Nanny's 1906 Portrait Dress

Those of you who have been reading along might remember the amazing portrait I posted when discussing Nanny's closet. I'm sure you can imagine how anxious I was to find the dress from that portrait. But alas, I did not find it, and returned to school in upstate New York confident that it hadn't survived.

Since I was a kid when we went through the closet, I didn't have many qualms about the mess we made in the process; I was way too busy loving the treasure hunt. I think Grammy's curiosity had been triggered, too. I remember her often saying, "Huh, I've never seen that before." So she was totally nonchalant about having everything out even though we had trashed Nanny's former bedroom by using it to drop all the stuff we displaced to reach the closet's depths. When my vacation ended, I left without helping to put anything away.  As I'm sure you can imagine, subsequent visitors to Grammy had a "What the Hell happened here?" kind of reaction to the disaster. Someone seems to have continued the exploration though, because when I next visited Grammy, the room was still a mess, but it was configured differently and the goods removed had multiplied. More importantly, however, I was informed that the portrait dress had been located!

I rushed up the stairs and demanded direction to the dress in question, and was unbelievably deflated when I saw it. It looked like a mass of stiff yellowed paper. And not only did it look bad, but it was clear that there was NO WAY I'd fit into it. My disappointment was complete. I concluded, with all of my teenage knowledge, that it had probably been starched like crazy and stored that way, leaving it to shrink and become brittle over time. I took pictures in 2000, but remained unimpressed.

Even when we spread out the portrait dress for photos in 2000, it looked shriveled, yellowish, and generally not as fabulous as I expected it to be.  

Well, last week I was up in Maine and this time I was armed with two dress forms, a backdrop, a petticoat wired to help a trained skirt take its intended shape, and most importantly, a hand-held steamer! My aunt Joy inherited the portrait and the dress to go with it, so she brought it over for a photo shoot. Sadly, the original matching lace belt has not been located, so I substituted with another gathered belt from the collection that was period appropriate. The fabric is still yellowed, but it no longer looks like old shredded paper. So here it is: the dress Georgiana Mayhew Duncan wore in the portrait made when she graduated La Salle in 1906, front, back, side, and in detail. Now I can finally say that I'm impressed. Who wouldn't love this delicate frock?

The Tissue Issue

In keeping with the theme of costume care, here’s a little briefing on tissue paper. Anyone who has read anything about proper costume storage knows that acid-free tissue is key. Whatever your choice of container, your costume collection will be happiest if each garment is wrapped in and/or fluffed out with acid-free tissue. So let’s dissect the tissue issue.

Acid-free tissue is an ideal packing material for costume collections. It can protect the fabrics by lining boxes, separating garments of different materials, and padding areas that are prone to folds or wrinkles that can weaken fibers. Also, if there is a sheet of tissue under a garment, you can get it out by lifting the tissue, minimizing handling and potential harm. 

Issue #1: Can you get acid-free tissue in the gift-wrap aisle of your local dollar store, or do you need to go to a museum or archive supplier? I’m afraid I don’t really know the answer to this one. Tissue paper is made by so many providers for so many different reasons that for all I know, archival suppliers pump up the price when the stuff you find at your local box store would be just fine. But do you want to take that risk? If the paper turns out to be acidic, it will yellow and become brittle, it may cause acid burns, brown spots, and staining on your costumes, and worst of all, the acidic environment will make your costume more brittle, so that the next time you go to take it out, it will be far more likely to rip, drop a bead, or pop a thread.

This is a detail of a corset that was stored in its original box for over a hundred years. Late 19th-century corsets were  rolled in long, skinny acidic boxes, and you can see where the bottom of the corset stuck out when the piece was rolled because the exposed portion has rust colored acid burns.  

Ph pens are cheap, and well worth the

investment.

Issue #2: Once you get some tissue, how do you know if it's acid-free? There are a few options to deal with the unknown here. First, you can order only from reputable archival suppliers like Gaylord Brothers (http://www.gaylord.com), Hollinger Metal Edge (http://www.hollingermetaledge.com/),  or Light Impressions (http://www.lightimpressionsdirect.com/). Such companies rely on their reputation for professional archival products, so you are unlikely to get bad acid-free tissue from them. The other option, which may be a cheaper route, is to get a Ph indicating pen (like the one shown here from Gaylord Brothers). It looks like a Sharpie, but its ink will turn yellow on acidic paper, and best of all, it costs less than $10 and you can use it to evaluate all kinds of packaging materials. If you have the Ph pen, you can try getting paper from different sources and evaluate as you go. Anything that makes the ink turn yellow should be relegated to gift bags, not costume storage.

Now think back to your high school chemistry class or read a refresher on Wikipedia and consider what the opposite of acidic is. If something isn’t acidic, it’s either neutral or alkaline, right?  Costume collectors know that acids are bad, but does that mean neutral or alkaline is good? This one I do have the answer to, but it’s complicated. You have to think about what your costume is made of in order to make this decision.  If you don’t have the time to keep reading, just go with Ph neutral acid-free tissue and avoid “buffered” tissue which is slightly alkaline. If you want the full dose of wisdom I have to bestow, read on…

Costumes can have a LOT of components beyond fabric, like beads, metal, fur, and feathers. The main question I suggest you consider is this: is it plant, animal, synthetic, or mineral? Plant materials might benefit from the alkalinity offered by buffered tissue, but animal products will actually do better in a slightly acidic environment. Minerals and synthetics can go either way.  If you’ve never thought about an outfit this way, here are some of the most common materials for cloth, buttons, and decorations:

According to the classes I've taken, buffered tissue should only be used for items that are all “plant,” and I don’t have many things that fit that category. In fact, much of the time I am at a loss when I try to identify the material, especially with my dresses from the 1920s-1940s which are often synthetic. So as a rule, I just always use acid-free tissue, not buffered tissue. It’s rare that a garment is only made of one thing, and it can be impossible to create an ideal environment for every element. I have a hard enough time getting motivated to put everything away properly, so adding an extra step of separating the costumes by material would just be counterproductive. If you're not as lazy as I am, get both acid-free and buffered tissue and keep your "plant" and "animal" pieces separated.

This isn’t my day job (most days)

I am an archaeologist. Yes, it is a real job. This is the career I’ve wanted since the 3^rd or 4^th grade (see pictures for proof). I used to work on excavations, but about 12 years ago I took some classes on conservation and some major guilt kicked in. I learned all about how the evil “agents of deterioration” were acting on everything I had ever excavated, and I knew from experience that artifacts sometimes turn to powder because of neglect. Since learning that, I have worked to assess and research collections instead of creating new ones. It’s not that I have a problem with new collections being generated, far from it, I just find it more rewarding to be the one caring for the artifacts when the excavation is over. I’m now a curator in a museum where I compile research on archaeological collections, keep them organized, and make sure they are kept according to archival museum standards.

Behold my first archaeological dig. I am a 5th grader in these photos, and I had gotten a book about how to do archaeology. It went over the supplies needed, and said to set up a grid. Grammy Rivers and my parents helped me gather the tools, and then Grammy, in rollers, helped me drive in the grid stakes (top left). But the book didn't really say what to do next. For example, it didn't point out the folly of sifting into the unit you are digging. Still, I got a school project and a boat load of 19th-century artifacts out of it. Big thanks to the 'rents for cutting the lumber off our land in Maine, revealing the site, and for donating the use of the dining room table as my mending station for a year or two (bottom right). I didn't do it right back then-- Elmers glue is not recommended on archaeological ceramics-- but I was a kid with the coolest jigsaw puzzle I could have ever hoped for. I kind of regret the bangs and the purple moon boots, but not my interest in archaeology, even if I didn't do it according to professional standards. 

Usually, this career has nothing to do with the private collections that I post about on this blog. My personal treasures are almost entirely clothing articles made of fragile textiles, and fabric rarely survives underground in the Chesapeake region where I work; there are too many little microbes that find them tasty. So in theory, home and work should not overlap.  But, of course, they do.

Collections management is collections management no matter where you are. I’m trained to do it professionally, and I can’t discard that knowledge when I get home. In a professional museum setting, collections care calls for organization, inventories, tracking, archival materials, safe handling, pest control, and sufficient storage space. Ideally, you should have a budget and staff to maintain this order. Pest traps, acid-free boxes, sufficient shelving, database software… You get the picture. Also, when you are paid to care for collections, you have 40 hours a week to stay on top of these things.

At home? Well, the budget isn’t really there for one thing. Archaeology as a career isn’t lucrative from a cash standpoint, though I do feel rich when it comes to enjoying my work. So my house is small, archival storage is expensive (and not something I want to use to decorate my living room), climate control is impossible because my small house is also old, and pest control is only going to happen if my cats take an interest. Conditions for my collections at home include such curatorial no-nos as overstuffed boxes, boxes stacked perilously high, major fluctuations in temperature and humidity, use of wooden storage containers that off-gas acids, and the placement of collections in a closet that is known to have had mold and moths.

I do my best to monitor things and get the right storage materials as my budget allows, but even when I purchase archival-quality supplies, there’s no telling when I’ll get around to using them. As I write this, a brand new pack of acid-free tissue sits on a table in my living room and it has been there for well over a month. Because here’s another thing I usually lack at home: any motivation whatsoever to continue doing what I did all day at work.

I like getting my collections out, looking at them, inspecting how they were made, taking pictures, and putting garments on a dress form to see how they once fit. I do not, however, like putting it all away again, nor do I let myself dwell on a stain I saw or a smell that lingers. If my goal in getting things out is inventory or condition assessment, that takes all the fun out of it! Truly, if the word “systematic” enters my mind with regard to going through the collection, I immediately feel some urgent need to check Facebook or watch TV.

All that being said, I do know what I’m supposed to do as a responsible steward of collections. I do make myself put things away, and I do eventually use those storage supplies. From time to time my posts will focus on techniques for caring for costumes in a non-museum setting. I have to take a practical, low budget approach, even if it’s not up to par with what I would do at work. If my readers also have collections, maybe it’ll be useful to share what I like to call “best-ish” practice for collections care at home.