When I woke up this morning, it was already raining steadily, and it was also dark, because around 6:30 am, the transformer fifty feet from the house blew and took out power to the neighborhood. “If it were cold, I’d be in bed all day,” I thought dispiritedly. But mid-morning my friend Anne called and suggested that we visit the American Textile History Museum in Lowell. I jumped at the chance to get out of the house. In fact, I knew of the museum because I had used their library to do research for a paper I wrote for a History of Textiles course I took at UMass back in Spring 1989. Around 10:30 we set off in my car; though it took us over an hour to get there, it was a smooth ride via the Pike and 495 North. Parking in the Museum lot was free, so as soon as we arrived, we left the car there and set off on foot to find an ethnic restaurant where we could have lunch. Fortunately, about a half-mile away on Merrimack Street was the Viet Thai restaurant, with tasty, inexpensive, and probably authentic dishes.
Back at the Museum, the receptionist told us that the building was designed to help patrons get a sense of the sweep of textile history. The main exhibit, Textile Revolution: An Exploration through Space and Time, unfolded thematically and chronologically along a sloping ramp. We learned about the four natural fibers, wool, cotton, linen, and silk, and about the technologies that were used to transform them into textiles in the American colonies and later in the new republic. In the nineteenth century, textile production drove the Industrial Revolution which transformed the new nation into a commercial powerhouse; the need for raw materials in the form of cotton created the slave plantation system in the South. Within our lifetimes, twentieth-century American science and technology produced synthetic fibers such as nylon, rayon, and Kevlar; innovations continue today.
The Museum’s holdings include thousands of books, trade catalogs, business records and personal papers, prints and photographs, a growing costume collection, and millions of textiles samples, as well as hundreds of machines used in textile manufacture. We saw some of these machines set up in a large room on the second floor; supposedly they are all in working order, but we were only able to watch some video clips of them in operation. This was just as well, as the machines are very noisy, and the conditions in the early factories would never have passed even a cursory OSHA inspection.
The other featured exhibit — in fact, the one we expressly came to see — was High Style: Betsy Bloomingdale and the Haute Couture. Curated by Kevin Jones and Christina Johnson of LA’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, it opened August 14th in the Stevens and Lowell Sun Charities galleries and will run until January 2nd. Betsy Bloomingdale, wife of department store heir and Diners Club credit card founder Alfred Bloomingdale, purchased haute couture over the span of decades, from such well-known designers as Hubert de Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, Marc Bohan for Dior, James Galanos, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Ferré for Dior, André Courrèges, and Adolfo Sardiña. The exhibit includes 41 ensembles donated by Mrs. Bloomingdale to FIDM, as well as video clips of interviews, photographs, and hand-drawn croquis (colored sketches with attached fabric swatches). I think I had some idea of what is meant by haute couture (a la the Wikipedia definition: “made to order for a specific customer [and] usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finish by the most experienced and capable seamstresses, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques”), but I didn’t realize that in the industry, it has a more technical meaning. As the exhibit panels informed us, members of the French Chambre syndicale, of which there are only about ten now, must follow certain rules in order to use the term haute couture in their advertising. Considering these numbers, it may well be the case that couture is a dying art, which I regret because these clothes are truly fabulous! I’m sorry I don’t have any photographs to embed in this post, but they probably aren’t allowed, as light is highly detrimental to fabric. Anyway, I don’t think I could have decided on my favorites.
We closed down the Museum at 5 pm; like bar patrons at 1 am, we didn’t want to leave.
