Karin Bohleke never quite imagined herself becoming a director of a historical fashion museum, but she's realized it's just the type of work she's always been destined for.
"I didn't take a direct path to become a costume historian, but my mom started me knitting when I was three and embroidering by the time I was four," she said. "I've been running a sewing machine since I was seven."
When Bohleke was growing up in Canada, her favorite place in the world was the Royal Ontario Museum.
"I used to look at the pretty dresses first, namely the costume exhibit and then look at the musical instruments and all the old harpsichords that nobody plays anymore," she remembered. "Then I had to talk to the mummies and go through the dinosaurs."
Her fate was sealed through those visits.
"Well, I'm now a costume historian," she said. "I learned to play the flute, the piano and the harpsichord. I married an Egyptologist and lived in Egypt. He's an amateur paleontologist who knows about dinosaur bones - so it was all there when I was three years old."
Bohleke oversees a collection of nearly 15,000 articles of clothing, shoes and accessories at the Fashion Archives and Museum at Shippensburg University.
The museum was started back in 1980 by her predecessor, Elizabeth Thompson, whose rack of historical clothing in her office grew exponentially over the past 30 years - mostly through donations.
Bohleke was hired by the university in 2007 and teaches multiple classes in addition to her work in the archives.
Building new exhibits for the public is an essential part of the museum's mission, and Bohleke enjoys bringing the personality of clothes to life through themed exhibitions.
Her most recent endeavor? “Fashionable Dances and Dancing Fashions.”
Still under construction, the display will feature the garb of dancers through the eras, dating from 1810 all the way up to the disco craze of the 1970s.
Walking through the exhibition space, one may not realize the intense amount of work that goes into setting it up - from restoring moth-eaten wool dresses to widdling down modern mannequins to fit the clothes of smaller generations.
But Bohleke and her team of volunteers and students find pride in such detail-oriented work.
For students, the space offers real-world experience in curation, restoration and research.
Kayla Feeney, a sophomore interdisciplinary art and history major, said working here provides her a step-ahead in this line of work.
"Working with clothes gives you a lot of experience because that's really needed in that industry," she said. "Not a lot of people know how to work with clothing artifacts."
Taylor Schmaltz, a freshman public history major, said every day in the museum teaches her something new.
"On my first day I got to help hem a dress," she said. "It was from 1810."
Sarah Martin, a sophomore history major, has always loved museums.
"Getting to see the background of what goes into an exhibit is really cool for me," she said. "I didn't realize how much work gets put into it."
Anthony James, a graduate assistant, said he's developed a thorough skillset through his work here that has given him more confidence.
"It was very daunting at first," he said. "There's just a lot of random skills that are useful that you wouldn't necessarily think of. Every day, there's something new and exciting."
One of those "skills" Feeney learned on the job was making hands for the male mannequins in the new exhibit.
"We had to do it in a specific way so they could be positioned how they would be for dance," she said. "I used pipe cleaners and batting so that you can wrap the batting around the pipe cleaners and sew it, then they're flexible enough to bend as fingers."
For volunteers, every day in the museum offers a new opportunity to learn how to give the past new life.
Joann Duningan has volunteered at Shippensburg University's Fashion Archives and Museum for three years helping to restore historical fabrics for display.
"It's time-consuming work," she said, as she rethreaded a red and brown flower-patterned dress from the 1800s.
"They just have a lot of personality," Duningan said. "Even though there's a certain style for that era, every dress is different because of the detail, the trim, the way things should fit. It's really like looking at completely individual people when you look at completely individual dresses."
The majority of the collection is carefully tucked away in the building's temperature and heating-controlled bottom level, where everything is carefully labeled, organized and kept away from constant exposure to light that could damage the fragile fabric over time.
When it's not in the archives, clothing often travels to different historical centers across the region and is featured in other museum displays as well.
"The collection here is so large that we do a lot of loans to museums, they turn to us for holdings," she said. "I have good relationships with these museums and I borrow from them as well, because no one museum can own everything."
In addition to the plethora of textiles, the museum also offers a unique library of clothing reference books, patterns for historical garments, fashion magazines and shopping catalogs.
"Anybody in the community can come and do research," Bohleke said. "This is where you can do phenomenal research - not just on clothing, but other things that people used to buy."
Such work by Bohleke and her team in preserving and restoring integral pieces of historical context remind the community of how much the fashion industry has changed.
Since the 1960s, mass production of clothing has turned into a trend of "fast and disposable fashion" and has had a heavy impact on the environment, according to Bohleke.
"The fashion industry is among the top three world polluters," she said. "Right now we're on an unsustainable cycle of more and more and more and they are conditioning people to expect to have to buy clothing about every week."
There's been a shift in the way clothes are made, and perhaps, Bohleke said, that's why people find displays like these so intriguing.
"I think this is really where we get fascinated and see how our ancestors lived - what they made with their own hands," she said. "People aren't brought up to make things with their hands anymore."
“Fashionable Dances and Dancing Fashions” opening date will be announced soon and will run until July 2, 2020. Updates will be posted on the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University's website.
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https://www.publicopiniononline.com/story/news/local/2019/11/24/shippensburg-fashion-archives-showcases-over-200-years-clothes/4273365002/
2019-11-24 15:00:00Z
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