Historic Fashion Newsletter

MHS intern Clare Barnett has gained hands-on experience and honed her skills as an accomplished researcher, archivist, seamstress, and pattern maker.

MHS intern Clare Barnett creates a regular newsletter that delves deep into the historic fashion collection at the Allis-Bushnell House. Each issue spotlights a different garment to explore the collection’s wide range of periods and variety in clothing.

New issues will appear on the MHS website every few weeks. Clare will offer her original research on the fashions she has examined at the Allis-Bushnell House, and she will explore why certain items of clothing have survived for centuries.

Clothing Tells a Story

The acts of making, wearing, and keeping clothing all have their own language. We may view the wear and tear our clothing accrues through our lives as the liability of textiles, but the “weaknesses” of those materials are the very aspect that provide the details that tell our stories. Among the hundreds of garments in the MHS collection, they all reveal hints about people of the past. They all can be decoded to unveil small portions of life in bygone times.

In 2023, on her own initiative, she will produce a themed newsletter called “Costumes In Detail.” This online publication will draw attention to the impressive garment collection preserved at the Allis-Bushnell House.