Real Clothes, Real Lives. 200 Years of What Women Wore. The Smith College Historic Clothing Collection

by Kiki Smith

This book has beautiful, full-page photographs of clothing from the 1800s to today that everyday women wore.  There is a brief description of each item of clothing and a page or two describing the item, how it was made, when it was worn, and the likely life situation of the woman who may have worn it. 

There are also old photographs of women in similar clothing, newspaper ads and articles, and printed pattern envelopes.  Some of the oldest dresses had visible repairs.  The clothing is organized into categories:  home, public dress, accessories, rites of passage, service, and suits.  Within each category the items of clothing are generally arranged chronologically with the oldest shown first.

I was most interested in seeing and reading about the clothes that were from earlier than my own lifetime: the 1865 work dress, the 1860-1880s home dresses, the 1895 wrappers.  I know that some of grandmothers may have worn similar clothing. 

There are close-ups of some of the clothes but I wish there were more so the details of how each was created or repaired was shown.

Be sure to read the Introduction by Vanessa Friedman.  It explains the rationale for collecting and saving old, worn women’s clothes.  In the Smith College collection, she wrote, “were clothes that were valuable not because they had been created by a famous designer..., or because they belong to famous people..., but because they had been worn out in the process of everyday life by anonymous owners.  Because they were stained, torn, mended, and otherwise flawed, and through those flaws told a story of life and times: families, responsibility, hardship, aspiration.”

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