Every Stitch a Story

Smith Quarterly

Garments from Smith’s vast collection of historical clothing give depth and dimension to women’s everyday lives

Photographed by Anna-Marie Kellen for the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection
BY CHERYL DELLECESE

Published February 10, 2025

On September 27, 2024, The New York Historical museum debuted an exhibition called Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore that will run through June 2025. At its heart are garments from Smith’s vast historical clothing collection, a timeline of sorts that brings to life two centuries’ worth of women’s everyday experiences—their work, their traditions, their aspirations—through clothing.

At an opening gala, designer Diane von Furstenberg and other notable guests mingled among 30 outfits displayed in glass cases, including a double-breasted wool suit from the 1920s, a short cotton top from the late 19th century, a homemade minidress from the 1960s, von Furstenberg’s own daisy-yellow wrap dress from the 1970s, and more. The garments were presented in their original states—with stains, tears, and all—to tell the deeper story of the rites of passage and vicissitudes of the lives of the women who wore them.

In writing about the exhibit for Vogue, fashion historian and editor Lilah Ramzi noted, “This is not a show celebrating the rare and exquisite remnants of sartorial history but the quotidian pieces of American women—a category of fashion often overlooked in fashion media and academia.”

The exhibition capped a banner year for the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection (SCHCC) that began with the publication of a critically acclaimed book also titled Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore (Rizzoli Electa) by Kiki Smith ’71, professor of theatre and founder/head of the collection. For her and the dedicated students and alums who have worked to grow the collection, the spotlight has been a long time coming.

What started 50 years ago as a project to preserve a few interesting items from the jumble of abandoned stage costumes in the theatre department has evolved into a unique archive of more than 4,000 garments—from housedresses and maternity clothes to waitress outfits and petticoats—that reveal the often untold stories behind the so-called social uniforms that convey the identities and roles of women over time.

Housed in the basement of Smith College’s Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, the collection has been devotedly added to, cataloged, curated, and cared for by Kiki Smith since 1974. “I just knew that some of the pieces that would be destroyed onstage would be much more valuable as a resource for research,” she says. “I put a bunch of gray metal cabinets in the hallway and just kept going through what we had.” Smith became increasingly adept at “reading” a garment—the number and types of alterations, the pattern of faded material, the mended tears, and the kinds of stains, all intimate details in the story of the life of the woman who wore it.

The collection has grown steadily over the years, as has the number of its supporters. Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic for The New York Times, first brought the SCHCC national recognition in a 2019 Times feature story, writing that the collection’s clothes are “the kinds of garments generally overlooked or dismissed by museums and collectors of dress, who tend to focus on fashion as an expression of elitism, artistry, aspiration.” Friedman introduced Smith to von Furstenberg, and soon after Smith had a book deal for Real Clothes, Real Lives and the SCHCC’s first major exhibit was on the calendar.

Rebecca Shea ’99, who heads New York–based RCS Fine Art, a costume exhibition display and collection management firm, worked closely with Smith on both the book and the exhibition to make people aware of the significance of these documentary garments. “These are not the fantasy of couture garments but what women chose to wear to face the obstacles of their everyday lives,” Shea says. “They trace how women’s lives and roles have evolved over 200 years.”

Smith students are introduced to the SCHCC through costume design classes, theatre production work, internships, and independent research. Besides studying design, textiles, and the clothing’s historical significance, students have repaired garments, cataloged the ever-increasing number of pieces in the collection, and, in general, helped to maintain its organization.

“Kiki [Smith] will find a way to make sure that the collection survives, but I hope that there’s overwhelming support in the next couple of years to really make it fly and see where it can grow from here.”
Costume designer Theresa Miles

“The value of working with a team is maybe my biggest takeaway from my time working with the collection,” says Jennifer Loveman Manthei ’90, director of operations and chief liaison for the advancement division at the Museum of Science in Boston. “You didn’t have to say, ‘I’m a theater person’ or ‘I’m a math person’ because we were all there for the collection; we just came from different perspectives.”

An anthropology and theatre major, Theresa Miles ’18 is a costume coordinator and designer whose credits include The Equalizer, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and Eileen. As a student, she used costume design as a bridge between her two majors to learn about culture and design. “Study collections like the historic dress collection are quite rare,” Miles says. “You opened these little gray doors and you were like, ‘Wow, we’re back in the 1890s.’”

As the collection blossomed, Smith realized its significance as a multidisciplinary teaching tool. For example, Jonathan Gosnell, professor of French studies, uses the collection in Consumer Culture and the French Department Store, an intermediate French culture course in which students read Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola—a novel about the advent of the Parisian department store.

For Gosnell, the collection is instrumental in illustrating the far-reaching impact that French fashion and department stores had in the mid-1800s. “The department store was important in making French fashion more democratic,” he says. “French fashion was sold to the middle classes, who took the styles and trends into their communities and made them accessible to people in small towns like Northampton. It’s exciting to use the collection for students to see the connections among consumerism, culture, and fashion, and how women played an important role in developing these.”

Barbara Kellum, professor of art, teaches a first-year seminar each fall called On Display: Museums, Collections, and Exhibitions. While most of her coursework uses the Smith College Museum of Art collection, her students also become familiar with the SCHCC. “Students always come away just agog at what they’ve seen,” she says. “I really think it speaks to them in a way that no other collection on campus does. As soon as you put a garment on a mannequin, you get the full impact of how a skirt falls or what the constraints are of one garment or another. It really brings history alive for students—especially women’s history.”

With the collection garnering more and more national attention, there is hope among the collection’s supporters that it will also continue to gain more visibility on campus and perhaps even find a new, bigger permanent home. “Right now, it’s literally a hidden treasure in the Mendenhall basement, and they are running out of room,” Gosnell says. Regardless of what comes next, costume designer Theresa Miles is certain of one thing: “Kiki will find a way to make sure that the collection survives, but I hope that there’s overwhelming support in the next couple of years to really make it fly and see where it can grow from here,” she says.

The pieces highlighted here are featured in both the book and the exhibition at The New York Historical museum. The clothes represent a variety of fashion trends and uses and span several decades. Most were donated by the owners themselves or their families, who were eager to share the stories behind the garments with the Quarterly.

Cheryl Dellecese is a senior editor at Smith College.

Sylvia Plath’s 1940s Girl Scout Uniform

The vibrant green of this 1940s Girl Scout uniform worn by Sylvia Plath ’55 was made the official color of the Girl Scouts in the 1930s. The buttons are made of vegetable ivory, a natural, renewable material derived from the nut of the tagua palm tree.

Donated by Aurelia Plath, Sylvia Plath’s mother

Sylvia Plath ’55 lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she was a Girl Scout from age 11 to 16 (1943–48). She spent parts of six summers at Girl Scout–affiliated camps, including Camp Weetamoe in Center Ossipee, New Hampshire; Camp Helen Storrow in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and Vineyard Sailing Camp in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard. During the school year, she attended weekly after-school sessions with the Girl Scouts that focused on earning merit badges.

The right sleeve of her uniform features 20 embroidered cotton badges for a wide variety of activities, such as biology, astronomy, boating, and weaving. At least five of the badges pertained to reading and writing. On June 7, 1946, for example, she turned in 30 book reports about works by authors including Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights) as part of the badge requirements. During this period, she also collected stamps and wrote stories, essays, and poems while taking viola, piano, and art lessons.

Seeing something that Plath wore is very exciting and adds a physical dimension to her. The garment also documents the customs of the period. Since Plath became a Girl Scout during World War II, when there was rationing of cotton and metal, it is enlightening to see that her green uniform closes with buttons and is shorter than the uniforms in the 1930s.

The 20 badges in such wide-ranging areas illustrate how versatile and ambitious Plath was from a very early age. Through hard work and dedication, she excelled in every activity she undertook throughout her life. Her six years in the Girl Scouts taught her to follow her dreams but also to be practical, organized, self-sufficient, independent, and resilient.

—Karen V. Kukil, Smith College research affiliate and international authority on Sylvia Plath

1950s–60s Aprons

Donated by Mary Ruddy ’80

My mother, Beatrice Campbell Ruddy ’39, majored in Spanish and minored in French. She was at Smith during the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. She had the privilege of attending Smith at a time when few people—let alone women—went to college. There weren’t many careers open to women then, so after graduation she went to secretarial school. She was a stay-at-home mom in Northampton until my brother and I entered high school, and she then worked as a secretary to the president of a local bank.

Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, we had family dinners every night with home-cooked meals. My mother routinely wore an apron whenever she was working in the kitchen. Mom loved red. It was a great color on her, and it complemented the green countertops in the kitchen.

Aprons were a routine artifact of women’s culture in the ’50s and ’60s. Homemaking and being a good hostess were very important. Aprons were useful for keeping flour off your clothing when baking and provided an opportunity for self-expression. They weren’t strictly white utilitarian aprons. When I took my first sewing class in grammar school, one of the first projects was making an apron. Even the most everyday items can be outlets for women’s creative expression.

Seeing the photo of my mother’s aprons for the first time in Kiki Smith’s book, Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore, was an emotional experience. She really captured the essence of my mother in a group of aprons. Of all the aprons I donated—and this included a group of aprons that were my grandmother’s—she managed to pick a cohesive group of the ones my mother wore most frequently when I was growing up.

—Mary Ruddy ’80

Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Mary Ruddy ’80 remembers nightly home-cooked meals prepared by her mother, Beatrice Campbell Ruddy ’39, who always wore an apron—usually in her favorite color, red.

1960s Peter Max Dress

In 1968, Marta Rudolph AC ’14 was the envy of all her friends when she received this micromini dress that featured a print by psychedelic artist Peter Max—a dress that embodies ’60s rebellion.

Donated by Marta Rudolph AC ’14

For their generation, both of my parents were relatively bohemian, very interested in art, music, and theater, and they both had a real sense of style. But my dad, who was an American civilization professor at Williams College, had a real fashion eye, and he often would shop with us for clothes. On occasion, he would pick up something for my sister or me. In 1968, when I was about 16, my parents returned from a trip to New York, and my dad brought me the Peter Max minidress.

I just flipped! I thought, “Whoa, this is the coolest dress ever!” Of course, I knew about Peter Max, and I’d seen his posters. But I lived in Williamstown, Massachusetts, so the only place to shop was like a Roberts Department Store in North Adams, and it had nothing like that.

I wore the dress to the summer theater, dances, and mostly to parties. It was very short, and I have long legs. I wore it with wedge shoes and fake-pierced hoop earrings. (My mother wouldn’t let me get my ears pierced, but she drove me and a friend to Northampton, where there was a fake-pierced earring store.)

We all wanted psychedelic posters, and here I basically had a psychedelic poster on my body. I saved it for all these years because it was one of the coolest pieces of clothing I ever owned, and it held such wonderful memories. It’s just a really special dress that a typical young girl in the ’60s would’ve really wanted. It reflects a time in our country. I think the entire historic clothing collection represents women in a way that’s never been acknowledged, and my hope is that its academic use will increase, not just at Smith but at other colleges across the country.

—Marta Rudolph AC ’14

1970s Wedding Dress

Donated by Barbara Borenstein Blumenthal ’75

I was married on June 30, 1974, when I was 21 years old, so I probably purchased the dress that spring.

I wasn’t really a hippie, but I did wear casual clothes—jeans, peasant blouses, and dresses. I wanted to shop in a place such as Goodwill and get a vintage cream-colored dress, certainly not a formal wedding dress from a specialty store. My mother wanted to buy me a formal wedding gown with a train and veil.

We compromised. I agreed to look at dresses in the bridal department of local Baltimore department stores, where I ultimately chose a bridesmaid’s dress instead of a formal bridal gown. The saleswoman was quite surprised when we told her we wanted the color of the dress to be white. I think the dress cost $50.

The wedding was informal, held outside in the yard of my in-laws’ house, with a brief Jewish ceremony and roving folk singers (our friends) providing music.

It felt wonderful to be getting married, and the dress made me feel great. I wore white sandals. I didn’t wear anything in my hair, but I did carry a small floral bouquet that my father-in-law arranged from his garden.

I’m delighted that my dress will have a sort of immortality by being part of the collection.

The clothing in the collection—so different from many collections that include only high fashion—tells so many important stories about women’s lives. These are everyday clothes, worn, altered, repaired, and well-used. It adds to the study of textiles and sewing techniques, but, of course, tells so much about the women—many anonymous—who wore the clothing.

My husband and I celebrated our 50th anniversary on June 30, 2024.

—Barbara Borenstein Blumenthal ’75

This 1970s wedding dress, worn by Barbara Borenstein Blumenthal ’75, challenged traditional norms with its romantic, folkloric appearance and balloon sleeves to enhance movement—all popular trends in counterculture fashion.

1980s Quinceañera Dress

In 1982, Ginetta Candelario ’90, professor of sociology and of Latin American and Latino/a studies, celebrated her quinceañera. Candelario’s quinceañera dress was made by her mother from 15 yards of fabric and paper flowers.

Donated by Ginetta Candelario ’90, professor of sociology and of Latin American and Latino/a studies

Quinceañera is a tradition in Latin America and the Caribbean when a young woman turns 15 to celebrate the fact that she’s transitioning from childhood to young womanhood. This is my quinceañera dress, which I wore in 1982.

Typically, it requires a lot of money to celebrate a quinceañera because it involves a fancy dress, a court of boys and girls, a dance that’s choreographed, and food for many guests. It was just my mom and me, and she didn’t have money to do the traditional big show, but she wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss out on something that other girls in my neighborhood in West New York, New Jersey, had. So she set about sewing the dress for me.

She and my aunt spent many days cooking because she couldn’t afford to cater it. They cooked huge trays of rice and beans and plantains and stewed meats. When the day finally came, we did a whole choreographed show for the guests, but once that was over, it was a party—eating, drinking, and dancing. I remember my mom and my aunt—who were quite pícara, meaning they were very sassy ladies—had a great time.

It was quite the feat to pull off for someone who was basically a welfare mother. But she made the tripas corazones, as we say in Spanish, which in English roughly translates into making lemonade out of lemons. But it’s even more than that—it’s making something from nothing. And that’s what this dress represents to me.

I feel grateful that it won’t just disappear, that it will be useful pedagogically to other students at Smith. That Latinidad—what it means to be a Latina girl in the United States—will be represented. And that my mom’s handiwork—and such an emblematic example of who she was and how she just made things happen no matter what—will get to live on. That’s meaningful to me as a scholar myself. I was just very glad that my mom and I get to contribute to Smith women’s experience in the 21st century.

—Ginetta Candelario ’90

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