Today I wanted to write about my experience at my university’s historical collection of clothing, accessories, and shoes, and my experience at my university’s art museum. I thought this might be interesting because they both made me think about shoes.
The historical collection is named the Mary Beeman Historic Collection, and it is a gathering of donated apparel from alumni. It houses thousands of pieces of apparel from a span of hundreds of years. To me, it is like a hidden gem on campus. I don’t believe it is open to the public, because I had to go to the house the apparel is held in with an instructor and the rest of my class. The reason this experience was so special for me was because I was able to put visuals to the costume history I have been learning in my fashion merchandising major for three years. This experience was really fun for me because I was able to walk through rows and rows of hundreds of pieces of clothes, including formal dresses, suits, blouses, fur coats, and everything in between that is imaginable. There was also a room full of boxes upon boxes of shoes and accessories to go through. I get to go back to the house soon and I am very excited to continue to look through the historical apparel. The experience really was something that I never knew I was missing out on. I wish that I was able to look at every single vintage pair of shoes to be able to report back to the blog about my findings. When I go back again I will try to find trends among the shoes, from types, designers, year produced, year donated, and condition. It would be so interesting to me if there was this data readily available about the shoes, and other articles of apparel, from the Beeman Collection, that students could study. My first time seeing all of the collection at once was an experience that was so unique to my time here at college. It was unlike any other museum I have been to because I was able to hold most of the pieces and look at them up close.
This experience at the Beeman House different than my experience at the art museum at my university because the art museum is much more formal and protective. Our art museum, the David Owsley Museum of Art, houses different collections of photography, paintings, sculptures, artifacts, and apparel from hundreds of years. I was drawn to the paintings from the museum specifically, because they have a great collection that are wonderful examples of fashion throughout history. When I was walking through the museum, I noticed that not very many of the portraits included the shoes that the person was wearing. I think this is due to the fact that shoes were not able to convey wealth in the way that the rest of a person’s outfit could up until recent decades. It is also possible that the artists might have been more focused on centering the portraits around the faces of who they were painting, and whatever other articles of clothing that happened to be in that line of sight were there (which would normally mean the portrait ended at the waist). It was so fun to walk through the art museum. I would definitely recommend the experience to anyone. It was surprisingly fun to go by myself, and really try to take the time to appreciate the art and the fashion that I was looking at. It definitely helped me put visuals to what I have learned in recent classes. I am wondering if the art museum will host a collection revolving around apparel from a certain era, and if that era would include shoes from that time period.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my fun, educational experiences this week.
I definitely recommend to anyone to find a fashion or art museum and attend it! You might be surprised about how interesting a physical or visual experience with ancient or vintage artifacts is!
Thanks for reading,
Anna
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