Visit “Wearing Histories” by Isabel Monseau ‘21.

Right now, you are wearing a personal history- right now, you can look at the shirt you’re wearing, and remember who you were with when you got it, or maybe how you wore it on an important day of your life. You can see that it’s getting threadbare, or perhaps you know about a stain that no one else can see.

Our clothes tell stories, maybe some that only we know.

The thing about looking at clothes in museums is that sometimes we forget these stories, and a lot of the time, we don’t know these stories in the first place.

This exhibit is a presentation of two items of clothing: both come from the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection (SCHCC), and both highlight histories of alteration that can reveal a story about their former lives.

Along with photos of and stories about these clothes, I am sharing my process of reconstructing and recreating them. You can use this as a tutorial for your own work, or simply as a way of seeing the processes that the previous owners of the clothes might have gone through

Take a look at the tabs above to explore each item.