The document discusses the reclassification of fashion slides into the visual resources collection at Franklin & Marshall College. It describes how the collection was previously organized and the need to develop a new classification system specifically for the 700 fashion slides. The author researched existing classification schemes and developed a new four-level system organized by chronological period, gender, how the costume is presented in culture (e.g. photograph), and designer. This new scheme integrates the fashion slides into the collection in a way that is logical for the slides and allows them to be easily located.

1. There’s Always Room for Fashion: Re-conceptualizing “Miscellaneous Arts”
Lauren Paustian
Advisor: Professor Amelia Rauser
Then I studied the arrangement of the structure of the visual
resources collection itself in order to get a sense of what the fashion
slides would need to accommodate.
The purpose of F&M’s visual resource collection is to provide art
and art professors with images of art objects within the convenience of a
class room setting. Starting with just a few drawers of slides over forty
years ago, the collection has since expanded to over 100,000 slides. The
range of the content of the slides reflects the teaching interests of the
professors within the department. As the Art History department hired
professors interested in Asian art, photography, prints, and architecture, it
added more slides to the visual resources collection that would suit these
new fields.
F&M’s visual resources collection is arranged according to a
unique classification system which best accommodates the content of the
collection. Asian art, photography, and contemporary art are filed
separately from the rest of the collection because they are anomalous
from how the rest of the collection is arranged. The majority of slides are
filed within the “Western Art” hierarchy. The hierarchy goes:
Santa Cruz system (for organizing slides):
-Chronological Period, then
-Country, then
-Subject (Format/Medium)
Fogg system (for organizing slides):
-Format (Subject/Medium), then
-Country, then
-Chronological Period
The Costume and Textiles Collection at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art :
-Chronological Period, then
-Country, then
-Designer (or Style)
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art: -
Chronological Period
-Subject/Theme
-Designer (or Style)
Colleges, libraries, and museums often house collections of slides, photographs, and/or digital
images for use by students, staff, and other researchers. At Franklin & Marshall College, our Art and
Art History Department has a visual resources collection of over 100,000 slides depicting a wide
variety of cultural objects (from Impressionist paintings to Classical Greek sculpture to modern
Japanese architecture to early daguerreotype photographs).
A year and a half ago, Professor Amelia Rauser joined the Art and Art History Department at
Franklin & Marshall. Her research specialty is in eighteenth and nineteenth century European art,
but she also has an interest in the history of dress and fashion. In the spring of 2004, Professor
Rauser taught a new course about the history of Western fashion. While the college has offered
courses about costume design in the past, the history of fashion is a whole new field of research to
the Art History department. The visual resources collection acquired several sets of fashion slides as
teaching aids for Professor Rauser’s course. My project was to research, design, and implement a
system for classifying and cataloguing these unique fashion slides so that they may be integrated and
easily located within the college’s visual resources collection.
The first level of the hierarchy refers to the country of origin for the
artist. The country is named with an abbreviated title, so France would be
FR, and Britain would be BR.
The second level refers to the form (or medium) of the object. The
medium is also named with an abbreviated title. There are four main subsets
within the medium category: architecture (ARCH), painting (PTG),
sculpture (SC), and a catch-all category called “miscellaneous,” or “minor
arts” (MSS or MA). The content of the MA category includes maps,
mosaics, tapestries, furniture, jewelry and various other decorative arts.
The third level refers to the name of the artist. The artist is named in
this format: LAST NAME, first name [birth date- death date].
The forth level allows for various secondary categories (such as
different styles within an artist’s repertoire).
A good number of the slides were purchased as sets from slide
vending companies. Other fashion slides were created through copystand
photography by Louise Kulp, curator of F&M’s visual resources collection.
Following strict copyright guildlines set by the Visual Resources
Association, Louise takes photographs of images from books and then has
these photographs developed as slides.
Western Art Hierarchy
-Country
-Medium
-Artist
-various secondary
categories
I studied the fashion slides themselves, in order to understand the
information I would be organizing. I also studied the sources of
these images in order to get some background on fashion history.
There are more than 700 slides, obtained from various sources.
One set of slides, entitled History of Costume VI: Fashion in the 20th
Century, featured over 300 images surveying the changing trends and
styles in fashion throughout the 20th
century. Another set featured
images of buttons used on 18th
and 19th
century dress, while another set
depicted Utility fashions worn in England during WWII, and another
set collected illustrations from the 1910s French fashion magazine,
Gazette du Bonton. Professor Rauser also selected pictures from a
variety of books to be made into slides, including a biography of
Ralph Lauren, a collection of photography from Vogue magazine, and
a book about the Aesthetic Movement. The content of the slides
varied widely, but I did notice some like characteristics:
From my research of fashion history, I decided that chronology was the most
important factor. What separates one style of dress from another is based more upon when
it was, rather than where it was. Therefore, I eliminated the country of origin category
entirely. Within the chronological period, the largest and most obvious division was
between men’s versus women’s clothing. Therefore, I created a category for gender
(which also includes a subset of “group,” for images featuring men and women together).
The next level got a bit trickier. Some slides depicted fashions created by
designers, but many were by anonymous designers (perhaps tailors or seamstresses). Also,
some images are qualified more by their use within the context of culture (as photographs,
as movie stills, as illustrations, as advertisements) more than anything else. Based on the
content of the fashion slides in our collection, I decided to put together these two factors as
parallel categories. If a slide is an illustration from a fashion magazine, that is the next
qualifying feature. But if a slide is just a photograph of an historical costume on a
mannequin, then the clothing is not seen in the context of the culture, and the category
does not apply. All clothes will have designers, but some are just referred to as
“anonymous.”
Costume Classification System:
-Chronological Period
-Gender
-Costume in Culture
-Designer
Santa Cruz classification:
-1970s
-Britain
-Black gown
Fogg classification:
-Black gown
-Britain
-1970s
Philadelphia Museum of Art:
-1970s
-Britain
-BIBA
Metropolitan Museum of Art:
-1970s
-Black gown
-BIBA
The first phase of the project involved researching methods of how to organize a visual
resources collection. This involved studying theories of classifying information, as well as
comparing classification systems used by professional research institutions. Through my
research, I learned what qualifications to consider when organizing the fashion slides.
The theory behind classification is that things with like characteristics are separated from
unlike things and then grouped together in a category. The separation of like from unlike could be
based on hierarchy, association, the alphabet, or chronology (among other things). The separation
and arrangement of information into categories then determines the physical placement of
materials within the collection. The system used to classify materials should be logical enough so
that users can easily locate specific materials they want from the collection. But the system should
be flexible enough to allow for expansion into new categories in case the amount of materials
within the collection increases.
Developing a system of classification really depends upon the materials that make up the
collection and what the overall purpose of the collection is. There are several well-known systems
designed to organize books, including the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems.
Because I was working with a collection of fashion images, I researched several systems designed
to deal specifically with art objects or their images, including:
Introduction:
Classification:
Visual Resources
Collection:
The Fashion
Slides
Many slides depict photographs of
historic costumes on mannequins.
These slides showcase the costume
for research purposes . This is a
purple velvet court coat from ca.
1780.
Some slides depict celebrity
figures in fashionable attire. This
is a film still from “Flying Down
to Rio,” featuring Ginger Rogers
and Fred Astaire in 1933.
Other slides depict advertisements
for clothing, placing the clothing
within the context of the culture of
the period. This a 1940s
illustration for a coat sold at
Kendals department store.
Other slides showcase work done
by particular famous designers.
This is a fashion plate of a red
taffeta dress designed by Yves
St. Laurent in 1981.
The Fashion
Classification Scheme
Putting it all together! I created a unique classification scheme for the fashion
slides that would integrate them within the whole of the visual resources collection.
With all these factors in mind, I took the 700 fashion slides out of the
“Miscellaneous Arts” category in which they had been temporarily placed. The fashion
slides would have gotten lost within the 100,000 other slides if they were separated
according to the “Western Art” hierarchy. Moreover, what was important in
categorizing art objects (like country of origin, artist name, and medium) really did not
apply to categorizing fashion and costume items. Therefore, I created a separate
hierarchy for costume images that was new and different from the rest of the visual
resources collection:
Take this image of Twiggy in a black sequined
strapless gown by British designer BIBA, for
example. It is a photograph taken for Italian
Vogue magazine in 1974. Here is how it
would be classified according to the other
schemes:
Western Art Hierarchy:
-Britain
-Black gown
-BIBA
Costume Classification Scheme:
-1970s
-Women’s
-Photograph
-BIBA
The new costume scheme is more specific and logical to the
needs of the fashion images in our collection.