Another Exotic Vacation

Right now I can barely contain my excitement, because later today I will be on vacation and on my way to NORTH DAKOTA.

I know. You are so jealous right now.

I'm going to hang out with my mom's side of the family, eat delicious things, stay in a Victorian themed B&B, and visit a small town museum while I'm there.

But obviously the best part is that my parents and I are TAKING THE TRAIN!

I'm realizing that over the last few years I've been making many trips to middle states, including Indiana, Kansas and Montana. And while I haven't been adding stamps in my passport, I usually have a great time seeing places that are very different than Seattle. Plus, the fun factor goes way up when train travel is part of the deal.

Oh, did I mention I'm TAKING THE TRAIN!!!!

Seriously, I am barely holding it together right now. I'll file a full report when I get back.

Inventory Quagmire

I've found that I use the word "quagmire" I lot in my work. Like, "I can't even think about the flag quagmire right now," or "no one wants to vacuum that rack because it is just a quagmire of ruffles."

Oooh! QUAGMIRE OF RUFFLES.

The existence of any quagmires in the collection is basically due to having an overwhelming amount of stuff. As I've mentioned before, museums are like icebergs. What you see on display is just a visible nugget of a hidden behemoth. MOHAI went through a long period where we took everything offered to us, and the sheer volume of stuff often makes my head spin.

It is most common to wander unknowingly into a quagmire during inventory. Most of the time inventory is pretty fun because you get to discover things in the collection that no one has looked at in years. Sometimes you can get a good pace going and maybe get through a couple boxes or even a couple shelves in one day. But then you open a nightmare box and BOOM you are stuck working on it for weeks.

BOTTOMLESS BOX OF LACE BITS

What makes a box a quagmire is one or more of the following issues:
-Items are small and the box is packed full
-Box is disorganized, items are in poor condition, and it is difficult to locate numbers
-The box is full of FICs and items that aren't already listed in the database, so you are creating completely new records as you go.

Right now I am in a quagmire of baby caps.

The thing is, individually most of these are quite delightful. Most are handmade and are beautiful examples of home crochet, knitting, tatting, lacemaking, and sewing. They are each different and I can see why someone thought they were worth saving, and why a museum might be an appropriate place.

But I think this box I'm working on right now must have 60 little caps in it. Opening it for the first time felt like:

When you look at the box as a whole, there are just stacks and stacks of flat little white caps. And it is box 1 of 3 in the baby hat section. That is TOO MANY CAPS!!!!!!!

Proud To Be Femme And Love Fashion

No doubt, no doubt, by this time you are aware that the decorated Olympian formerly known as Bruce Jenner made her debut as Caitlyn on the cover of Vanity Fair this week. People cheered and then immediately started dissecting what this meant and then dissecting the way that other people were dissecting it. One of the key topics: Good for her, but isn't she conforming to a particular standard of beauty? Should we really be celebrating that? 

Laverne Cox wrote a wonderfully eloquent piece applauding Caitlyn but also reminding us all that not all trans women have the resources to look like her, nor do they all want to. It was a great reminder to celebrate the diverse expressions of trans beauty, and indeed the diverse beauty of all people.

Then there was Jon Stewart's Daily Show segment about the media treating Caitlyn Jenner as a woman--with all the underlying terribleness that that can sometimes include. 

But there was a particular well-meaning angle to this discussion which made me uncomfortable and I couldn't quite put my finger on it--until I found this wonderful article titled Caitlyn Jenner is High Femme, Get Over It.

Read it. It's awesome.

An entrenched and inflexible gender binary doesn't really work for anyone. It excludes trans and genderqueer individuals, tells men they aren't supposed to cry, and tells women that their most important quality is their looks. Which basically makes everyone feel like: 

But in our hurry to break down those barriers, we still somehow end up affirming traditional masculine traits over traditional feminine ones. Rather than celebrating both, we start talking about masculinity in terms like "strong" and "authentic," while femininity is "weak" and centered around artifice. 

As a cisgender woman who loves skirts more than pants and studies fashion for a living, I have experienced this over and over. It is someone saying "that is only interesting to women," and assuming we all agree that to be a negative. It is that little look of pity some people give me when they hear me talk about fashion. They assume I've been "duped" by the system, and can't imagine that I'm capable of thoughtfully engaging with the subject. 

It is that mistake that we have made about feminism over and over: Feminism isn't about women all living one way, it is about women (and all people) having the CHOICE to be who they want to be. It's not about abolishing dresses and high heels, its about making sure that pants and comfy shoes are an equally valid option. So while I absolutely do not think that all women should dress in a hyper-feminine way (because really, when it comes to gender expression no one should to be doing anything) we shouldn't tear down any person for choosing to occasionally or continually dress femme.  

There is this strong understanding in our culture that clothing is false and artificial. If clothing is artifice and women like clothing, then it follows that femininity is all about putting on a fake identity over a real one.  But as Anne Hollander has so wisely pointed out, every culture has some sort of system of dress, and so perhaps being clothed is our most natural state. This excerpt from her book Seeing Through Clothes blew my mind when I first read it: 

Surveys of many cultures lead us to conclude that the truly natural state of the adult human is dressed, or decorated, but that his sense of nature demands from him a deep respect for nakedness...Nakedness is not a customary but rather an assumed state, common to all but natural to none, except on significantly marked occasions. These may be ritual, theatrical, or domestic, but they are always special, no matter how frequent. (emphasis mine)

We all get dressed, and we all define ourselves when we do. Stop acting like its just femme women who do this and that it is somehow bad and fake. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and is super femme. If that look doesn't resonate with you, that's great! Go and be yourself whatever that looks like. And if you feel drawn to aspects of a feminine look, embrace it! And don't let anyone tell you that it is somehow false or inauthentic.

Hat Inventory: Second Verse, Same As The First

A few weeks ago I posted about the completion of the shoe inventory and the emotional roller coaster it put me through. Well now that is officially DONE and so it's on to the hats!

But basically, the hat inventory is the same agony and ecstasy of the shoes. There is lots of: "Oh wow, I just touched it and all the feathers started falling off, well hopefully it won't have a local label...aw crap...MacDougall-Southwick, Seattle" and "Geez Frederick & Nelson seemed to make a lot of hats with black netting." But there are some additional complicating factors that the shoes didn't have.

Two years ago, the hats were the focus of a frantic moth-related bag-and-contain project. Since then, they have basically just been chillin' in their archival plastic prisons, waiting to be checked for bugs and stored more appropriately. So while it is exciting to finally begin working on them, it means lots of additional steps above and beyond the basic inventory procedure.

Regular inventory is instant gratification--you pull a box off the shelf, discover a bunch of cool stuff you've never seen before, put the box back, and start on the next shelf. But now it's like-- oh hey, before you put those back on the shelf and move on to the next exciting discoveries, you need to check them for bug evidence, decide which ones to freeze, pack the ones for freezing, do some vacuuming, build boxes or pack them in existing boxes, make labels...

Plus I'm moving a bunch of hats off shelves that should be for shoes, and discovering boxes of hats in odd places, and since the official hat shelves are already packed full I'm not sure where everything is going to go...

Big projects always start like this though-- at the beginning you haven't figured out a system and you also haven't done enough to see any satisfying results. Right now it just feels like I am making an even bigger mess. But I have faith that we'll figure out a system and soon I'll be encouraged by the sight of happy hats in boxes on completed shelves.

Dance In The Textile Room Like No One's Watching

Bonus feature: I was previously convinced that I had identified the ugliest hat in the collection. I've already found several which may be strong contenders for the title. Stay tuned.

Things I Learned While Preparing My 1920s Talk

Two weekends ago I was scrambling to get my "Seattle Fashion in the Roaring Twenties" talk finished and last weekend I was basking in the triumph of presenting it and feeling awesome about it.

Now that I have recovered (although I am giving it again in August, get tickets here) I want to share some of the exciting things that I came across during my research.

Nellie Carman 

For those of you still wondering about the identity of "Mrs. X" I mentioned in an old post about diva ladies in the Seattle fashion business, her name was Nellie Martin Carman. If you don't feel like following the link to the previous post here is he short version: She worked as a buyer and head of ladies wear at J. Redelsheimer & Co. for a number of years in the early 20th century. Things weren't great in her marriage but when she tried to file for divorce from her husband (Mr. Carman) he turned around and accused her and her employer (Redelsheimer) of an inappropriate relationship.

The whole thing blew up in Mr. Carman's face though because it came out that a key witness (who said he saw the pair "embracing") turned out to have been bribed. Mr. Carman's case was immediately thrown out.

Soon after all that Nellie set out on her own and her "Carman" store enjoyed meteoric success. In 1921 her store took up an entire building downtown and the Seattle Times gushed: “The growth of the Carman Shop from a modest beginning six years ago to its present rank as one of the largest high-grade specialty shops for women on the Pacific Coast forms one of the most interesting annals of merchandising successes in Seattle’s history.”

When Nellie Carman died she left money for a local scholarship fund, which is still active today. 

A Seattle company takes credit for inventing the modern bathing suit

As you may know, I tend to be cautious about claims that someone "invented" this or that piece of clothing. Most of the time, when you look back at some iconic look like the little black dress or the mini-skirt, you find several designers working on similar ideas at the same time. They aren't copying each other, they are just all tuned into the same zeitgeist. So take this with a huge grain of salt, but the Saxony Knitting Company of Seattle (later Sportcraft) claims to have invented the one-piece knitted bathing suit. 

Click to enlarge

Before the one-piece, bathing costumes were multi-part and multi-layer. A two-piece didn't mean you were showing off your midriff, it meant that you had a pair of bloomers that went under a dress, or maybe you had a three-piece consisting of an under layer, a blouse, and bloomers. The knitted one-piece caused quite a stir because it did what women's bathing suits do today: cling to the body in a single, form fitting layer. 

So while I'll need to do a little more research into this claim, it seems like at the very least the Saxony Knitting Company was part of the first wave of designers and companies to make the knitted one-piece. And considering how revolutionary and influential the style was, and how far away Seattle was from everything else, the fact that they are even on the radar is pretty exciting. 

Eddie Bauer was hot

PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection / MOHAI

Seriously. Who saw that coming? Somehow he makes a bow tie with outdoor gear WERQ

Back Soon

Sorry I've been MIA. For the last couple weeks I've been devoting most of my extra energy to my 1920s fashion lecture so blogging got pushed to the side. The talk was on Saturday but since then I've been busy with weekend shopping and the Mad Men finale.

Obviously, my life is the hardest.

The Many Faces of the Shoe Inventory

The inventory of the shoe collection is almost done! It has been interesting and exciting, and I've gotten emotionally invested in some of the discoveries. My volunteers and interns have become familiar with my shoe-related mood swings.

Here are the four most common emotional states of the shoe inventory:

When a gorgeous pair of shoes in perfect condition turns out to have no Seattle story whatsoever:

We can keep them for "study" purposes...or something...

When a pair of shoes that are stained and falling apart turn out to have a rare Seattle label:

Can we not pay the light bill for a month and put some more money in the conservation fund?

When a pair of shoes that are in poor condition have a non-local label and the database says explicitly that they were worn on the other side of the country. 

DEACCESSION CANDIDATE

When a gorgeous pair of shoes are in excellent condition and have clear Seattle provenance:

I may have screamed "WALLIN & NORDSTROM!!!" while peering into a pair of boots on Friday.