Chelsey Roberts and Professor Mary Farahnakian, Theater and Media Arts

As the lid of the first box was lifted off I became giddy. I couldn’t help but reach out and touch the golden yellow silk flapper dress. My fate to the BYU Historic Clothing Collection was sealed. It was the last week of classes of my first semester at BYU. Dr. Mary Farahnakian was showing us the study collection of historical clothing that was kept on campus for student use. Each piece held a story and I wanted to be a part of uncovering the story.

Now in my final semester at BYU and in the culmination of many hours and experiences with the collection. Curating an exhibit from the many items that I have fallen in love with over the last four years. This exhibit encapsulates my experience at BYU as a student of Costume Design and Art History. I have been able to combine a love of historical clothing and fashion print media with a curatorial eye developed over the course of many art history classes. The Historic Clothing Collection became a part of me and a part that I wanted to share with the wider campus community.

The Historic Clothing Collection was originally a part of the Clothing and Textiles department. When the university shut the majority of the program down in the early 1990s the collection was placed under the jurisdiction of Dr. Mary Farahnakian—a joint professor in TMA (Theatre and Media Arts) and SFL (School of Family Life). At the time the collection was only about 500 pieces However, in 1996, Dr. Carma de Jong Anderson, the president of the Utah Costume Institute, decided to bequeath the majority of her collection to BYU. The only logical place for this bequest that BYU had acquired was the already existing collection. However the donation was almost 1000 pieces tripled the collection. The collection was then moved to an off-site storage facility. Since then the collection has grown to almost 4000 pieces and has moved on multiple occasions to different off-site storage locations.

Current funding allows the collection to function only at a minimal level. Acid-free tissue paper is the priority for the preservation process, but acid-free boxes are only a future dream in the collection’s present state. In 2013 the TMA department, on whom the financial responsibility of the collection had fallen, decided that they could no longer afford to maintain the collection alone. Other departments were asked to help assume responsibility of the collection, but all of them declined. With help and funding the collection could become more accessible to students from a variety of disciplines. Without additional support the collection would be distributed to other university, museum, and private collections.

It was during this time that I first decided I wanted to do an ORCA project that had something to do with the Historic Clothing Collection. I had grown to love the collection through many different experiences and I did not want to see it leave BYU. By this point I had switched my major to Art History and was looking into textile conservation and clothing curation. I knew I wanted people to be able to actually see the collection, so working on a research publication about just one piece lacked necessary scope. An exhibit seemed like the perfect option. It would be seen by the campus community, utilize the collection, allow me to collaborate with other students and departments, and give me curatorial experience as a senior in Art History.

After discovering that I had received the grant, I began to formulate how, when, and where this exhibit would happen. My original plan was to exhibit in Gallery 303 of the HFAC during fall semester. Unfortunately precedence is always given to BFA and MFA student shows. By the end of June, I found out that I did not get the space. I applied for a space and received permission from the Art in the Library committee to exhibit in Gallery on 5 in the Harold B. Lee Library during the Fall Semester 2014.
Curating, preparing, and installing the exhibit was the next step in the process. Jaynanne Meads, an adjunct faculty member and assistant curator of the Historic Clothing Collection, and Stephanie Merrill, a fellow art history student, also worked with me on this portion of the project. We searched through the catalog archive to find dresses that would fit into our space and paradoxical theme of discovering simplicity and detail in the clothing of the twentieth century. With a conceptual focus on looking at details that clothing now seems to have lost, we wanted to find unique pieces that were simple, embodied each period, and had unique details that seem to be lacking in the clothing we wear now. The title Details: Western American Fashion in the 20th Century came out of the desire to show simple details that have been lost.

Choosing to focus on women’s fashion, dresses were chosen based on their details, condition, provenance, and color scheme. The selections in the end included: a pale green kimono dress (1912), a black beaded flapper style (c. 1923), a luxurious floor length velvet dress (1938), a simple navy war-time dress (c. 1942), and a flashy synthetic eyelash dress (c. 1962). Curating print media that corresponded with each of the dress selections followed. Contextualizing these dresses within each is helpful to understand the role of clothing in a cultural framework.

After finalizing the selections we had to get them “exhibit-ready”. Writing descriptions, cleaning, repairing, photographing, recovering dress forms, and fitting required the work of patient and careful hands. Each piece needed different preparation in order to be ready to exhibit. Setting up the exhibit became quite the collaborative project. We had exhibit technicians, librarians, conservators, and many others that helped us to get the exhibit up and to work out some challenges in the process. Displaying the magazines in an appropriate way was an unexpected challenge. The book cradles the library had were too small and needed to be extended. With the advice from the conservation staff we came up with a solution to keep the books open and protected.

Overall, I am pleased with the reaction and personal accomplishment of this exhibit. As a summation of my path through BYU the classes, workplaces, and people that have been a part of my university experience came together in this collective experience.