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Exhibit shows how home sewers kept passion aliveYoung men and ladies who are just sipping the sweets of connubial felicity, before you get a bed-stead, purchase a sewing machine. If you can't have both, sleep on the floor until you can earn enough with your sewing machine to pay for a bed-stead. From Butterick Sewing Machine Costume Ad, Fall, 1896. Long before Victoria's Secret catalogs created a stir in American households and well before Frederick's of Hollywood opened its shops and mail order business in the 1940s, women were creating romantic lingerie fashions at home. Historic patterns, lingerie and other clothing, are among the items on display in the new exhibit--Tissues of Dreams: Dressmaker Patterns--at the URI Textile Gallery in the Quinn Hall Lobby. The gallery is located on the Kingston Campus and is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. through Feb. 17. The exhibit is free and open to the public. The show features two resources that make URI one of the most important textile and costume centers--The Betty Williams Pattern Collection, the largest historic pattern collection in the world, and the URI Historic Textile and Costume Collection, one of the most extensive in the country. "We thought it would be great to put together an exhibit that combines patterns and the clothing made from them," said Margaret Ordoñez, associate professor and director of the URI Historic Textile and Costume Collection. She is the co-curator of the exhibit with Joy S. Emery, professor and chair of URI Theatre, and curator of the Betty Williams Pattern Collection. The exhibit highlights seven lingerie patterns and undergarments that would be at home in any catalog today, except maybe for the silk bloomers. The items range from a 1920s hand-stitched pink chemise, made from a Deltor Butterick pattern to a 1930s sheer cotton teddy made from a Simplicity pattern. The exhibit, however, has more than just unmentionables. It is a look at how patterns, initially intricate and hard to follow, became easier to use thanks to Ellen Curtis Demorest. Demorest made patterns of individual pieces of tissue paper for each part of a garment, as opposed to drawing overlapping lines on a single sheet of paper. The easy-to-use patterns made current fashions readily available to home sewers. Following the Demorest patterns, Ebenezer Butterick introduced his own line in 1863. Today, McCall's, Butterick and Simplicity remain the major pattern suppliers. A highlight of the show is a Butterick dress pattern taken from an Yves Saint Laurent design. The dress, with its large color blocks and bold lines is a signature of the mid-1960s. A dress based on the pattern in the exhibit was made by 1946 URI graduate Ruth Dove Salter for her daughter Lynn Salter McCauley, URI '73. In one corner of the exhibit there is a special display of a silk wedding dress with detachable train made by 24-year-old Edna Maine Spooner in 1916. She chose a Butterick pattern to make her wedding dress but changed the sleeve to create variation. The dress was donated to URI by her daughter, Lucille Hewitt Spooner. A photo of Edna Maine Spooner is placed near the dress. The exhibit is dedicated to Betty Williams, a New York costumer, and a pioneer in dress-maker pattern research. Her passion has inspired scholars, designers, students and sewers around the world. Betty's husband, Gene Williams, donated her pattern collection to the URI Library's Special Collections. Williams' patterns are the cornerstone of the Commercial Pattern Archive, a consortium of international pattern collections, which is headed by Emery. The archive is being cataloged in an electronic database. By Dave Lavallee |
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