{"id":22715,"date":"2019-01-17T12:17:22","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T17:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22715"},"modified":"2019-01-17T12:22:10","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T17:22:10","slug":"the-fabric-of-our-lives-museum-looks-at-birth-marriage-and-death-through-textiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/the-fabric-of-our-lives-museum-looks-at-birth-marriage-and-death-through-textiles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fabric of our Lives \u2013 Museum looks at birth, marriage and death through textiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever flipped through the family album and groaned at some of the things you or a loved one wore in the past \u2013 be it a bridal gown or a suit worn for a particularly special occasion \u2013 you know firsthand how fashion can be a snapshot in time.
\nFor the Aurora Museum and Archives, however, fashion can mean so much more; just a few garments can tell the story of a whole life, or a whole community, and it is this idea they are set to explore this spring in a new exhibition Births, Marriages and Deaths.
\nCurated by Museum Studies students from the University of Toronto, the exhibit aims to illustrate the fabric of Aurora\u2019s history through garments associated with the major milestones of a person\u2019s life, through beautifully preserved christening and wedding gowns, uniforms, period mourning clothes and much more.
\nThe exhibition is the brainchild of Rachel Dice, a U of T student who has worked as a summer intern at the Aurora Museum of Archives. Joining the museum team, she jumped at the chance to work on textiles preserved in the collection, a passion she had since she was a child watching her mother, who owns a fashion design school.
\nMs. Dice\u2019s area of expertise is actually historical literature, but when she got her hands on these local textiles, the creative juices began to flow.
\n\u201cBy the end of [working with the textiles as an intern] we realised we had a lot more stuff than we thought,\u201d says Ms. Dice. \u201cWe thought it would be really cool to put them on display. As for themes, we weren\u2019t really sure how to show the most number of our textile collections under one comprehensive idea, so that was when we all started working together on themes like life, death and all those fun and not-so-fun occasions in between. A lot of the clothing we have here is the best clothing people would have owned, things you wouldn\u2019t have worn all the time, which is how they managed to survive to come to us. We wanted to show that off with as much information about Aurora and its history as we could.\u201d
\nJoined by fellow students Carolyn Ben and Jessica Ho, they set an additional goal for themselves: narrating an exhibit through objects alone.
\n\u201cTextiles invoke the presence of the person who wore them when you see them up on a stand,\u201d says Ms. Ben. \u201cThey are very personal. They tell a bigger story. When you have a wedding dress on display, you can see the bride on her wedding day, but [in the museum] you can also see the cards of sympathy for her husband dying 50 years later and you can trace the family through all those special occasions.\u201d
\nMs. Ho and Ms. Ben came into the project not quite as familiar with the stores within the Aurora Museum & Archives as Ms. Dice, but they were soon hard at work going through hundreds of pieces carefully stored in innumerable boxes.
\nThey uncovered a story through a christening gown about a local librarian who adopted a little girl who may or may not have been her niece. Intrigued by what they describe as this \u201cmissing link\u201d they uncovered a story that just kept unfolding like a \u201cspider\u2019s web.\u201d
\nThe guest curators say they each found birth, marriage and death equally interesting in their own right, the rites \u2013 and indeed the commercialization \u2013 surrounding death was particularly intriguing.
\n\u201cDeath is a little bit difficult to portray because our practices around death have really changed quite a bit over the years, especially over the two World Wars,\u201d says Ms. Dice. \u201cWe have some really cool mourning items and practices, including a wreath of flowers made of coiled and embroidered hair of the dead. It was a very common thing with mourning jewellery and making stuff out of your loved one\u2019s hair.\u201d
\nAdds Ms. Ben: \u201cDeath was a huge industry. If you went to Eaton\u2019s, they would have a whole section on mourning clothes. If someone died, you had to wear non-stop black for over a year. Some women just never bothered to go out of it because someone else would die and they would be back in black again. We have a lot of beautiful condolence notes of people who died, we have information about their funerals, which is really interesting.\u201d
\nMs. Ho, on the other hand, is a champion of the marriage component in the exhibition.
\n\u201cDifferent wedding outfits really show the personalities of the person,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is a time to get the family together for an occasion that is about the whole family.\u201d
\nOne area that is slightly lacking in the collection, she adds, are uniforms and other garments associated with the First World War. The trio of curators have a few theories on why that is; the prevailing one being that after the reality of the First World War \u2013 then known as simply The Great War as it was unlike anything they had ever experienced to that point \u2013 set in, people wanted no memory of it. They wanted it gone and saved very little. This extends beyond uniforms to the everyday clothing of that period which, at a time of shortage, were often cut down into rags and put to other uses.
\n\u201cWe want to tell a story about Aurora\u2019s past,\u201d says Ms. Dice. \u201cIf they come out of here knowing something more about their local heritage and history, even if it is about a specific person or some gossip about an adopted daughter or just an idea of the way christening gowns have changed, but not really, I think we would have done a good job.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve ever flipped through the family album and groaned at some of the things you or a loved one wore in the past \u2013 be it a bridal gown or a suit worn for a particularly special occasion \u2013 you know firsthand how fashion can be a snapshot in time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/2019-01-17-04.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5Un","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 13:06:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}