The Lived Silhouette: Evolving Femininity in the Park-McCullough Historic Dress & Photography Collection

Course Description

Summary

an Exhibit Design & Historic Dress Class, centering Researching, Mounting, Conserving and Basic Garment Restoration. 

The Lived Silhouette explores evolving definitions of femininity, domesticity, and social status through the material culture of the Park-McCullough House textile and photo collections. Spanning the mid-19th to the early 20th century, the exhibition examines the changing aesthetics of the female form through the personal wardrobes and lives of the mansion's matriarchs, directly connecting physical garments to the legacy of the body captured in photographic images. It interrogates the tension between what is captured in an image versus what was lived in person, tracking how aesthetics shifted for each woman over her lifetime.

Students will engage in the technical art of exhibition design, with a specific focus on historic dress mounting, conservation, and—where possible—minor restoration. By exploring both archives, the exhibition aims to reveal how the female body was actively shaped, constrained, and redefined over the decades. From the highly engineered, rigid understructures of the Gilded Age to the fluid, uncorseted silhouettes of the early modernist era, the garments on display do not simply reflect shifting fashion trends; they map a multi-generational transformation of identity and womanhood within the Park-McCullough House.

As a historic house museum, the Park-McCullough Mansion aims to provide visitors with an immersive sense of the past through the preservation of its architecture, furnishings, and artifacts. Placing historic images and garments directly within this historic space provides students with a unique opportunity to analyze how objects in space communicate with a viewer. This project balances critical conversations about narrative content with the practicalities of object care, grounding student research in primary sources. Ultimately, students gain hands-on experience in preservation, preliminary restoration, and garment mounting, while participating in the creation of an evocative space designed to engage the curiosity and imagination of its visitors.

The course will run with two parallel tracks: and introductory and an advanced level. introductory level students must have experience with research and a precursory understanding of women's garments and general American history in the 19th C. The advanced track requires students to demonstrate a strong, pre-existing background in both hand-stitching and advanced research practices.