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.
6
Page 1 of 1
-
Environmental Button
- Description
- The Sierra Club, an American environmental organization headquartered in San Francisco, developed a reputation in the 1960s as an aggressive defender of wild lands. Its activist approach has continued, and its areas of concern have expanded. The organization was founded in 1892 by John Muir, a Scottish American naturalist and essayist.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- early 1990s
- ID Number
- 1999.0248.68
- catalog number
- 1999.0248.68
- accession number
- 1999.0248
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Environmental Button
- Description
- Produced by the group Zero Population Growth, this button highlights anxiety created by the continued growth of the world’s population, first remarked upon by Englishman Thomas Malthus in his 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Paul R. Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb, published in 1968, renewed interest in the topic by raising concerns about the potential risks of overpopulation.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- maker
- Zero Population Growth
- ID Number
- 2003.0014.0137
- accession number
- 2003.0014
- catalog number
- 2003.0014.0137
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Environmental Button
- Description
- The universal symbol for recycling is shown on this button. The symbol, a mobius loop formed by three arrows, was designed as part of a contest in 1970 by University of Southern California student Gary Anderson.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- maker
- Badge-A-Minit
- ID Number
- 2003.0014.0273
- accession number
- 2003.0014
- catalog number
- 2003.0014.0273
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Environmental Button
- Description
- While many of the buttons in our collections were produced by environmental organizations, the causes they espouse are often advocated by government agencies. This button is a good example. It was made in Canada by the Alberta Energy and Natural Resources.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- ID Number
- 2003.0014.0362
- accession number
- 2003.0014
- catalog number
- 2003.0014.0362
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Environmental Button
- Description
- In 1982 eight grassroots activist groups concerned with coastal issues banded together to form the nonprofit North Carolina Coastal Federation. They saw a need for a clearer vision of long-term coastal management. The establishment of wetland water quality standards and the restoration of estuaries were just two of the concerns addressed by this group.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- ID Number
- 2003.0014.0836
- catalog number
- 2003.0014.0836
- accession number
- 2003.0014
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Railroad Watch
- Description
- This English watch was a part of a technical fix applied to U.S. railroads following accidents in the middle of the 19th century.
- Back then timetables governed train arrivals and departures, established train priorities, and ensured that trains did not collide on single-track lines. Clocks in railroad stations and watches held by conductors and engineers helped to enforce the timetables.
- But in the middle of the 19th century, timepieces in use on the railroads varied wildly in quality and availability to employees of the line. There was no single standard of quality for railroad timekeepers. After a horrific fatal accident on the Providence & Worcester Railroad in August 1853, caused in part by the inaccuracy of a conductor's watch, some railroads in New England responded to public criticism of their industry by tightening up running rules and ordering top-quality clocks and watches for their employees.
- This is one such high-quality railroad watch.
- An official representing the Vermont Central Railroad and three other New England lines, William Raymond Lee, ordered watches and clocks in late 1853 from William Bond & Sons, Boston, the American agent for Barraud & Lund of London. The English firm delivered the first of the timepieces in January 1855. The Vermont Central purchased fifteen watches for $150 each and one clock for $300.
- Barraud & Lund, founded in 1750 by Huguenot watchmaker Francis-Gabriel Barraud, had a long-standing reputation for high-quality timepieces, including marine chronometers, clocks and watches. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the firm had extensive foreign markets and added John Richard Lund, a chronometer maker, to their business.
- William Bond & Son, the firm named on the watch's dust cap, was one of the principal timepiece purveyors of nineteenth-century America. Intimately connected to navigation and commercial shipping, the firm rated and repaired marine chronometers for the busy port of Boston and supplied instruments of all sorts to agencies of the federal government-specifically, the coast survey, the topographical engineers, and the navy. The firm, whose original business provided time for navigating at sea, branched out with the railroad business to perform the same service on land.
- Date made
- 1853
- maker
- Barraud & Lund
- ID Number
- 1999.0278.01
- catalog number
- 1999.0278.01
- accession number
- 1999.0278
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
Filter Your Results
Click to remove a filter:
