The basement of the theater department at a small liberal arts college seems like an unlikely location for one of the most robust collections of antique and vintage women’s clothing in the country. The Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, on display for the first time in fifty years with the September 2024 opening of the New York Historical Society’s new exhibit “Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore.”
The basement may be secluded and labyrinthine, the rows of storage lockers in the hallway imposing and inelegant, clothes and accessories overflowing into dressing rooms and closets, but President Sarah Willie-LeBreton has hailed it as the “crown jewel” of Smith College.
Yet as the collection garners national attention, questions are being raised within the walls of Smith College about the future of the archive. Although the Historic Clothing Collection (SCHCC) has been celebrated by many for its humble beginnings and the humble women it represents, Professor Kiki Smith ’71 — the Smith alum who teaches in the Theatre Department and founded the archive — is thinking bigger on its behalf and advocating for the collection’s future at Smith. On Sep. 27, the day the Historical Society opened “Real Clothes, Real Lives,” Kiki Smith submitted a proposal to the Smith College Strategic Planning Committee that the College “endorse and embrace” the SCHCC as an official archive of the College.
“We would need to be given permission to fundraise for [the collection],” Kiki Smith said. “We’re not allowed to do that right now.”
The relationship between Smith College and the Historic Clothing Collection is an ambiguous one. The college administration has no qualms with promoting the collection under its name, but has dragged its feet in providing the SCHCC with the same storage space, funding and staffing necessary for the maintenance of such an extensive archive. However, Willie-LeBreton’s interest in the collection may cause a shift in the college’s attitude toward it. Willie-LeBreton, a sociologist, has lauded the SCHCC as an “emblem of democracy” for its accessibility, educational potential and depiction of working class women’s everyday struggles. She also provided an introduction to Kiki Smith’s 2023 book which shares its name with the Historical Society exhibit, directly connecting the existence of the SCHCC with Smith College’s mission of educating women from diverse backgrounds.
Yet, the collection has remained an unofficial archive at the college since its inception in the 1970s, and has been upkept throughout the decades only by the volunteer work of Kiki Smith, her theater students and a handful of alums who have expressed interest in the collection.
If given permission to fundraise by the Strategic Planning Committee, Kiki Smith and her colleagues would be able to reach out to alums and other donors to help establish the Historic Clothing Collection as an official archive, like the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History and the Mortimer Rare Book Collection. Kiki Smith would love for the SCHCC to attract scholars from across the country in the same way the other archives do, for these clothes to be given the serious study she believes they deserve.
Her relationship with the collection began when she first accepted a full-time position in the Theatre Department shortly after finishing graduate school. She inadvertently inherited the collection of antique garments donated by Smith alumnae that had been repurposed as costumes for the department’s plays, with clothes, ranging from maid’s uniforms to haute couture gowns.
Some zealous theater directors might have latched onto these unique garments as a means to legitimize the historical setting of their plays. More practical costume designers might have dismissed them as too uncomfortable for actors to move around in and too unappealing to the tastes of modern audiences. Kiki Smith, however, saw something more in these clothes — an untold history and a learning opportunity for the entire college community. She began to categorize and relocate the garments that were too delicate or rare to be worn on stage — but not to keep them hidden away in storage forever. Smith intended to use the garments as teaching tools for her theater classes and the department’s costume designers. Gradually, the collection began to coalesce into the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection. It has since grown from five humble metal lockers to over fifty, with accessories and fashion plate books tucked into the nooks and crannies of various rooms in the basement where storage space can’t be found for them.
“For years, nobody really knew [the collection] was here,” Kiki Smith said. But after a colleague recommended she do a presentation to the faculty about the SCHCC, professors from a wide range of departments began to approach her asking if they could incorporate the archive into their curriculums. Over the years, the collection grew into its potential as an interdisciplinary learning tool and awareness of its existence has grown among the campus community at large because of this academic cooperation.
Kiki Smith also teaches her own course on the collection which focuses on different aspects of women’s clothing each semester — the history of pants, coats, wool or house dresses.
As Willie-LeBreton mused in her introduction to Kiki Smith’s 2023 book, the Historic Clothing Collection continues Smith College’s mission of education for women, by and about women. From the labor it took to make the garments themselves, to the working women who wore them, to the volunteer work of Kiki Smith and her students, the SCHCC lives on as a testament to women’s invisible everyday labor.
“What’s at the heart of it is women’s labor,” Kiki Smith said in reference to the production process of the garments in the collection. “It’s the work it takes to make this stuff. And it’s almost always underpaid and undervalued.”
The same can be said for the years of unpaid labor that went into maintaining the Historic Clothing Collection itself. However, Kiki Smith is glad that students and alums have taken a greater interest in the collection in the past few years — it shows that the work of herself, her students, and her colleagues have paid off.
Kiki Smith envisions the SCHCC leaving its cramped location in the theater department basement and being adopted by the American Studies department. “That’s really what [the collection] is,” she said. “It’s another way of looking at American history, and women in it.”
While people before her saw these garments as props, costumes or their grandmother’s old clothes, Kiki Smith finds the true stories hidden in their imperfections, their wear and tear, their homespun novelties. What at first glance looks like a wealthy woman’s petticoat may turn out to be a working woman’s outer skirt — and that distinction can make a difference in how we approach the study of women’s history.
Explaining her philosophy behind what garments she accepts — and she can accept very few these days, with the basement already so crowded — Kiki Smith said, “If somebody writes me that they have a dress that was worn by their great-grandmother when they rode on a ship coming in as an immigrant […] that is hard to turn down, you know? I’d want that dress, and I’d want the story to go with it. It’s the stories that the clothes can tell, to me, that make them powerful.”
Be First to Comment