Lacy underwear, starched collars, a beaded bodice: these are just a few of the objects in the Queen’s University Collection of Canadian Dress that Sophia Zweifel and Gennifer Majors have been examining as the 2017 Isabel Bader Fellow and Graduate Intern in Textile Conservation and Research. In residence until the end of April at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and Queen’s Master of Art Conservation Program, Zweifel and Majors have been delving into fashion items from Kingston’s past as part of Zweifel’s investigation into the underexplored history of textile cleaning and finishing. Under microscope and ultraviolet light, they have been scrutinizing stains, residues and fibre samples on objects to determine the techniques and products that housekeepers, domestic workers and launderers used, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to make clothes look their best. As Zweifel explains, “Whether a fabric is made of plant-based fibres, such as cotton, or protein-based fibres, such as silk or wool, dictates how the fabric would have been cared for, cleaned, and finished.” This period coincides with the rise of Home Economics as a discipline and laundry as an industry. Zweifel is interested in situating “the practices of historical textile cleaning within a broader context of what it meant to be clean,” as well as in the implications that this history has for future approaches to textile conservation in museums and galleries.

Zweifel and Majors have lab space in the Master of Art Conservation Program, the only graduate program of its kind in Canada. Throughout the project, they have been sharing their expertise with conservation students through workshops and discussions, as well as consulting with other conservators and professionals in the field about their research. Every two weeks Zweifel provides updates on the progress of her and Majors’s work in a blog on the Agnes website. On Thursday, 6 April, 7–8 pm at the Agnes, Zweifel and Majors present a public talk, “The Textile Conservator Meets the 19^th-Century Housekeeper.”