Dress is already performative, and the historical Dress Collection itself finds roots in theatrical performance and fashion pageantry. It began as costumes for the Drama department at Queen’s University in the 1940s. As Kingstonians donated heirloom clothing, costumer-turned curator Margaret Angus designated some as museum quality and preserved them in a collection. Over the years, these garments were worn in historical fashion pageants as a form of exhibition. By 1985, that collection fell under the care of Agnes, where we continue to find ways of mindfully growing it, preserving it, documenting it, and making it accessible.
Trace the Queen’s University Collection of Canadian Dress (Dress Collection) from its early beginnings in the drama department at the university to its present home at Agnes.
This digital “scrapbook” is composed of archival material collected primarily by Margaret Angus throughout her tenacious journey in establishing the Dress Collection.
Scroll through the scrapbook to learn about the origins of the Dress Collection.
By Sarah Oatley, as part of the Art History Practicum at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Edited by Alicia Boutilier
Click images to see larger.
Each of the 2500+ items in the Dress Collection tells a unique story. Learn how museums organize and keep track of object-based information so these stories can be researched, preserved and shared.
One study of Early Modern European gloves, by James Daybell and other scholars, illustrates how the use of gloves in social situations and their styling by the wearer were gendered. It was not just the appearance of the object that represented a gender; women wore gloves with a slit at the base of the ring finger to display their marital status, or would simply carry one glove in the other hand.1James Daybell, Svante Norrhem, Susan Broomhall, Jacqueline Van Gent and Nadine Akkerman, “Gender and Materiality in Early Modern English Gloves,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 52, no. 3 (2021): 571–606. Another study explores the diverse and sometimes transgressive ways that hats could be worn in the Early Modern period. Hats were strictly gendered by social convention and in sumptuary laws, but these expectations were not neatly met in practice. Writings from the period complain about apparent women tipping their hats, a masculine behaviour deemed only appropriate for those considered men.2James Daybell, Kit Heyam, Svante Norrhem and Emma Severinsson, “Gendering Objects at the V&A and Vasa Museums,” Museum International 72, no. 1–2 (2020). As evidenced by these studies on gloves and hats, the “gender” of a clothing item is not stagnant or entirely aesthetic but is expressed through action. The selection of clothing, the styling of clothing with other items, and the use of clothing in different ways while worn all contribute to one’s gender expression. Thus, in a museum collection, dress is in a sense “incomplete.” These items are not worn by someone, are not styled together, and are therefore no longer part of a human gender performance.
Daybell et al. also make the important argument that museums must allow for historical dress to have “trans possibilities.”3Daybell et al., “Gendering Objects at the V&A and Vasa Museums,” 2020. We have no way of knowing, they argue, why every person presumed a “woman” may have been donning “men’s” hats, or tipping them as only a man would be expected to. But simply calling an object a “man’s hat” obscures diverse potential uses of that type of object–especially when the actual original wearer of it is unknown.
Of the over 2000 items in the Collection of Canadian Dress at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at the time of this study, 156 of the catalogue entries were labelled with gendered language. In Agnes’s database, language of this nature was present in the following fields: “Title,” which is meant to contain the title of an artwork, “Object Name,” which is in a tag format similar to Nomenclature, and finally “Description.”4Interestingly, Nomenclature 4.0 uses no gendered language to define clothing terms, except in a single case: “bootees,” which are defined as soft shoes worn by girls and women. Agnes has a pair of bootees in its collection (C73-626.34), so if one was to follow Nomenclature 4.0’s example, gendered language would still be appropriate to use for this object alone (hence, the need for museums to carefully consider their use of gendered language regardless of classification system. Gendered terminology, like “man’s” or “woman’s,” was predominantly used to indicate the presumed gender of the former wearer. However, in some instances, the “Description” field did describe the historical use of an object by a gendered group/individual. Following this investigation of gender’s presence in Agnes’s database, steps were taken for feasible immediate change to Object Name and Title fields.
Description fields allow for multiple words, for full sentences, as opposed to Title and Object Name fields, which allow for only a couple of words. For example, C08-001.04 by Elsie Densem was titled “Woman’s cloak,” and the “Object Name” was “outerwear; cloak; woman’s.” In a Description field, discussion of how an object may be gendered can be nuanced and refer to the object’s specific historical context, while titles and tagging systems are unable to do this. Agnes’s records state that Densem often worked with popular Vogue pattern designs, customizing them and altering them–including some of the pieces commissioned by Judith Hunter. These are unique, bespoke pieces, but they were still created within a cultural context that idealized some expressions of femininity and disapproved of others, that had specific social codes with which these garments engaged in some way. Thus, it could be worthwhile for the descriptions of these pieces to record how they incorporated trends in women’s fashion and how they may be more personalized.
Densem’s tendency to borrow from patterns and Densem and Hunter’s increasingly collaborative design process are similar to Agnes’s ongoing Patterns for All Bodies (PfAB) project. Completed PfAB looks are not entirely original, but use patterns made from historical garments in the dress collection, adapting them to be appropriate for drag and to reflect the individual performers’ artistic identities. In this case and in Elsie Densem’s, adapting patterns allows makers and wearers of clothing to play with gendered expression, using signifiers of femininity or masculinity to curate a specific, unique look, whether it be for performance or for personal expression. In this way (and many others), PfAB demonstrates the need for a dress database that presents possibilities rather than restricting them. Not only might a description allow for “trans possibility,” but perhaps also a “drag possibility”–especially in Agnes’s case as the dress collection takes on new life in the PfAB project. A database could record how garments have continued to live on and interact with gender, documenting a sort of “gender provenance.”
It is important, however, to not entirely eliminate gendered language from dress collection records. Gender is arbitrary and misunderstanding it as binary or eternal has had negative consequences, but it is still meaningful–and it has been meaningful throughout history, across cultures in myriad ways. Maintaining some association of clothing with gender in the database preserves the historical context in which the garment was made, and can protect against modern assumptions made in the absence of information.
By conveying an understanding that clothing is a tool to express gender—is evidence of gendered behaviour rather than gendered itself—databases can start conversations.
By Carolyn Moeller, as part of the Art History Practicum at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Edited by Alicia Boutilier.