I've Always Wanted to be Like Indiana Jones

 Welcome back to another weekly addition of Historical Fact and Fiction. This week, we'll do something a bit different as I wanted to talk about my experience working in museums and how much I really enjoyed it!

I grew up in the shadow of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). It was a quick and easy train ride into Toronto and could easily be done in a day. This meant that I had plenty of opportunities to visit and explore the vast collections offered there. Since it is the biggest museum in Canada, my perceptions were skewed. Combine that with my love for Indiana Jones and anything from Dan Brown and I was ready to discover groundbreaking historical secrets trapped in seemingly ordinary artifacts.  

So when I finally got to work in a local museum’s archives, I was very excited. All my childhood dreams had come true and I could wander the stacks and find any number of hidden objects. Now, I didn’t find the Arc of the Covenant or some hidden secret about Christianity because those only exist in fiction. What I did find, was a vast collection of textiles. This was at a small museum in a small town whose collection was massive for where they are. The textile collection ranges from the 17^th-20^th century and mainly featured women’s clothing which was fine by me. I had always been interested in the corsets and the big hoop skirts—so much unlike my own style of dress.

Part of my role was to create an online exhibit on pretty much anything I wanted, as long as it could be traced to a specific location in the town. The choice seemed obvious to me so I took a deep dive into the textile collection. I focused mostly on dresses from the 18^th and 19^th centuries. As an extension of this project, I also photographed, located and documented some of the dresses that had been lost in the archives. This was by far my favorite part.

To get the full effect of the dress, we had to put it on a mannequin and then the proper undergarments so that we could see the full skirt. This process posed many difficulties. Women of that era are very small. Regular mannequins don’t lend themselves well to fitting these petite frames. On more than one occasion, I spent an hour or so molding a vaguely feminine shape out of a large cardboard tube and cotton filling (a task University did not prepare me for). Often these women would be cinched in with the corsets, but even the shoulders were very narrow. As someone who is 5”10, I towered over these mannequins (with adjustable heights) since the dress was made for a woman around 5 feet.

Another major concern is just manipulating the fabric around a mannequin. Silk of that era was made with bits of metal so over the years, the silk shreds itself. Even if you never looked at it again, the sheer weight of the silk would shred itself. Thus, if you did take it out and put it on a mannequin, you risked losing chunks of the fabric, or further shredding the material.  In some cases, this was worth the risk since these fragile dresses were often among the ones least photographed and catalogued if at all.

Everything I found was just so cool. The dresses and other textiles had been boxed up ages ago with labels that were no longer accurate so opening a new box was like Christmas morning every day. A few of them were sadly in poor condition, but most were stunning. It’s such a unique experience to see them up close and personal. You can see the painstaking stitches along the hem. Or the intricately hand-beaded patterns. Or as one dress had, repurposed lace clearly not from the era. This posed a little mystery but we suspected it has been used by a theatre troupe and had been adjusted several times for the actresses and reinforced.

Even though I never found the Holy Grail, each artifact I did find and interact with was just as interesting. It was amazing to get these small glances into people lives. I always tried to imagine who the person was. Why did they spend so much time hand beading her dress? Why was this dress saved, was this her favorite outfit? What event did this dress go to?