”

“The History of Costume” exhibit is located in the lobby of the Special Collections department in the basement of Allen Library. If you’re interested in exploring any materials within the Special Collections department, you can schedule an appointment here.

Reach writer Abigail Boyer at arts@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @aelizawrites.

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