Essay

    The original goal of this project was to sift through and discover the books contained in Special Collections that had to do with costume. Upon initial examination of the scope of the collection at large, it was decided that the best way to approach this would be to focus on costume in Central and South America and the Caribbean, centered in the time before 1900, and to create a solid base therein for a further collection on costume to develop. This goal was based on the assumption that many books that were not specifically “costume books” contained relevant images of clothing styles from a variety of periods, and that we could uncover and display them, ultimately, in a highly accessible web-based exhibition.

    One of the most interesting aspects of this project was the fact that many of these books were written at a time before the establishment of formal anthropological studies, and certainly before costume history was thought of as a viable endeavor. Therefore, many of these primary sources have been documented with vague descriptions of what exactly the image is meant to portray, primarily, I assume, because the illustrator or author did not fully understand what he or she was documenting at the time. Because this Special Collections department, and the library itself, is so rich with materials describing this region of the world, it was easy to find resources to enlighten even the vague sources, and to clarify any questions that I might have encountered along the way. Anthropology was a non-existent science until the 19th century. It developed as an attempt to rationalize the enslavement and oppression of the peoples encountered during this imperial heyday. As a result, many of the early images are quite beautiful sources of documentation, but also often implicitly racist and therefore probably not entirely accurate. Most of the people who were creating these images were unsure at the time of exactly what they were seeing, so it is up to the modern viewer to interpret and create a fuller picture of the costume and the wearer using today’s knowledge. It is my intention, subsequently, to understand and elucidate the motivations and approaches used by these early sources, and to explain the rationale in terms of the accuracy of the image and potentially, its accompanying description.

    The Special Collections department, as I have mentioned, contains rich collections of materials with information on the Caribbean, South and Central America, and North America. Within these is a plentiful and growing section of books on costume (or containing beautiful images of costumes over the centuries). The images in this exhibit are by no means an exhaustive list. These are just a sample of the many images to be found in this collection. Hopefully, this can serve as a basis and a framework for further study and examination of not only the collection itself, but the costume of the region as a whole as it can be illuminated utilizing the collection.