Student Molly Hogan is on a mission – helping Professor Marcy Linton to document a collection of more than 3,500 pieces of historic clothing, kept in the basement of UVA’s theater building, under one of two stages. The pictures she’s taking will someday be online – not subject to temperature fluctuations that are common under pipes that supply heat and air conditioning.
“The clothes regain a little humidity in the summer, and then they’re extremely dried out in the winter, and it’s going back and forth, and it’s causing things like this – this fracturing of the fabric – just by being in this room,” she explains.
Linton has been making costumes since she was 15, so when she got the chance to oversee a historic collection of clothing, she was delighted. She walks past carefully labeled boxes and racks of garments – past decades of American history.
“This is like a cape from the 1860’s. Wow, beautiful. It is. This is actually monkey. It didn’t matter what the fur was. They would wear it.”…