Tuesday, July 3, 2001

A Scholar's CD-ROM Chronicles 19th-Century Women's Clothing By JESSICA LUDWIG Bell-shaped skirts narrowed, and lightweight bodices became armorlike -- those are two of the changes that occurred in American fashion over the course of the 19th century. A new CD-ROM, American Dresses, 1780-1900: Identification and Significance of 148 Extant Dresses, chronicles the evolution of clothing for the female form. "To us now, it seems there were some remarkable changes, but they were part of a process," says Elsie Frost McMurry, a 93-year-old professor emerita of textiles and apparel at Cornell University, who started documenting the dresses 14 years ago. For example, dresses in the early Civil War period featured skirts with large circumferences. By the 1880's, dresses appeared dramatically less bell-shaped. The hem was the same, but the fullness of the skirts was redistributed to the back of the gown. Changes in design and style are illustrated in more than 300 photographs and sketches from 17 private, public, and university collections along the East Coast. The CD-ROM profiles dresses housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Ms. McMurry traveled to each of the collections along with the project's illustrator, Cathie Simpson, a designer and dressmaker. M. Vivian White, a professor emerita of textiles and apparel at Cornell, photographed the dresses. Users can navigate through the CD-ROM's 800 pages as they would a book, or they can skip to specific time periods. A chapter is dedicated to each decade and includes a historical overview of the period, a detailed description and photographs of specimens, a comparison of the dresses, and an analysis of the predominant characteristics of the period as displayed by the dresses. Why women's dresses? "It's what people have and want to give," Ms. McMurry says. "We need much more written information about menswear and different types of specialized clothes." Ms. McMurry, who has worked on the dating of textiles for more than 30 years, says she invented her own methodology for the project. Dating is not an exact science, she says; the researcher must act like a detective tracing clues. She hopes that the CD-ROM will be a useful reference for historians, for curators of university collections, and especially for historical-society volunteers, who may have little time and training in textile conservation. She also hopes her garment measurements will aid anthropologists who compare the physiology of 19th- and 20th-century women. There were no scientific measurements of women until the 1890's, she says. Ms. McMurry concedes that 148 dresses do not provide an accurate survey of what all women were wearing over a period of more than a century. However, she says the project provides a base line for further study. From her research, Ms. McMurry concluded that East Coast dress styles did not differ markedly from Western European styles. Therefore, the study could aid in dating, say, dresses from the Midwest, where many European immigrants settled. When possible, the CD-ROM notes the socioeconomic level of the garment's wearer. The wardrobe of Ida Clark Langdon, whose sister-in-law married Mark Twain, is featured as a well-preserved collection of upper-class fashion. One obstacle to documenting the time period of a dress, says Ms. McMurry, is that dresses were often made over many times -- a practice that has led to some interesting discoveries. While examining an 1897 wedding dress of brown silk, Ms. McMurry found that the dress's folds, a style popular in the 1890's, disguised buttonholes that were in fashion during the 1870's. The CD-ROM is available for $49.95, including shipping and handling within the United States, from the Cornell University Resource Center, 7 BTP, Ithaca, N.Y. 14850; (607) 255-2090; fax (607) 255-9946; resctr@cornell.edu Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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