A 'Glimpse' into a little-known collection

Tucked away in the basement of the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film, in the Lower Costume Shop, is a little-known piece of history: the Vassar College Costume Collection (VCCC). The collection is composed of over 500 original historic costumes, the oldest of which date back to the 1850s. From May 21 to June 6, several examples from the collection will be on display in the aptly titled Palmer Gallery exhibit, "A Glimpse into Vassar's (Secret) Closet."

Costume Designer and Senior Drama Lecturer Holly Hummel rescued the VCCC from obscurity when she first came to Vassar in the fall of 1981. While organizing costumes used in theatre productions in the basement of Avery Hall—now the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film—Hummel noticed old cardboard boxes lying at the bottom of the closets. "They looked like garbage. I still have the idea that they were intended to be thrown away…[but when] I decided to open them up, it was a treasure trove." Hummel claims that she wanted to make preserving the costumes her personal mission.

However, this has not proven an easy task. One challenge that Hummel has faced in her attempt to organize the VCCC is that, for many of the pieces, not much is known regarding their origins. "We believe they were donated by alumni or perhaps former faculty members; some of them don't have a source. We have worked on researching and trying to find the connections."

Hummel is aided in her "detective work" by Costume Design Assistant Arden Kirkland '93. Many Vassar students have worked on the VCCC with Hummel over the years, but she claims that Kirkland, as a student, really "made it into her own" during her time as a student, eventually working the VCCC into her senior project.

Said Kirkland, "When I was a student, I had done an internship with the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I really learned about how the museums take care of objects like this. So part of my senior project was trying to organize the collection better by giving everything a number and having files for each thing." New additions to the VCCC are filed in a similar fashion—records reflect the names of the donors and the person who wore it, as well as photographs of the garment itself.

Organizing the VCCC and researching the history of each individual garment is only one hurdle; another is restoring the physical state of the actual garments, many of which are described by Hummel as "too small and too fragile to be used."

This year, the VCCC received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), which was used to fund a series of conservation workshops on campus. The workshops have focused on a variety of subjects, including condition reporting, cataloguing and the latest, a five-day intensive workshop in basic conservation techniques, or what Kirkland refers to as "stabilization."

Kirkland explained that stabilization is limited to simple, non-invasive techniques to salvage a garment, and with good reason: "People who are really conservators train for years… The garments are so fragile that if you try to do any advanced conservation on them without knowing what you're doing, you could do more harm than good."

These stabilization techniques appear to have paid off, as attendees of the exhibition will see. "Most of the things that are going to be in this exhibition, we would not have been able to put on a mannequin before that workshop," said Kirkland.

Kirkland claims that interest in the VCCC has spanned across
disciplines. "Miss Hummel and I are studying them from the point of view of costume designers, but we also have history students who are interested, [and] we have women's studies students who are looking at what the clothing tells us about the women who wore it." Even the Chemistry Department has gotten involved with the VCCC; Associate Professor of Chemistry Stewart Belli and Senior Chemistry Lecturer Edith Stout have taught Kirkland and Hummel how to analyze the composition of various garments in order to determine what kind of materials were used in their construction.

The VCCC also attempts to engage outside groups each semester with its "Trying on History" activity, in which participants don period costumes for a short span of time. The most recent event was held on May 12 with a group of girls from the Mill Street Loft's Program for Adolescent Student Women of Real Direction, which is designed to empower teenage girls from Poughkeepsie to overcome various adversities. Kirkland says that the purpose of the exercise is to teach the girls to relate the garments to their own experiences, and their discussions focus on related topics like body image.

"It's not just about looking at the history of these pieces, but also looking at how we're different and thinking about where we're going."