A Sartorial Puzzle
Stamp on the petersham of a circa 1866-1868 jacket. Photo: Brian Davis, courtesy FIDM Museum & Library
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This changeable silk taffeta Worth & Bobergh ensemble was conserved for display in an exhibition at the FIDM Museum, at Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. When it was donated in 2019, the ensemble’s five garments—day bodice, evening bodice, paletot, skirt, and overskirt—had already been partially disassembled. The donation also included some fragmentary pieces of self trim, which were either purposely detached or had fallen off the original garments.
Having examined the ensemble in early 2020, I spent the following year producing detailed scale drawings of all the ensemble’s components, researching fashion illustrations and comparable garments in other collections, and devising a treatment plan. This was the basis of my masters thesis at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and I began the hands-on work in July 2021, as the FIDM Museum’s Conservation Fellow.
Treatment including localized wet cleaning, reattaching sleeves, realigning and stabilizing existing trim, and reconstructing certain elements. These interventions restored the ensemble’s symmetry, but special care was taken to keep any contemporary material physically and rhetorically distinct from the historical garments. A prop “underbodice” was fabricated for the sake of displaying the full daytime ensemble on a mannequin. Not only does this support a reconstruction of the day bodice’s missing left sleeve, but it also allows for visual reintegration of pleated organza trim that seems to have been cut or worn away, without stitching into delicate nineteenth-century taffeta.
Woven with blue warps and orange wefts, the original taffeta is a very specific textile to match. Luckily I was able to find a strikingly similar contemporary version at Mood Fabrics in New York City. The new fabric was tinted slightly with both tea and a pink acid dye in order to approximate the tone of the original under gallery lighting.
The full day ensemble was dressed for photography on a custom padded Kyoto Costume Institute mannequin. Contemporaneous shoes from the museum’s permanent collection were included to complete the fashionable image. Ultimately this ensemble, including the paletot, will be featured in an exhibition foregrounding the treatment process, as part of the FIDM Museum’s ongoing effort to advocate for the field of fashion conservation.
Photo: Brian Davis, courtesy FIDM Museum & Library
Watch the FIDM Museum Collection Conversation about this ensemble, recorded on May 7, 2021 with myself and Curator Kevin Jones:
