Clothing & Accessories
Work, play, fashion, economic class, religious faith, even politics—all these aspects of American life and more are woven into clothing. The Museum cares for one of the nation's foremost collections of men's, women's, and children's garments and accessories—from wedding gowns and military uniforms to Halloween costumes and bathing suits.
The collections include work uniforms, academic gowns, clothing of presidents and first ladies, T-shirts bearing protest slogans, and a clean-room "bunny suit" from a manufacturer of computer microchips. Beyond garments, the collections encompass jewelry, handbags, hair dryers, dress forms, hatboxes, suitcases, salesmen's samples, and thousands of fashion prints, photographs, and original illustrations. The more than 30,000 artifacts here represent the changing appearance of Americans from the 1700s to the present day.
"Clothing & Accessories - Overview" showing 953 items.
Page 1 of 96
Paper Dress, Campbell's Soup Company
- Description
- Everyday objects were elevated to artistic inspiration in Andy Warhol's painting Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and "The Souper" paper dress.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1968-1972
- ID Number
- 1992.0319.001
- catalog number
- 1992.0319.001
- accession number
- 1992.0319
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Cast Iron Shoes
- Description
- Dating from the 18th century, these metal shoes were made for and worn by a chemist. The donor is purported to have purchased these from a direct descendant of the famous French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, and the shoes were supposedly worn by Lavoisier. However, there is no way to verify this claim, so we value these shoes for what they can tell us about early French scientific and cultural history.
- They are made of cast iron; each shoe weighs over 1-1/2 lbs! The shoes slip on. There are rivets all around the top of the heels, sides, and insteps. On one shoe, some remnants of leather remain under the rivets. Whether this leather was strictly decorative or served some practical purpose is unknown.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 18th century
- ID Number
- CH*330783
- catalog number
- 330783
- accession number
- 299585
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Hattie Carnegie Original Two-Piece Dress
- Description
- This evening dress, made of yellow-green silk satin, with princess-style seams, has a very full skirt, measuring 409-1/2 inches around the hem edge. The gown's pleated portrait collar and short sleeves were cut all-in-one with the upper bodice panel. A separate self-fabric belt with rhinestone buckle encircles the waist. A "Hattie Carnegie Original" designer's label is sewn on an inside skirt seam.
- Hattie Carnegie, one of a few female entrepreneurs in the early to mid-20th century, was born Henrietta Kanengeiser in Vienna, Austria, in 1886. She came to the United States in 1892. Her first job was as a messenger, sometime milliner, and model in Macy's department store. She decided to change her name and chose the surname of the richest man in the country, Andrew Carnegie, to reflect her ambitions. With determination and an innate sense for style and business, she became a symbol of taste and high fashion to many Americans.
- From the very beginning her wholesale and retail establishments attracted the wealthy. She opened her first shop, "Carnegie—Ladies' Hatter" in 1909, making and selling custom-made dresses and hats. As her business grew, she established her own wholesale house, which manufactured clothing with her label and sold in select stores. Well-known designers such as Claire McCardell and Norman Norell began their careers designing for her. By 1945, her shop on 49th Street in New York had added more departments, including American and French designs and accessories for "smart" dressing.
- This dress was worn by the donor, Mrs. Morehead Patterson, nee Margaret Tilt, the daughter of Charles A. Tilt of Chicago's Diamond T. Motor Car. She was at one time married to Moorehead Patterson, CEO of the American Foundry Machine Company (AMF), New York City.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1948-1949
- used by
- Patterson, Mrs. Morehead
- maker
- Carnegie, Hattie
- designer
- Carnegie, Hattie
- ID Number
- CS*248146.006
- catalog number
- 248146.006
- accession number
- 248146
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Evening Dress, Oleg Cassini
- Description
- French-born American fashion designer Cassini influenced fashion trends of the early sixties using strong colors and lavish fabrics in his elegant and modern designs.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1961-1970
- designer
- Cassini, Oleg
- ID Number
- CS*308346.006
- catalog number
- 308346.006
- accession number
- 308346
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Man's Two-Piece Suit
- Description
- The donor purchased this navy-blue wool double-breasted two-piece suit on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in early 1945. He wore it for his 1945 high school class picture and graduation ceremony in Los Angeles, California. He continued to wear the suit until he entered the navy in July of 1945. The May 1945 issue of Esquire magazine featured a similar suit, claiming that jackets with buttons set low were accepted by men conscious of the subtleties of fashion. They also noted that a double-breasted jacket with low buttons and long lapels accentuated the height of the wearer.
- While not every man owned a suit in pre-Civil War America, the development of the ready-to-wear industry in the United States made the purchase of a suit possible for most men by the end of the 19th century. The availability of ready-made suits at a reasonable price was helped by the shift from the more formal frock coat and trousers of the 19th century to the more relaxed fit of the sack coat. It is the sack suit or lounge suit, a business suit made of wool with a loose fitting single or double-breasted jacket that dominated men's fashion throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1945
- user
- Morgan, Jr., Arthur A.
- ID Number
- CS*316499.001
- catalog number
- 316499.001
- accession number
- 316499
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Pulsar Electronic Wristwatch
- Description
- Most Americans learned about digital electronic watches for the first time when the Pulsar came on the market in 1972.
- The Pulsar originated in a watch built by George Thiess and colleagues at ElectroData, a small electronics firm in Garland, Texas, and developed into a marketable piece of fine jewelry when ElectroData partnered with a division of the Hamilton Watch Co. of Lancaster, Pa. The watch had no moving parts. It was huge, showy and expensive. With a price tag of $2100, the Pulsar cost about as much as a small car at that time.
- Hamilton marketed the watch as "a time computer." The display was composed of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that consumed so much power that the watch couldn't display the time continuously. Instead, the wearer had to push a button to illuminate the time. Pressing the button briefly displayed the hour and minute. Holding the button down a little longer showed the seconds. To set the watch required a small magnet stored in the watchband's clasp.
- For these inconveniences, Pulsar's proud owner got the most accurate time then available in a wristwatch. The new quartz technology inside made the watch accurate to within a minute a year, compared to about 15 seconds a day for the best mechanical watch.
- The wristwatch was completely reinvented with all-new electronic components beginning in the 1960s. For centuries before then, watches had been mechanical--composed of intricate moving parts powered by an unwinding spring. When battery-driven quartz wristwatches first hit the market, it seemed unlikely that the new-fangled gadgets would sell. But electronic watches won over the buying public.
- Today, mechanical watches make up only approximately 10% of the world watch market. The components for the quartz watch emerged from independent streams of invention that stretched over nearly a century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries scientists identified new materials like liquid crystals and discovered unknown properties such as piezoelectricity, the ability of certain crystals to produce electrical voltage when pressed mechanically. During the Cold war, researchers in defense and aerospace technologies laid the basis for miniaturizing electronic circuitry. In the 1960s, enterprising manufacturers applied the new research to the first electronic consumer products—tvs, calculators, hearing aids, and watches.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- ca 1972
- maker
- Hamilton Watch Co.
- ID Number
- 1994.0354.02
- catalog number
- 1994.0354.02
- accession number
- 1994.0354
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
American Watch Company Prototype
- Description
- The first firm to mass-produce watches by machine was the American Watch Company of Massachusetts. Oliver B. Marsh, one of the firm's earliest watchmakers, designed and made this watch as a prototype.
- The appetite for watches in the United States in the early part of the 19th century was huge; about $46 million worth were imported between 1825 and 1858, especially from England Switzerland. To tap into this market, a few Americans attempted to develop watches domestically, but probably no more than two thousand watches were made in the United States before the 1850s.
- In that decade, watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, developed the world's first machine-made watches. They completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on specialized machines they invented just for that purpose. They also developed a highly organized factory-based work system to speed production and cut costs.
- The firm was launched in 1849 in a corner of the Howard & Davis clock factory in Roxbury, near Boston, where Edward Howard and Aaron Dennison experimented with completely new designs for watches and the machines to make them. With expert help from a cadre of experienced mechanicians and funding from Howard's father-in-law, the Boston mirror maker Samuel Curtis, the enterprise got under way.
- Dennison had absorbed techniques for the mass production of firearms with interchangeable parts during a visit at the Springfield Armory. The primary measures the new firm adopted from arms making were a tight organization, a critically important machine shop, and a manufacturing system that relied on models. Waltham designers made a model watch and a master set of gauges to fit it, and every watch part made thereafter was measured against the corresponding model part.
- In its first decade, the firm's work was largely experimental, but by late in 1852, Howard and Dennison finally had products-seventeen watches, made mostly by hand by brothers Oliver and David Marsh. One of these prototypes, a watch made by Oliver Marsh, survives in the collections of the museum.
- O. B. Marsh's watch was large compared to other pocket watches of the time. The white- enamel dial indicated minutes around the rim and featured four smaller dials indicating hours (at 6:00) seconds (at 12:00), days of the week (at 9:00) and date (at 3:00).
- The design of these first watches, eight-day movements with two mainsprings, gave way to a simpler one, a watch that ran on one mainspring for a little more than a day. Although superficially similar to English watches of the time, the new American watch featured a mainspring in a "going barrel." This meant a watch without the traditional fusee and chain to equalize the force of the unwinding spring. This was a watch with fewer parts to make.
- The next hundred Waltham watches, built on the new model, took until the fall of 1853. The third batch of nine hundred sold for just $40 each, cased. An imported movement of the same quality cost twice as much.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1849-1851
- Date made
- ca 1852
- manufacturer
- Waltham Watch Company
- maker
- American Waltham Watch Co.
- Oliver B. Marsh
- Oliver B. Marsh, for American Watch Co.
- ID Number
- ME*334625
- accession number
- 310796
- catalog number
- 334625
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
William Ellery model Pocketwatch
- Description
- During the Civil War Army physician Dr. G. D. O'Farrell received this watch as a gift from grateful patients.
- In the 1850s watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, developed the world's first machine-made watches. They completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on specialized machines invented just for that purpose. They also developed a highly organized factory-based work system to speed production and cut costs.
- In its first decade, the firm's work was largely experimental and the firm's finances were unsteady. The name of the company changed repeatedly as investors came and went. Operations moved from Roxbury to Waltham in 1854, and the Panic of 1857 brought bankruptcy and a new owner, Royal Robbins. Reorganization and recovery began, and output reached fourteen thousand watches in 1858.
- Renamed the American Watch Company the next year, the firm was on the brink of success from an unexpected quarter. During the Civil War, Waltham's watch factory designed and mass-produced a low-cost watch, the William Ellery model. Selling for an unbelievable $13.00, these watches became a fad with Union soldiers. Just as itinerant peddlers had aroused the desire for inexpensive clocks, roving merchants sold thousands of cheap watches to eager customers in wartime encampments. By 1865, the year the war ended, William Ellery movements represented almost 45 per cent of Waltham's unit sales.
- This William Ellery model watch was a gift to Army surgeon G. D. O'Farrell from his patients at White Hall, a Civil War hospital near Philadelphia. The inscription on the dust cover of O'Farrell's watch reads: "White Hall USA Gen'l Hospital, Feb. 15, 1865 Presented to Dr. G. D. O'Farrell, USA by the patients of Ward C as a token of regard & respect for his ability as a surgeon and unswerving integrity as a man."
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1864
- presentation
- 1865
- maker
- American Waltham Watch Co.
- ID Number
- 1987.0853.01
- catalog number
- 1987.0853.01
- accession number
- 1987.0853
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Sir Sandford Fleming's Pocketwatch
- Description
- This watch belonged to Sir Sandford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway. About 1880, Fleming devised a plan for worldwide time zones and had a complicated watch made to reflect both zoned time and local time.
- The maker of Fleming's watch is the London firm of Nicole, Nielsen & Co. Successor to a business founded by Swiss immigrants Adolphe Nicole and Jules Capt in the late 1830s, the firm made high-quality timepieces. Fleming ordered the watch through retailer E. White, also of London.
- Fleming's first notions about time reform emerged on a trip to Ireland in 1876, when he missed a train because he misread a timetable. His initial plan concentrated on replacing the two twelve-hour designations of the day, A.M. and P.M., with a twenty-four hour system. Almost immediately, though, he expanded his ideas about time reform to propose a system he called variously "Terrestrial Time," "Cosmopolitan Time," and "Cosmic Time"-a division of the globe into twenty-four zones, each one hour apart and identified by letters of the alphabet.
- As the 1880s began there was no binding international agreement about how to keep time for the world. Traditionally, each country used its own capital city or main observatory for measuring time and designating lines of longitude on national maps. After publication of the British Nautical Almanac began in 1767, many nations came to use Greenwich time for navigation and some scientific observations. Local mean time served for all other activities.
- Added emphasis on Greenwich had come from North America when the railroads there voluntarily adopted a standard zoned time in 1883. In that system, the zones were based on meridians counted west from Greenwich, England, at zero degree of longitude.
- Fleming was not the first or only proponent of world standard time. Quirico Filopanti, an Italian mathematics and engineering professor, for example, published a scheme based on twenty-four zones counted from Rome as prime meridian in 1858.
- Organized international support emerged slowly for fixing a common prime meridian. Not until October 1884 did diplomats and technical specialists gather to act on scientific proposals. The International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC, recommended that the nations of the world establish a prime meridian at Greenwich, count longitude east and west from the prime meridian up to 180 degrees in each direction, and adopt a universal day beginning at Greenwich at midnight. Although the International Meridian Conference had no authority to enforce its suggestions, the meeting resulted in the gradual worldwide adoption of a time-zone based system with Greenwich as zero degrees.
- The military and some civilian science, aviation and navigation efforts still use alphabet identifiers for time zones. The time of day in Zone Z is known as "Zulu Time." The zone is governed by the zero degree of longitude that runs through Greenwich.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- ca 1880
- maker
- Nicole, Nielsen & Co.
- ID Number
- 1990.0659.01
- catalog number
- 1990.0659.01
- accession number
- 1990.0659
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Delkin Pocket Watch
- Description
- The first mechanized watch developed in the 17th century from earlier types of spring-powered clocks. Prior to the 1920s, pocket watches were not only a utilitarian accessory but they also conveyed an owner’s social status, wealth, and education.
- Anton Louis Delkin, the jeweler who made this watch, was born in Atlanta in 1861 to a Dutch father and a German mother. By the time he was just seventeen years old, Delkin was the foreman of one of the largest watch factories in the southern United States. In 1900 he decided to try his luck, and hopefully find his fortune, as part of the Nome Gold Rush (around 1899—1909). Delkin accompanied his wife’s uncle, J. H. Ladd, from the Southeast to Alaska in search of gold.
- Six years after arriving in Alaska, Delkin created this impressive man’s pocket watch out of eighteen-karat yellow and rose gold. Encrusted on the watch are gold nuggets. This rugged design recalls the finds that were made in Nome during this, Alaska’s largest Gold Rush period. This substantial timepiece was donated by members of Delkin’s family. It recounts the adventure and fortune sought by so many in Alaska at the turn of the 20th century.
- date made
- 1906
- user
- Delkin, Anton
- watch works maker
- Reliance
- maker
- Delkin, Anton
- ID Number
- 1994.0160.001
- catalog number
- 1994.0160.001
- accession number
- 1994.0160
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
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