University of Connecticut

The University of Connecticut’s Institutional Insights and Innovation team will design, build, and launch a digital archive of over 20,000 American fashion illustrations of clothing from 1790 to 1930. While the underlying database will initially be stocked with fashion plates, its structure will permit adding photographs, paintings, and images of surviving garments. Project staff will create guides to educate users about how to recognize identifying features of clothing to date unidentified garments and portraits. Organized by garment type, the resulting website will feature the digitized archive as well as a new online tool that allows users to sort and filter collection materials by visual criteria. The online resource will help museum staff and public researchers to date and identify American clothing as well as interpret the cultural significance of historical clothing for public audiences.