Collection: Costume/Textiles

Costume/Textiles

The Museum has been actively exhibiting textiles for one hundred years and today the department of Costume and Textiles consists of over 15,000 objects, dating from antiquity to the present. The collection is divided roughly into eleven thousand flat textiles and four thousand costume and accessories that trace the history of fabric and dress.

A collection of national significance, it contains outstanding examples of European and American costume and textiles from the 17th through 20th centuries, and is very strong in the areas of Peruvian, Coptic, African, Native American, Oceanic, and Asian textiles.

The Asian textiles are particularly rich. Those given by Lucy Truman Aldrich in the 1930s are among the best in this country. The Japanese Noh robes are generally considered the finest assemblage in the world. In addition, the collection of 19th-century Chinese robes displays the splendor of decoration, as well as the importance of social rank and status, in costume of the period.

Included in the fine collection of Egyptian textiles are examples from the Old and Middle Kingdoms, and the Pre-Ptolemaic, Coptic, and Fatimid periods.

The collection also includes significant examples of Indian robes, sashes, and shawls and Turkish and Persian silks, velvets, and rugs. The Islamic collection illustrates the important role of textiles in court display and royal exchange, in defining social rank, and in Near Eastern commerce with the West.

The Peruvian collection provides an overview of weaving techniques as well as an understanding of the ritual uses of textiles in Nasca, Tiahuanaco, Huari, and Inca cultures.

One of the earliest European textiles in the collection is an extremely rare medieval German embroidery fragment. Exquisite Italian and Spanish silks and velvets represent the height of luxury textiles in the 14th and 15th centuries. The department also cares for a large collection of European tapestries, the earliest of which dates from around 1520. Highlights of the European collection include an exquisite example of Elizabethan embroidery in the form of a man's nightcap, fine examples of 18th-century French and English costume, and an opulent train worn in the court of Napoleon. Examples from Charles Worth, Fortuny, Paul Poiret, and Liberty & Co. represent European achievements in costume of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Included in the department are significant examples of early American needlework: quilts, coverlets, samplers, and embroideries. The collection also presents a remarkable survey of the development of printed textiles, an integral part of Rhode Island history. The Museum has a collection of New England needlework of great rarity, and a collection beyond compare of schoolgirl samplers made at the Balch School in Providence.

Experimental work in textile design in the collection includes work by Diane Itter, Cynthia Schira, Jack Lenor Larson, and Junichi Arai. Among the important twentieth-cetnury designers represented in the collection are Charles James, Claire McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, Chanel, Halston and Geoffrey Beene.

The department also houses more than three hundred early twentieth-century textiles and garments and eighteen cubic feet of records from Providence's Tirocchi Dressmakers' Shop (fl. 1915-1947). Such complete documentation of an historical dressmaking business exists nowhere else in the United States. Thus, in addition to the splendor of the objects themselves, the Tirocchi collection is an unparalleled resource for understanding many wide-ranging historical issues, including Italian immigration, women as workers and consumers, and the transition from hand production of garments to ready-to-wear clothing.