There’s Always Room for Fashion: Re-conceptualizing “Miscellaneous Arts”Lauren Paustian

Advisor: Professor Amelia Rauser

Then I studied the arrangement of the structure of the visual resources collection itself in order to get a sense of what the fashion slides would need to accommodate.

The purpose of F&M’s visual resource collection is to provide art and art professors with images of art objects within the convenience of a class room setting. Starting with just a few drawers of slides over forty years ago, the collection has since expanded to over 100,000 slides. The range of the content of the slides reflects the teaching interests of the professors within the department. As the Art History department hired professors interested in Asian art, photography, prints, and architecture, it added more slides to the visual resources collection that would suit these new fields.

F&M’s visual resources collection is arranged according to a unique classification system which best accommodates the content of the collection. Asian art, photography, and contemporary art are filed separately from the rest of the collection because they are anomalous from how the rest of the collection is arranged. The majority of slides are filed within the “Western Art” hierarchy. The hierarchy goes:

Santa Cruz system (for organizing slides): -Chronological Period, then

-Country, then-Subject

(Format/Medium)

Fogg system (for organizing slides): -Format (Subject/Medium), then

-Country, then-Chronological Period

The Costume and Textiles Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art :

-Chronological Period, then-Country, then

-Designer (or Style)

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: -Chronological Period

-Subject/Theme-Designer (or Style)

Colleges, libraries, and museums often house collections of slides, photographs, and/or digital images for use by students, staff, and other researchers. At Franklin & Marshall College, our Art and Art History Department has a visual resources collection of over 100,000 slides depicting a wide variety of cultural objects (from Impressionist paintings to Classical Greek sculpture to modern Japanese architecture to early daguerreotype photographs).

A year and a half ago, Professor Amelia Rauser joined the Art and Art History Department at Franklin & Marshall. Her research specialty is in eighteenth and nineteenth century European art, but she also has an interest in the history of dress and fashion. In the spring of 2004, Professor Rauser taught a new course about the history of Western fashion. While the college has offered courses about costume design in the past, the history of fashion is a whole new field of research to the Art History department. The visual resources collection acquired several sets of fashion slides as teaching aids for Professor Rauser’s course. My project was to research, design, and implement a system for classifying and cataloguing these unique fashion slides so that they may be integrated and easily located within the college’s visual resources collection.

The first level of the hierarchy refers to the country of origin for the artist. The country is named with an abbreviated title, so France would be FR, and Britain would be BR.

The second level refers to the form (or medium) of the object. The medium is also named with an abbreviated title. There are four main subsets within the medium category: architecture (ARCH), painting (PTG), sculpture (SC), and a catch-all category called “miscellaneous,” or “minor arts” (MSS or MA). The content of the MA category includes maps, mosaics, tapestries, furniture, jewelry and various other decorative arts.

The third level refers to the name of the artist. The artist is named in this format: LAST NAME, first name [birth date- death date].

The forth level allows for various secondary categories (such as different styles within an artist’s repertoire).

A good number of the slides were purchased as sets from slide vending companies. Other fashion slides were created through copystand photography by Louise Kulp, curator of F&M’s visual resources collection. Following strict copyright guildlines set by the Visual Resources Association, Louise takes photographs of images from books and then has these photographs developed as slides.

Western Art Hierarchy-Country

-Medium-Artist

-various secondary categories

I studied the fashion slides themselves, in order to understand the information I would be organizing. I also studied the sources of these images in order to get some background on fashion history.

There are more than 700 slides, obtained from various sources. One set of slides, entitled History of Costume VI: Fashion in the 20th Century, featured over 300 images surveying the changing trends and styles in fashion throughout the 20th century. Another set featured images of buttons used on 18th and 19th century dress, while another set depicted Utility fashions worn in England during WWII, and another set collected illustrations from the 1910s French fashion magazine, Gazette du Bonton. Professor Rauser also selected pictures from a variety of books to be made into slides, including a biography of Ralph Lauren, a collection of photography from Vogue magazine, and a book about the Aesthetic Movement. The content of the slides varied widely, but I did notice some like characteristics:

From my research of fashion history, I decided that chronology was the most important factor. What separates one style of dress from another is based more upon when it was, rather than where it was. Therefore, I eliminated the country of origin category entirely. Within the chronological period, the largest and most obvious division was between men’s versus women’s clothing. Therefore, I created a category for gender (which also includes a subset of “group,” for images featuring men and women together).

The next level got a bit trickier. Some slides depicted fashions created by designers, but many were by anonymous designers (perhaps tailors or seamstresses). Also, some images are qualified more by their use within the context of culture (as photographs, as movie stills, as illustrations, as advertisements) more than anything else. Based on the content of the fashion slides in our collection, I decided to put together these two factors as parallel categories. If a slide is an illustration from a fashion magazine, that is the next qualifying feature. But if a slide is just a photograph of an historical costume on a mannequin, then the clothing is not seen in the context of the culture, and the category does not apply. All clothes will have designers, but some are just referred to as “anonymous.”

Costume Classification System:-Chronological Period

-Gender-Costume in Culture-Designer

Santa Cruz classification:-1970s

-Britain-Black gown

Fogg classification:-Black gown

-Britain-1970s

Philadelphia Museum of Art:-1970s

-Britain-BIBA

Metropolitan Museum of Art:-1970s

-Black gown-BIBA

The first phase of the project involved researching methods of how to organize a visual resources collection. This involved studying theories of classifying information, as well as comparing classification systems used by professional research institutions. Through my research, I learned what qualifications to consider when organizing the fashion slides.

The theory behind classification is that things with like characteristics are separated from unlike things and then grouped together in a category. The separation of like from unlike could be based on hierarchy, association, the alphabet, or chronology (among other things). The separation and arrangement of information into categories then determines the physical placement of materials within the collection. The system used to classify materials should be logical enough so that users can easily locate specific materials they want from the collection. But the system should be flexible enough to allow for expansion into new categories in case the amount of materials within the collection increases.

Developing a system of classification really depends upon the materials that make up the collection and what the overall purpose of the collection is. There are several well-known systems designed to organize books, including the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems. Because I was working with a collection of fashion images, I researched several systems designed to deal specifically with art objects or their images, including:

Introduction:

Classification:

Visual Resources Collection:

The Fashion

Slides

Many slides depict photographs of historic costumes on mannequins. These slides showcase the costume for research purposes . This is a purple velvet court coat from ca. 1780.

Some slides depict celebrity figures in fashionable attire. This is a film still from “Flying Down to Rio,” featuring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in 1933.

Other slides depict advertisements for clothing, placing the clothing within the context of the culture of the period. This a 1940s illustration for a coat sold at Kendals department store.

Other slides showcase work done by particular famous designers. This is a fashion plate of a red taffeta dress designed by Yves St. Laurent in 1981.

The Fashion Classification Scheme

Putting it all together! I created a unique classification scheme for the fashion slides that would integrate them within the whole of the visual resources collection.

With all these factors in mind, I took the 700 fashion slides out of the “Miscellaneous Arts” category in which they had been temporarily placed. The fashion slides would have gotten lost within the 100,000 other slides if they were separated according to the “Western Art” hierarchy. Moreover, what was important in categorizing art objects (like country of origin, artist name, and medium) really did not apply to categorizing fashion and costume items. Therefore, I created a separate hierarchy for costume images that was new and different from the rest of the visual resources collection:

Take this image of Twiggy in a black sequined strapless gown by British designer BIBA, for example. It is a photograph taken for Italian Vogue magazine in 1974. Here is how it would be classified according to the other schemes:

Western Art Hierarchy:-Britain

-Black gown-BIBA

Costume Classification Scheme:-1970s

-Women’s-Photograph

-BIBA

The new costume scheme is more specific and logical to the needs of the fashion images in our collection.