Johanna Lee/THE REVIEW
The fashion department utilizes every last bit of space in their storage facility.
BY Staff Reporter
In the dimly lit, sterile rooms of Allison Hall, an eccentric 1980s Arnold Scaasi dress and an intricate pollera from Panama — items that might otherwise be found in a museum — sit crammed onto already crowded clothing racks. Even the cheap, trendy items on the racks of Forever 21 have more room to hang than these historic, culturally significant and financially valuable garments.
But even the discount rack at Forever 21 could someday meet with a similar fate. The university’s Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection houses these artifacts and numerous others of diverse styles and time periods. The collection numbers around 5,000 pieces and constantly grows as curators add both vintage and current styles.
Most of the collection resides in Allison Hall West, stored in the workroom and the temperature- and humidity- controlled storage facility. The Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies keeps the remainder of the collection in Allison Hall, in a room with less control over environmental factors.
Professor Lopez-Gydosh, an assistant professor of fashion and apparel studies and director of the collection, says the department is moving toward the idea of dividing the collection into two, with the student collection stored in Allison Hall and the museum-pieces, which require environmental controls, remaining in Allison Hall West.
Lopez-Gydosh and students take several precautions to ensure that no textiles degrade. They use archival and acid-free cardboard storage boxes, they properly label each item with acid-free tags to avoid dissociation, they cover several racks in cloth to protect the garments from light and dust and, recently, they decreased the width of the clothing rods to avoid rips when jamming hangers in.
However, there is a considerable lack of storage space for this growing collection.
“We are running out of space, which is one of the most common issues in any fashion history collection,” Lopez-Gydosh says.
Laura Mina, affiliated assistant professor of art conservation and associate conservator of textiles, considers overcrowding an accessibility issue, among others. If a collection is overcrowded, one cannot easily locate and retrieve garments, thereby putting other items in the collection at risk.
In the storage facility, hanging racks are tightly packed into the space and the conservators store garments on the rods, one immediately next to another. Occasionally, this results in items transferring color to each other, like in the case of Bonnie Cashin’s suede lime green and mustard pants. Other challenges resulting from overcrowding, according to Mina, include snagging, items falling down and hitting others and abrasion. One method that Lopez-Gydosh has used to deal with such issues include creating muslin bags to protect susceptible items from color transfer.
Johanna Lee/THE REVIEW
Garments of multiple styles and eras file on the racks of the Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection in Allison Hall West.
Though grateful for the existing spaces, Lopez-Gydosh cites needs for funding and more collection storage space.
“We don’t really have a budget per se,” she says. “We have space, we wish we had more.”
More university funding would better suit the collection’s needs because it would allow for more space to adequately store the textiles. Nina Owczarek, assistant professor of art conservation and objects conservator, says financial issues in the conservation field often results from the difficulties of communicating the worth of the art.
“It is a struggle, for people who don’t understand the value of it, how to explain it in a way that is meaningful,” Owczarek says. “If you can’t communicate the value of it, then it’s hard to ask for money for it.”
With more resources and space, the collection could continue to expand, without facing the detriments of overcrowding. The collection not only benefits the students and staff of the fashion department, but the students in the Department of Art Conservation, who help preserve the materials.
“The University of Delaware is really world renowned for our art conservation program,” Annabelle Camp, a master’s student in art conservation, says. “I think it’s a little ironic if the collections that the university stores are not well-preserved.”
Textiles in general must receive the proper resources for preservation, according to Mina, because these materials keep record of and symbolize the past, which provides an enriched understanding of different people.
To Mina, items as disparate as underwear and flags explain the symbolic weight of these textiles.
“Our underwear is something that’s incredibly personal and often somewhat private in terms of what we choose,” Mina says. “[Underwear] helps us define for ourselves who we are as individuals. Flags are these amazing symbols of community. They are very public and they collectively help us identify ourselves as members of groups. And so its again, it’s a textile that’s helping us feel this collective power and connection.”
