Photography by Nick Krug
A small museum on the campus of Kansas State University houses a rare and unusual collection of historic clothing and textiles
The museum is here, but few know where to find it—tucked away on the third floor of Kansas State University’s Justin Hall, behind an ordinary wooden door with a plain white sign reading “Historic Costume and Textiles Museum,” along with its hours and contact information.
The door opens to an atypical museum. This is no reception desk, gift shop, display cabinets, or storyboards. Instead, there is a large table in the center, bookshelves and storage along the perimeter, and rolling racks of covered clothing in the aisles. Professor Marla Day, the museum’s curator, is at the front of the room. Books line the shelf above her desk, and displays of several of the museum’s previous exhibit books and clothing items cover the countertops. The room itself is a little cold, as it should be, to protect its precious contents, all 17,000 of them, at 65 degrees with 45% humidity year-round.
The collection began in the early 1900s and evolved into a teaching collection of cardboard boxes stored in different areas for domestic science classes. In 1960, the collection moved to Justin Hall. In the 1970s, a curator was hired who took crucial steps to remove the textiles from ordinary cardboard boxes and preserve them in archival-quality containers and protected hanging cases.
Day, who had researched traditional Chinese clothing as a student, arrived as a graduate teaching assistant in 1996. In 2004, she became curator of the museum and has since expanded the museum’s collection.
The Collection
More than 15,000 items are part of the museum, including American fashion designs, American quilts, salon shoes, military uniforms, Byzantine-era textiles, Chinese and other culturally diverse textiles and clothing. Among the collection’s highlights are dresses by Nelly Don, the famous Kansas City designer who manufactured an estimated 75 million dresses from 1916 to 1978, and wearable art from Anita Mayer, an internationally recognized contemporary artist and weaver.
Perhaps the most quintessentially Kansas clothing in the collection is the prairie dress, a simple cotton dress that reveals much about the times and the people who wore it. Women on the Plains in the late 1800s had a choice of cotton, linen, silk and wool for their clothing. Cotton was by far the most popular choice because it was inexpensive, available in a wide variety of patterns, and comfortable. It was also popular because until the turn of the century, in many parts of Kansas, women made and washed their clothes by hand, and cotton was easy to sew and launder.
On the Road and on the Campus
Since Day became curator, she has also worked to bring portions of the collection to different communities. As a Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau member, Day gives presentations about Nelly Don, the Kansas City designer and entrepreneur, and curates other traveling exhibits and presentations. She has recently focused on thrift style and the history of upcycling feed sacks during the early 20th century.
Day also has been working on a traveling exhibit celebrating the “little black dress.” Also known as the LBD, the variable design is considered to have gotten its start in 1926 when Coco Chanel published a picture of a simple black dress in Vogue, which called it “a sort of uniform of taste.” Day’s exhibit will feature LBDs from every decade and in a range of prices and styles.
In addition to preparing traveling exhibits, Day creates displays for cases in Justin Hall, works with interns, teaches classes and gives on-campus presentations.
Most of the museum’s collection is accessible to the public. Given the collection’s size, visitors should contact the museum to request viewing specific pieces. The hours vary with the school’s schedule, so email for an appointment and note that tour groups are limited to 12 people, middle-school age and older.
Once visitors don cotton gloves, Day or other museum staff will bring items to a large center table, explain their significance, and point out design features. For example, a plaid coat by Pauline Trigere is designed with only one seam down the back—but the plaid pattern lines up perfectly along this crucial seam. Then there are the Nelly Don designs, which contain extra fabric, allowing the wearer to adjust the seams without major tailoring.
Other stunning pieces hang inside some of the museum’s cabinets. There is a blue cotton bodice from the 1870s, a polka-dotted mini dress from the 1980s, and samples of everything from the Renaissance to the present. Day has been working on expanding the museum’s denim selections and finding good representative samples with provenance to put the item in a cultural context. She likes textiles in her collection to tell a story of the owner, their life, and the world when the piece was designed.
Eclectic Approach
While Day and her team build and preserve culturally and historically significant items, the collection of Historic Costume and Textile Museum does not necessarily distinguish between high and low fashion. For example, Day believes that even curated samples of today’s easily disposed micro-trend fashions should eventually be in museum collections. She points to the paper dress fad of the 1960s. The first of these were simple shift-design dresses made as a promotion for the Scott paper towel company out of “Dura-Weave” (a rough fabric now used in upholstery and carpets) and were designed to promote using this product to make disposable garments for medical workers. Scott sold these early designs to consumers for $1.24 and started a craze.
The museum has several paper garments; one of the most striking is a TWA 1968 flight attendant black paper jumpsuit with a coordinating silver-foil belt and collar. The airlines created a line of these paper garments to match a flight’s meal theme. They are cheap but somehow also elegant and stunning.
Though dresses are a vital part of the collection, the museum collects everything related to clothing and costuming, from head to toe: bracelets, undergarments, stockings, shoes, jewelry, and more. Day believes it’s important to understand the context of the pieces and to see changes over time—which means the clothes you wear to the museum might one day be represented in its collection.
