MIDDLEBURY — When it comes to January at Middlebury College, there are a few things one’s likely to encounter — brisk temperatures, snow showers and a diverse lineup of courses for students to dive into throughout the month-long Winter Term.

This year’s Winter Term — often called J-term, since it falls in January — got underway on Monday, with students enrolled in classes ranging from ski design and fabrication to the culture and craft of DJing. Students take just one course, which allows pupils and professors to fully dedicate the four weeks to a single area of study.

“(Students) are so excited about lots of different things that I tend to have trouble getting them to focus sometimes on one topic or one assignment,” Summer Jack, a visiting assistant professor of theatre at Middlebury College, told the Independent. “This is really a time to focus on one thing.”

This month, Jack is co-teaching a course called “Middlebury’s Historic Clothing Collection: Conservation, Documentation, and Interpretation Practicum.” Students in the class will work to inventory and document the college’s historic teaching collection of more than 400 pieces of antique garments and accessories.

Charlene Gross, an associate professor of costume design at Penn State University, is also teaching the course.

Jack brings to the class more than two decades of experience designing costumes for actors. Through the years, she’s also researched the history of fashion and different time periods, a tool she uses in her work as a costume designer and also in leading courses on related topics.

This is Jack’s third year teaching at Middlebury. She noted some of her predecessors noticed there were historic garments included in the college’s costume collection. The items were too fragile to be used on stage and have been stored into a separate stock known as the Middlebury College Antique Clothing Collection.

THE MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE Antique Clothing Collection includes more than 400 pieces of antique garments and accessories, such as those shown here. Students in a Winter Term course on the historic clothing collection will work to research and document items in the stock.
Photo courtesy of Summer Jack

Jack noted much of the collection has never been documented. Throughout the course, students will work with Jack and Gross to identify, number and preserve items in the collection so they can more easily be used for education.

“We have different ways to show these garments for the historic value that they have and how looking at them you can really see them as a reflection of the times in which they were created,” she explained. “You get to see something that’s just a little bit more personal than you would see in a written text or a letter from the period…It’s a very empathetic way to look at history.”

HISTORIC CLOTHING

The antique clothing collection is full of history to explore, including 400-500 garments dating from around 1840 through 1929.

“We have a really specific time period, which is also really interesting because it’s a time of great transition — late Victorian through the 1920s,” Jack said.

The collection also includes menswear from the 1930s, kimonos from Japan and different kinds of skirt supports.

“From the 1840s to the 1880s (skirt supports) take a very drastic change from being a cage crinoline with those big hoop skirts like in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ to these more bustle cages, which just move all of that volume to the back because having it all the way around you was a little limiting,” Jack said. “We have great examples of both of these that through the Industrial Revolution were being produced in a mass amount, but they’re made with new materials like steel.”

A couple of garments in the collection have the name “Brainerd,” inscribed in them. Ezra Brainerd served as Middlebury College’s eighth president from 1885 to 1908. She had several daughters, Jack noted.

SUMMER JACK, LEFT, and Charlene Gross are leading a Middlebury College J-term course called “Middlebury’s Historic Clothing Collection: Conservation, Documentation, and Interpretation Practicum.”
Independent photo/Marin Howell

“I am so anxious to figure out who I can contact to figure out more information about who might have worn them,” Jack said of the items.

She said the class will include some detective work, as much of the collection has been donated to the college by people in the community, and there’s not a lot of information on the origin of the garments.

Students will work with Jack and Gross to find more information on pieces in the collection.

“You just never know what people are going to find because Vermont has so much history all around us all the time, and I’m just super curious where some of these things came from and how we ended up getting them,” Jack said.

Students will also explore different aspects of clothing across disciplines. For example, Jack said students will hear from assistant professor of biology Greg Pask about different insect challenges that can arise with the stock and how to contain them, as well as from a chemistry professor to explore how dyeing works and look at textiles under a microscope.

The class will also put together an exhibit with some of the pieces in the Johnson Memorial Building’s gallery.

“We’re kind of encouraged to make (J-term) a time to test out new ideas for classes,” Jack said. “I’m really enjoying that prompt and trying to find a way to make this class into something that’s pretty unusual.”

On Tuesday, students were conducting burn tests on a pile of assorted textiles, which can help identify fabrics as various fibers respond differently to a flame.

Middlebury College first year Lily Jensen was among the students gathered in class that day.

“I’ve always been very interested in fashion and costumes, and I did some work at the costume vault at my high school,” Jensen said. “I just thought it would be really interesting to explore the ways that history and fashion and costume intersect.”

Throughout the course, Jensen and fellow students will update and expand the collection’s online database. Jack noted that her goal is to have all the garments at least documented by the end of the course.

She said she’s looking for a way to make the garments more accessible. She also hopes the course will encourage an appreciation for the quality of the historic garments that’s enabled them to last this long.   

“Thinking about the economic, fast-fashion problem that we have today and how these historic garments are made of quality materials and how we can go back to having the same ideas that they had in the Victorian times of, ‘I’m going to take this one thing, and I’m going to save it by changing the sleeves and making it new again,’” Jack said. “Finding a way for them to use that in their fashion personal choices maybe can be something that my students think about more, having seen these garments and how they’ve been reworked and redone and handsewn and patched.”