Hello! My name is Chloe Williams, and I am a rising senior majoring in Rhetoric, Writing, and Public Discourse. This summer I have been continuing my work as a Textile Collections Intern at the Fort Walla Walla Museum. My major project for the internship has been updating the Heritage Fashion Runway, where the museum displays historical garments from their collection of historical garments. I spent most of my internship here during the school year doing research on 1920s women’s fashion trends in order to put up this exhibit, so I was really excited to start working on object descriptions and the actual display this summer.
The exhibit includes seven dresses from the museum’s collection, which each showcase the type of heavy beading, embellishment, short hemlines, or loose, simple silhouettes that became popular in the 1920s. A big part of my work was tailoring the scope and goal of this project to fit the audience and available resources of the FWWM, a small non-profit local history museum. I started my work on this exhibit with a broad idea of focusing on 1920s women’s fashion, based on the fact that the museum seemed to have a lot of interesting garments from this time period in their repository. I lucked out with this idea because the 1920s, often called the Roaring 20s, the Jazz Age, etc, is a pretty exciting era of fashion that reflects major changes to everyday life in the United States post World War I.
After diving into fashion history research from the 20’s, my next challenge was distilling all of the information that I learned into short object descriptions, each sixty words or less, and a small introduction for the exhibit. I am a big fashion history lover and especially appreciate learning about what fashion trends can tell us about culture and social relationships. Part of what made researching the 1920s as a fashion time period so enjoyable for me was seeing how it was impacted by a ripple of historical events and movements. Many women went to work during WWI that had not done so previously, strengthening the cause of the suffrage movement and changing gender norms for women. New technologies and a national economic boom influenced art movements such as the Art Deco Movement. These factors in turn influence fashion—from the fall of the corset’s popularity to highly embellished, glamorous designs. Because this is something that I find fascinating, it was a real challenge to distill these ideas down to short blurbs that are accessible, yet informative for the guests at the museum, which often include families with young children that are less likely to stand around and read large blocks of text.
Another important part of the process of this project was the logistics of display. A goal I had for this project was to improve the visual display of this gallery. I wanted to make sure that all the signage was consistent and appealing, the mannequins were not damaged and as a whole they were spaced out in a balanced way. The preparation for putting up the display required attention to lots of little details, including picking the right paper type to print the signs on, cutting them as precisely as possible, locating props for the signs and completing the necessary cataloging in online system so that the artifacts on display are accounted for and able to be located. Finally, with the help of my supervisor and two fellow collections interns/Whitman students, we were able to install the exhibit with extreme care—some of the dresses are over a hundred years old!
I am really happy with how the exhibit turned out, and I am glad that I was able to help add something new to what’s on display at the museum. It was really rewarding to be able to see the project through from start to finish, culminating in the end product of an exhibit that will likely be up for over a year! If you would like to see the exhibit, Deco Dresses: Fashion in the 1920’s, it’s on display in the entrance building of the Fort Walla Walla Museum!
Experiences like Chloe Williams’s are made possible by the Whitman Internship Grant, which provides funding for students to participate in unpaid internships at nonprofit, some for-profit, and government organizations. We are happy to be sharing blog posts from students who were supported by either a summer, fall, spring, or year-long grants at organizations, businesses, and research labs all around the world. To learn how you could secure a Whitman Internship Grant or host a Whitman intern at your organization, contact us at ccec_info@whitman.edu.