Eddie Bauer, JCPenny, Wrangler—these are the labels you’ll spot in The New York Historical Society’s latest exhibition, “Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore, the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection,” which opens today. But, in fact, most of the pieces presented bear no label whatsoever. Lest we forget, the garb of most women throughout history came not from fashion houses but from home sewers or local dressmakers. This is not a show celebrating the rare and exquisite remnants of sartorial history but the quotidian pieces of American women—a category of fashion often overlooked in fashion media and academia. We might already be familiar with the Dior gown a society swan would have worn to a gala in the 1950s, but what did a pregnant woman in the era wear to work at her McDonald s job? The show just so happens to have her exact uniform; it’s a navy, tunic-and-pants set with the golden arches embroidered on the breast—Moschino, eat your heart out.
“Each thread and length of fabric on view in this exhibition provides insightful clues about the women who wore these garments,” said Anna Danziger Halperin, associate director of the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical. She curated the show alongside Keren Ben-Horin, curatorial scholar at the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical, and Rebecca Shea and Kiki Smith of Smith College, which is broken into five themes: Clothing worn for housework, clothing worn for service work, clothing worn socially, clothing marking female rites of passage, and finally, clothing that pushed gender boundaries.
Building off of the work and scholarship of The Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, founded by costume design professor Kiki Smith who spearheaded the collection of over 4,000 garments and accessories, The New-York Historical Society’s show supplements these items with pieces from their own archive. Plus, the exhibition layers in ample primary source context (photos, advertisements) that makes this a user-friendly exhibition at a digestible 30 pieces.
“Real Clothes, Real Lives” begins with a hand-made, printed cotton work dress with a micro black and white floral pattern, ca. 1865-1870. Displayed on a mannequin, the dress is surrounded by additional tidbits communicated on the plexiglass that surrounds the garment. With these exhibition clues, we’re told how the loose sleeves of the gown were not due to a lack of tailoring abilities but were made to allow its wearer to push up their sleeves. A nearby photo of a contemporaneous textile mill worker displays the look in situ. More insights come from the garment’s color, suggesting its wearer was in a state of mourning, and interior garment photography reveals the dress was lined with multiple fabrics, suggesting the maker’s literal scrappiness and how the dress had been resized at some point to accommodate a fluctuating body size. If a picture tells a thousand stories, so too can a dress.
Fluctuating bodies, which is part of the female experience, is another thread that runs through the exhibition; several garments on view, including the aforementioned McDonald’s uniform, were made specifically for or adapted to the pregnant body. Moving through the exhibition, we see the no-nonsense but visually appealing housework-wear of the 19th-century and 1940s woman transform into a flirtatious housedress dubbed the “slenderall,” a dress and apron-set, which allowed the housewife to be alluring even whilst vacuuming. Finer-made nursing uniforms reveal how the medical profession was acceptable employment for the upper classes, while bifurcated bicycling uniforms with modesty panels that shield the legs of the wearer speak to the modesty demanded of women at the turn of the century.
The show ends with pieces of clothing that push women into a modern, more liberated age. A Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress (the only “designer” in the mix) is near a yellow micro mini dress from the late 1960s, which was handmade by a first-year college student—the type to spur on the Youthquake.
Though the exhibition is void of the technical fetes of a typical fashion exhibition, it’s still, in every sense, a show of fashion. These were garments from whence we came—they needed to serve a function beyond being beautiful because the same was expected from the women who wore them. And for all the merits of fantasy in fashion scholarship, reality tells a much better story.
