LibGuides: PCA 225: Introduction to Theatrical Costuming: Useful Websites

Costuming Internet Reources

Chicago History Museum, Digital Collection: Costume and Textile Collection The Chicago History Museum's Costume and Textile Collection features 50,000-plus artifacts from the mid-18th century to the present. Its focus reflects its urban origins: many of its contents were worn by "former presidents and first ladies, sports stars, celebrities or everyday people." Otherwise the items' connections to Chicago are via dressmakers, milliners, and manufacturers. The collection is particularly strong in 20th-century items, women's wear, and pieces designed by Charles James. Images and metadata are of high quality and vetted by the museum. (R. Tolley-Stokes, East Tenn. State U. for CHOICE)
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See also Treasured Ten: Selections from the Costume Collection
April 9, 2022–January 16, 2023
https://www.chicagohistory.org/exhibition/treasured-ten/
Costume Gallery Websites "You may tour through the 14 areas of The Costume Gallery Websites. We have over 40,000 web pages, 85,000 images, and two databases. Our websites vastly covers the history of the fashion / costume / textile industries."
Costume Page
Costumer's Manifesto
Daphne Dare Collection British designer Daphne Dare (1929-2000) designed for major theatres on both sides of the Atlantic as well as for television and film. Learn more at https://library.osu.edu/tri/explore and https://scout.wisc.edu/archives/r27695/daphne_dare_collection
Elizabethan Costuming Page This site, divided into 16 sections, focuses on a broad variety of topics related to clothing in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Of particular interest are those entitled, "Portraits and Pictures" and "Regional and National Fashions."
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Useful to Renaissance enthusiasts and those involved with costuming!
Europeana Fashion This portal provides free access to digital fashion and costume collections across Europe. Launched in March 2012, this online fashion archive features 700,000-plus objects, including clothing, accessories, photographs, posters, illustrations, and videos. The archive encompasses collections from 22 contributing partners from 12 European countries, including the private archives of Pucci and Missoni and museums such as the Victoria and Albert, the Musée de la Mode et du Textile, and the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum. The project is coordinated by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale in Italy, a nonprofit working to preserve "digital memories" by developing digital preservation strategies, promoting greater collaboration among European cultural centers, and providing educational opportunities to explore best practices for preservation. Europeana Fashion is an ambitious project to aggregate existing digital content from public and private European fashion collections and incorporate it into Europeana (CH, Dec'09, 47-1742), a portal offering access to the online collections of European cultural heritage institutions. Scheduled for completion in 2015, Europeana Fashion is planning a specialized fashion thesaurus to enable searching across collections--an especially challenging task in a multilingual environment. The website provides broad keyword searching of collections. Search results may be filtered by object type, e.g., hats, photographs, or dresses; by designer; by content provider; or by color of the object and surface treatments. Also featured is a unique resource titled Fashion and Intellectual Property 'Best Practice' Guidelines, designed to assist project partners and site users with managing intellectual property rights for fashion content, including images. In addition, Europeana Fashion has developed a presence on social media platforms, including Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. Because this resource is under development, users sometimes may experience limited functionality and quality control, such as broken links, inaccurate search results, and formatting and printing challenges. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. --C. B. Cannon, Brand Library and Art Center
Google Images: Costume History This link performs the search described in the titles and provides a vast array of costume history-related images!
Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection The mission of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection is to further "the understanding of human beings within their material and social environments through the study of textiles of artistic, cultural, and historic significance." It is primarily a teaching collection serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Human Ecology's Design Studies Department. It includes 13,000 textiles and related objects spanning spanning various places, techniques, and time periods.
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The Digital Collections database provides open access to images and cataloging information for almost 9,000 items in the HLATC. This unique trove is very useful for research and instruction in the study of textiles. The collection is especially strong in ethnographic textiles and costumes from all over the world, especially Latin American, African, South and Southeast Asian, and Turkish objects. It is also strong in 19th- and 20th-century American and European home furnishing and apparel fabrics. The database is fully searchable by keyword, title, subject, and geographic area. (Y. Cortes, Skidmore College for CHOICE)
Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design The digitized version of the Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design is based on originals housed in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Motley Collection consists of over 5000 costume and set designs, sketches, notes, photographs, prop lists, storyboards, and swatches of fabric. The collection documents 150 productions of Shakespeare and modern classics, dating from 1932 to 1976, staged in England and the United States, from the West
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The majority of the collection has been digitized, and can be searched by play title, theater name, actor and director names, as well as medium. In addition, production notes have been compiled for selected plays; for example, a researcher interested in a 1954 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream can view excerpts of reviews, commentary from the set and costume designer, Margaret Harris, and a cast list including Vanessa Redgrave who played Helena.
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Stage Costume Exhibit (Victoria and Albert Museum) An online exhibit from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibit highlights stage costume designers, costume makers, and the costumes themselves.
Textile Museum
Timeline of Costume History
See also
https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/about-timeline/ and https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/?s=history+of+fashion+design+costume+timeline
Tonic to the Imagination:Costume Design for Stage & Screen by B.J. Simmons & Co.,1889-1959 The B.J. Simmons & Co. costume shop in London produced costumes for theater and film, along with renting out costumes to such venues for over 100 years. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has a web exhibition of 228 costume designs from over 60 productions from the span of 1889-1959.

Museums

Newfields (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
This is the website for the art museum nearest you!
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Mother of All Art and Art History Links (Michigan School of Art and Design)
See also http://umich.edu/~motherha/resource.html
National Gallery of Art
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See also https://www.nga.gov/collection/collection-search.html
National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Tate Gallery
Vatican Museums
Victoria and Albert Museum

Shakespeare Websites

Global Shakespeares: Video and Performance Archive
The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field ... Global Shakespeares provides global, regional, and national portals to Shakespeare productions within a federated structure. As the archive grows, you will be able to view and study productions either in an environment focused on one area—Shakespeare Performance in Asia is the first of these—or in the context of world-wide Shakespeare production. The archive is a work in progress and currently includes a catalogue of more than 397 productions, 75 video clips, and online videos of over 30 full productions.
Shakespeare Theatre Links
Provides links to theatrical companies and festivals specializing in Shakespearean productions.

Costume

Sara M. by Ahmed Hashim used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

PCA 225: Introduction to Theatrical Costuming: Useful Websites

Costuming Internet Reources

Museums

Shakespeare Websites

Costume

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