Historical 'fashion show' looks at what Westport women wore in 1800's

By ROBERT BARBOZA

Editor

WESTPORT — Ever wonder what local women were wearing 200 years ago? Hoop skirts and hobnail shoes, or gingham sun bonnets and a hidden bustle beneath the handmade dress?

All your 19th century fashion questions can be answered with a quick tour of the wonderful free exhibition, "Head to Toe, A Century of Westport Fashion (1800-1900)" at the Westport Historical Society (WHS) Museum, 25 Drift Road through Sept. 4.

The advertising flier for the summer exhibit invites you to explore the transformation of women's fashions in the 19th century from simple homemade, hand-sewn smocks of plain fabrics to more elaborate, machine-made dresses of silk topped off by elaborate feathered hats in the most modern styles.

The handout suggests you may discover "how a country woman dressed from her stays to her outermost layer," and the exhibition does just that with a wide-ranging mixture of textiles, photographs, and a fascinating peek at all the corsets, hoops, bustles and other contrivances ladies used to keep themselves in style in those days.

The exhibition is a culmination of several years of work by curator Blaire Walker of Dartmouth, a textile historian and curator who has been volunteering at the Westport museum for some time, said WHS director Jenny O'Neill.

"We have a great collection of textiles upstairs, but we really weren't sure of exactly what we had until Blaire finished her project," Ms. O'Neill said. "Her first step was to identify everything we had in the collection."

The next step was selecting the most interesting items for an exhibition; a task made even more difficult when a newspaper appeal to local residents for period fashions brought in some very interesting clothing and accessories, the director noted.

The offered items included the oldest dress in the exhibition— a simple, hand-stitched brown silk dress from around 1800 with wondrously puffy "leg 'o mutton" sleeves, donated by neighboring Dartmouth resident Barbara Lawrence Richmond, according to Ms. O'Neill.

The roomful of displays on the ground floor of the museum, the former Bell Schoolhouse, "are in chronological order" starting around 1800, Ms. O'Neill explained. The first exhibit shows the raw fleece (from a Drift Road sheep farm) and spinning wheel used to make yarn for everyday clothing down on the farm.

"Each exhibit helps give you an idea of what daily life was really like" for a typical Westport woman at the turn of that century, she said. Clothing and accessories include display cases of shoes, whalebone corsets and other foundations that helped produce the "ideal" narrow-waisted shapes; wall displays of bonnets and bustles and an interesting collection of photographs of the Westport women from the 19th century.

"Almost all the pieces are from the Historical Society collection," Ms. O'Neill said. "A few pieces came to us on loan, from the Little Compton Historical Society, and from the Freetown Historical Society." Most of the dresses are handmade, being from before the 1849 invention of the sewing machine, and frequently altered repeatedly by the owners as fashions changed, the director noted. "Most women had only a few dresses, and often changed them, adding things or altering them to suit the latest fashion," she said.

Youngsters coming back from the beach might be interested in one of the later fashions on exhibit— the late 1800s navy blue swimming suit, complete with long skirt, full sleeves and nautical white trim— worn by a local woman, Clarabelle Shaw Sanford (1863-1924) on her regular visits to Horseneck Beach.

Just above the sailor suit is a large-format photo of three Victorian era ladies in the beach surf, all similarly dressed, obviously having the time of their lives at the Westport shoreline.

There's plenty of information panels, old local photos, and other supporting material offering a wealth of historical facts about Westport life in the 19th century, from a woman's point of view— making for a well-rounded, educational exhibition you won't want to miss.

The free Head to Toe exhibition is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Sept. 4. For more information or directions, visit www.westporthistory.com or call (508) 636-6011.