 And now it's my pleasure to turn the floor over to Jenny Arena. Thank you so much, Adam. So you know I'm Jenny Arena and I'm with Heritage Preservation. We're so glad you're joining us today. It looks like right now the room has 126 folks in here and it's slowly climbing. Let me go ahead and start by giving a quick introduction to the community and these webinars, and then we'll move on to our topic. So Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Time. And the goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we've drawn on many resources that were developed through the C2C initiative including the Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshop and webinars. Links to all of these resources can be found under our topics menu on the main website. Then about once a month or more, the online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource or topic and host a webinar related to it. Recordings of these webinars are archived on our main homepage, connectingtocollections.org. Today's webinar will also be recorded and added to the archive, and you can see a new topic menu webinar archive there. And they're also filed under the topics menu by Subjects. Now today I am so pleased to welcome Kathleen Kiefer and Petra Slinkar. Both women are from the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Kathleen is a senior conservator of textiles, and Petra is a curatorial associate within textile and fashion art. And they've kindly agreed to lead this discussion today on mounting garments for display with an emphasis on mounting to mannequins. Kathleen and Petra, would you mind telling the group a little bit about yourself, and Kathleen will go ahead and start with you. Okay, great. This is Kathleen Kiefer, as Jenny said, and I'm the senior conservator of textiles at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I've been here a little over five and a half years, and we're very exhibition driven in the work that we do here. Lots and lots of textiles being prepared for display. Prior to coming to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, I was a textile conservator at Winniter Museum Gardens and Library, and also involved in teaching in the Graduate Conservation Training Program there. And my name is Petra Slinkar, and I have been with the Indianapolis Museum of Art in the textile and fashion arts department for about six years. Actually, May will be my sixth year. And prior to working at the IMA, I worked as a curatorial assistant with the Sage Collection, which is a social history clothing collection located on Indiana University's campus in Bloomington, Indiana. And I also did some work with the Kinsey Institute and their clothing collection and have been heavily involved in assisting Kathleen with mounting exhibitions, but also working alongside our curator, Neely Paydar, in researching and developing the thesis for multiple exhibitions at the IMA. Great, thank you both so much. So before we get started, we just wanted to ask a few poll questions to get a feel for our audience. And as we've done in webinars in the past, these will be door prize questions. So we'll choose some of our respondents at random, and you'll win your choice of a book from the CDC Bookshelf. So our first question is, what type of collections do you work with? And I'll give you some time to fill that out. And I'll also pull over our second question to get an idea of how big your institution is. And we go about that by asking how large your staff is. So it looks like about 68 of you, and this is still taking our from historical work with historical collections. And a few of our other options. And it looks like we have a pretty good mix of how large your staff is. As you can see, most popular is five or less. So some smaller institutions with us today. Okay, I'm going to move these over. And I've got one more question for you, which relates to today's topic, of course. Do you currently use mannequins to mount historical garments? And your options are yes and no, and then no, but you are interested in starting or learning more. I'll give you a few seconds to answer that. Looks like we have 144 people in the room with us. So a lot of you say yes, 76 say yes. Only six say no. And then another 43 say no, but you're interested in learning more, which is fantastic. Okay. So I'm going to move over Kathleen and Petra's PowerPoint, and they wanted to start today off a video. I'm going to launch that in just one second. Feel free throughout their presentation to ask questions. I'll make sure to save those and we'll ask them as soon as they're done presenting. Okay, Kathleen and Petra, I'm going to go ahead and hit play on this. For this exhibition, we have a select set of mannequins. And for the most part, those mannequins work quite well for our needs. However, for this show, because it was a very contemporary show, there were some pieces that we needed to make some adjustments to. In some cases, we really have to be kind of creative in how we build out and manipulate mannequins. You know, it's not a clothing store. We don't have a variety of sizes to choose from. We have one size and that's, you know, it was built for a particular person. And so we have to accommodate in the best possible way. Each piece requires a lot of individual attention. We had to really modify mannequins for this dress here by Tara Mugler. It's called the Space Age Cocktail Dress. And this dress has a 22 and a half inch waist, which is actually very small. When you see a final product and it's with any kind of art or technology, you know, your people, I think we tend to be so engrossed in the final product that we don't stop to think about all the steps that we've took to get there. In some cases, we really have to be kind of creative in how we build out and manipulate the mannequins. Okay, I'm going to move this over and then I'll hand things over to you guys. All right, you're all set. Great, I'm sure you can just get started for us. Okay, well thank you for joining us. And having looked at the results of the survey questions, it looks like most of the people who have signed on are from smaller institutions. And I'd like to point out just from the get-go that while the IMA is a larger institution and we are very fortunate to have a lot of resources at our disposal, the textile department is actually just a department of essentially four people. So we can kind of relate to some of the smaller institutions that are working with the staff of maybe five or six. So just keep that in mind that we appreciate where you're coming from. And so one of the first things that we wanted to talk about was just kind of give you an overview of what our starting point is anytime we do an exhibition. And the focus of this presentation will be primarily on 20th century and in some cases 21st century garments and mounting those garments. But we do very frequently work with historical dress, both male and female. And we work with ethnographic dress and textiles as well. So anytime we're preparing an exhibition we're constantly looking at a variety of resources and brainstorming to figure out the best ways to present those pieces. And so the first thing that we essentially do is research. Then we do assessments of the garments and then we collaborate with conservation. And some of the first steps that I take basically when we're pulling together a checklist is we pull everything that we're considering and we go in with the conservators and look at every individual piece and determine together whether or not this piece is safe to show. Can it withstand the time period that we're looking at for the exhibition run? Does it actually fit well within the thesis of the proposed exhibition? And then from that point forward, if it fits a yes, then I consult as many relevant resources as I possibly can to get a feel for how this piece was presented on a live person. And sometimes some of the resources that I use are catalog resumes, exhibition catalogs. There are so many custom history books that are available. But some things that I find to be very useful are historical periodicals. And if you use Google Books, you can access a lot of the historical periodicals online by typing in a particular designer's name or maybe a time period. And sometimes we also rely heavily on historical patterns. And I think just getting sort of a feel for how something was worn and within the context that it was worn can be very helpful when devising the best way to present that piece. Also looking at other museum collections. And it doesn't necessarily have to be limited, of course, to art museums. But many collections are now putting their pieces online and just getting an idea for what other pieces are similar to yours. Maybe if you are focusing on a specific designer, looking at institutions that have worked by that same designer. And then some other online resources that I find to be helpful are fashion encyclopedia.com, the vintage fashion guild, and then fashion era.com. And so this is just a nice little display of how historical or sort of terriels, silhouettes change. And we really look at how the basis, the foundation of a garment exists in order to build or create the best or most appropriate silhouette. And so while we'll focus mostly on contemporary pieces today, I think it was important to include the fact that what we're talking about today can be used in historical context as well. And so this is just one example of a range of historical silhouettes. And there are plenty in resources that are available to you in the library or online. And this is a screenshot from the website fashion era.com. And if you are looking for resources, I think that this is a good one because it will break down in specifics. Silhouettes, colors, fabrics, details. Some institutions will prefer to present clothing with the use of accessories or other embellishments, whereas sometimes art institutions will present pieces on their own. You notice that we cut the heads off of our mannequins, so that's sort of a choice that we made in the way that we present our pieces. As I said, patterns provide a nice reference for developing an idea for what kind of accessories go with your pieces and how maybe the stance or the mode that best suits your garment. And so once we've sort of gotten together for an initial chat about what we're going to show, then from the curatorial perspective, the first thing that we really think about is, well, what is it about this piece that stands out to us? What is the design element that makes this piece, this garment, this ensemble, appropriate to show within the thesis of the exhibition? And that's what we want to present to our public. And so from our perspective, from that point forward, we need to collaborate with the conservators to figure out what is the most appropriate way to safely present this piece. And then the secondary is, well, what is the mood of the exhibition? What is the style or the attitude that's appropriate for the mannequin? Because even though they are inanimate objects, they definitely have attitude and they definitely have style. And from a conservation point of view, my main focus is always the safety of the garment, the safety of the artifact, the safety of the museum collection piece. From a broad perspective, that would be thinking about the exhibition environment, light levels, how long something is on display, your standard careful handling, museum practices, things like that. There are references out there that will give specifics on that, so we're not going to cover that today in any depth, but just know that everything is predicated on that careful handling and respect that we have objects that may be fragile and that our goal is to preserve these over time. Focusing a little bit more on individual objects, once I have a checklist of pieces that are proposed for an exhibition, we really look at condition. Is the piece deteriorated in some way? Is it worn? Is there something physically or chemically about it that makes it particularly fragile? And then certain garments have inherent vulnerabilities, just how they're made, things that are made from knitted fabrics. Over time, if they're hanging on a hanger, they'll start to expand under the forces of gravity. The same thing is going to happen to garments on a mannequin, so we make note of these characteristics and in planning the way that we're mounting, we try to ameliorate that, do things that are going to sort of disperse that force of gravity that could be damaging. The example that you're looking at right now, it's a Callous Sours dress from 1926. And these 20s dresses, most people are familiar with them. Often they're very lightweight, silk fabric, chiffon, for example, with lots of heavy beads and embellishments attached. Those can be really problematic as they age. The silk is fragile and heavy beads on there. Often we see those in a condition that they really can't be displayed on a mannequin. This particular gown has silk cloth and broidery mostly, but there's a very heavy embellishment right on the center front, and that's made from heavy beads. And what we've done in this case is to actually attach on the inside of the dress some Velcro that then matches to Velcro that is on a corresponding spot on the mannequin. And what that does is take the weight of this really heavy embellishment off of the dress fabric and allows this to be safely exhibited. Another thing that we see often in garments is garments that are cut on the bias, and that means the straight of grain is at a 45-degree angle, and fabrics tend to be quite stretchy in that direction. This dress here is one of Halston's spiral cut gowns. We'll talk about this a little bit later on, but just for the period of display on a mannequin, you'll see movement in bias cut garments. So those are notes that we take as we're preparing and planning for how we'll mount the garments. And then going back just briefly to assessing what is it that we want to show, we think a lot about what kind of mannequins we have. And really, I think it all boils down to being able to use what you have most effectively. And we are lucky we do have a wide range of mannequins, but they're not always perfect. And so the examples that you see on the screen are two pieces by Halston, and the blue evening ensemble, which is a two-piece pajama ensemble, has a very beautiful, full sleeve. And if both arms were at the side, you would completely lose the benefit of that gorgeous sleeve. And so for that mannequin, we actually broke the arm and reset it, allowing us an opportunity to showcase that aspect of the design. The other dress, which is a very, very heavy beaded gown, features this beautiful slit in the front of the dress. And so the pose that we chose for this mannequin needed to be elegant to correspond with the design of the dress, but also the stance allowed us to showcase that aspect of the dress perfectly. And because of the heavy beading, it was also nice that that stretch that you see of fabric between the legs, our viewers were able to get close enough to see the type of stitching in the way that the beads were hand sewn. And this is an example of how sometimes, again, the mood that's created based on how the garments are put on the mannequins can change. The image that you see where the cape is draped over the arms is from a later exhibition on Christian Dior. And it gave it a lot of some opportunity to really show this beautiful ball gown in its simplicity. But you can see that when the cape is put on with the addition of the head and gloves, that the entire mood or feel of the garment has changed. And something that I've found, and I think probably most of you have maybe experienced in one way or another, is that people are very passionate about mannequins. But I do think that it all boils down to your institution's preferences. And that it's important to decide what your goals as an institution are. From our perspective as an art museum, we look at these objects as works of art. And so to us, while the mannequins do resemble human form, they are truly equivalent to a pedestal or a frame that would be used to showcase another type of artwork. And I'm not going to read this to you, but this is an anonymous comment to a blog post that I had written on some of the mannequin customizations that we've done. And this person had very, very strong feelings about the skin tone, quote-unquote skin tones that we had used, the paint that we chose, and why we, in her opinion, seem to present these objects with more care when they were contemporary versus historical. And my rebuttal to her was that, you know, for historical garments, we use Kyoto mannequins that are specialized and used by many institutions. And that there's a reason that for using the Kyoto mannequins, which is based on the stance that you cannot possibly achieve with a contemporary mannequin. And in the references that we'll have for you today, you can link to that and read the post and also read my response. And I think, as I said, it's important to use what you have at your disposal. And so whether you choose to go ahead or headless, other options that we have are half-legged mannequins, dress forms, and then the custom adjustments that we make ourselves. And in some cases, having a head, whether it has stylized features, stylized hair, stylized poses, can be appropriate as the example that you see on the screen here. And in other cases, not having a head can also be quite effective, because in this case, I think not having a head in the presentation of this bondage suit by Westwood and McLaren, you really, the eye is really drawn to the details of the garment, which in our aspect is the most important part. This is an example of a half-legged form, the blast by Franco Moschino. And in this case, we only had the blouse, we didn't have any accompanying bottom. And so we chose to create prop skirts to cover those legs. And again, in an effort to sort of minimize any distracting elements of the display and then also the dress form. And then customized mannequins is something that we are fortunate to do here. However, if you have access to a table saw or if you have access to other standard power tools, you yourself are capable of making these kinds of adjustments. And I'll just scroll through here. This is Kathleen working on the form that you just saw. The reason that we removed the bust for this mannequin was we initially used it to showcase a Rudy Gernreich design from the 60s, and the bust point was just simply too low. And so we made the decision to remove the breasts and Kathleen built a new bust line for it. This is an example of the modification that we made to a mannequin to accommodate the Terry Mugler dress with the small waist and really removing both sides of the mannequin was the best move for us because we needed the stomach to be full in order to support the dress and also we needed the back to be full to support the back of the dress. This is an example of making a mannequin taller. A lot of times hem length is something that we consider to be very important when presenting historical garments, whether they are 20th century or from previous centuries because the hem length is so important to the way the dress is presented and so in some cases we will have to make a mannequin shorter or in this case we've added epiphoem in order to make her taller. And Kathleen, do you want to talk about mannequin research? Sure, I'll do that. What we've done here, sometimes we buy, if you have a big budget, our museum we usually use what we have on hand and I've heard tell of some shows where they have a budget for mannequins and some of the resources for mannequins are in these next few slides. Goldsmith is a company that's been around a long time and does beautiful quality mannequins. The page that I am showing here shows that they have a huge variety available. So if you're shopping, that's one resource to check out. Rootstein is another mannequin manufacturer that's been around a long time. Often mannequins are based on individuals, models for example and I don't know how they do it if they cast their body or sculpt from them. Rootstein is one of the first, I understand to do that, but they have a huge array available, a good quality reputable company. And then with the internet now there are tons of resources there and if you google mannequins you'll find all kinds of things. And we've had some interesting experiences. Patra, I'll let you talk about it. My advice would just be to plan ahead. We've had experiences where ordering male mannequins, orders have been cancelled without us knowing it, factories have gone on strike, we've run into the problem of ordering mannequins during Chinese New Year, or in some cases we've ordered mannequins and what shows up is not at all what we ordered and so I would say definitely planning ahead. But Las Vegas mannequins, we just had ordered a shipment from them recently, five male mannequins and the price point was decent and it was a good experience. But I would definitely say planning ahead is important because you do not know what you're going to get when you're ordering mannequins. And then what do you do with them when you have them? We have about 100 mannequins or so in our stock, not all of them are great, some get used over and over and over again and some only get used once or twice depending on what it is that we're showcasing, but I like to keep the mannequins put together. I think it's easier to keep track of all their pieces and so what we've done to cattle on them is we have a mannequin binder where each individual mannequin is given a name, the style of the mannequin is recorded, we've done detailed measurements of the mannequin from head to toe and then a corresponding sheet goes with the mannequin itself and you can see that on the image on the screen where there's a plastic, a sleeve with twill tape and basically that is their hang tag and when we're preparing for an exhibition we keep all of the bits and pieces that go with the mannequin within the plastic sleeve or any notes that may address a piece that it will be wearing. Okay and I'm going to talk about sort of nuts and bolts things now. So when you're trying to find a mannequin for a particular garment or one to purchase mannequins, I've found that the measurements that are highlighted here are the ones that are the most critical to try to get in the ballpark when you're trying to match a garment to a mannequin in terms of fit and what we do in museums and as conservators is that we always fit the mannequin to the garment rather than the other way around. We always want to preserve the garment in as best condition as possible and not alter it, try not to misrepresent it. So what is good to do is get a stock of mannequins that are smaller in size. You have more flexibility in terms of what they'll fit. A lot of historic costume is quite small and partly it may be that just the small things that no one else could wear survive so that can be a challenge. So we're always really looking for small sizes but when you do have some mannequins at your disposal and you have garments that you've identified to display using a soft tape measure and measuring the inside of your garment at the points that are noted here, the bust circumference, the waist circumference, the hips circumference and the center back length. That's one that is critical and that is from, there's sort of a bone at the base of the neck, top of the back. From that bone that protrudes a bit down to the waist that gives you a lot of good information. Often garments, the waist point is defined and then the shoulder and bust are other defined points. So getting in the ballpark there is good and then another one that I like to do is the shoulder to the bust point and as Petra talked about earlier sometimes we'll actually remove the breasts from the mannequin. Say 1970s silhouette was a brawless, very natural bust line was popular and for a 50s garment especially it's just too low and sort of gets in the way of where the bust point should be so removing them and rebuilding is an option that we exercise. If you have a super small mannequin you can sometimes just ignore that the breast is there and build a new one that's about it if you aren't able to cut into your mannequins, don't want to do that. What I've gathered here is an array of tools that I find useful and you really don't need a lot to do the mannequin dressing. I've got some nitrile gloves pictured here. In terms of handling a garment, you want to be very careful with it. Of course, you know, have clean hands, use gloves if necessary. Having a glove that's very fitted helps you with manual dexterity, stitching and such so if you're not able to wash your hands frequently wearing gloves is a good idea. A variety of scissors, pins. There's, let's see if I can figure out the error. This little guy here, this silver tool is a micro spatula. Lots of conservation labs have those. They're handy for tucking things in and then my most favorite tool is this right here. I call it my mannequin dressing stick and it has a nice curve to it and I find it really useful for tucking things in and laying things smooth inside of a garment and this is something I found when I was visiting one of the shaker villages in the northeast and there was a guy who was weaving a chair seat out of woven tapes and he had the tape threaded through this stick. I'll go back. That was like a big needle and I just thought, wow, that looks so useful. I have to have one of those. What he had made it from was one of the backs of the chair that didn't quite work out so I was able to get that from him but I love this tool and if you can find something like that it's a useful thing to have. Let's see, and then materials and supplies. Of course we want to use things that are acid free, archival quality. When we're doing these sort of additive modifications to a mannequin, mostly what we'll cover here today is adding padding and building a silhouette with these materials. It's good to have something that you can anchor your padding onto so what I like to use is a tubular cotton stockinette material which is this stuff right here and you can get it from a surgical supply. A lot of people have used pantyhose in the past. They sort of pull them on the bottom of the mannequin over the legs and bottom torso and then cut the crotch out and pull that over the head or over the neck. I have a sort of general aversion to pantyhose so I really like using the tubular stockinette. Let's see, other materials that are here, this polyester needle punch batting. Needle punch is, if you hold the batting up to the light, you'll see sort of little holes in it and it's put together by being felted rather than using adhesives. And in the past, some of the adhesives that are in batting have yellowed. I think that may not be such a problem these days but we do choose to use needle punch batting or polyester felt. We also use loose polyester fiberfill sometime so that's what the little cloud of stuff is right here that you would use to stuff animals with. There's the stockinette up close. You can see that it's quite stretchy and this wide one here, it measures 8 inches across and this is a good size to actually pull over the torso of a mannequin and then this is a 2 inch across stockinette. Let's see, twill tape, indispensable. You'll see the use of that in several places. Nylon net or tool that you get from your local fabric store that's the black and white here. These are sort of a finer version like bridal veiling. Also, sometimes we'll use larger stiffer net. It can be a little scratchy so sometimes you'll want to isolate it from your garment. And then another material that I've been using sometimes is high-density polyethylene sheeting. It's 3 mil, this particular version so it's very lightweight. Sometimes I use it as stuffing using that little mannequin stick I have to tuck in, side garments, and it's also really useful as a dust cover if you're dressing mannequins and they have to hang around for a while before the exhibit opens. And then thread, of course. And I like to use cotton thread the best. It seems to be the easiest to use when you're stitching through polyester batting. It doesn't tend to develop static and twist and knot as readily as some of the poly threads do. So just for ease of use. And then covering fabrics, just basic cotton nets that you can get from your local fabric store. Whenever I do buy things from the local fabric store, I always pre-wash them. And what I usually do is put my washing machine on the gentle permanent press cycle and put in a small amount of one of the Tide Free regular laundry detergent, put in my fabric, and then I do it, run it through once with detergent and then a second cycle with just water. And then I'm being sure to rinse out any adhesive residue and hopefully we're getting rid of sizing anything that could be problematic for the garment. Costume exhibits tend, it's not a good idea to keep things up permanently over time, so we consider them sort of a short-term installation. So I don't auto-test everything that we're using because of time, but we haven't noticed any problems. And we do have a program of auto-testing that we're working on here at the museum. I'm trying to go back and test a lot of things that we're standardly using. So I'll keep you posted and let you know if there are problems. Some things to do before you start is understand Germanic. We have many different sorts and on the slide here you'll see different arm attachment methods. This is a fairly common one. Behind this sort of nipple here there are angled sides and they'll slip into this little keyhole opening. But you have to get them just right. This is actually one of the Kyoto mannequins up here and they have an easier arm attachment mechanism. And then hands, they're removable and sometimes they're really difficult to get the arms and hands on and off. And sometimes you have to really pull the arm far forward to get it to the point where it'll pop in and out of that mechanism. So it's a really good idea to... And they're all individuals too. You can have the same model of mannequin and one will behave differently from another. So we always will try to figure out the quirks of the mannequin before we even approach it with a garment. You also want to make sure that it's clean and smooth. That there aren't any areas on there that will catch or braid that they're not covered with dust and the like. And then also the conservator speaking here you want to make sure that your hands are also clean and smooth before you start working. This mannequin image that's here shows a feature that I like in mannequins. This join that's right here across the hip can be really useful as Petra showed for changing the height of a mannequin. So if you're shopping for mannequins you might want to consider ones that have that feature. Many of them are solid there. All mannequins though have arms that come off and for the most part hands that come off. And I'll show you some examples as we go on where that's really critical. This will be the basic procedure for patting out a mannequin. The first thing we do is pull on a foundation then we'll add patting to create the silhouette that we like. I always like to cover up the polyester batting or fiberfill because those little fibers will really get tangled in your object and it's good to avoid that. What I'm showing here this is a Bill Blass pants ensemble from the 1980s. Very oversized. This is what the mannequin was padded out to look like. It was one of the 1970s bus type mannequins. I was surprised how much of an improvement in the silhouette just adding changing the bus shape and making it a little bit fuller how it supported that garment and really improved the interpretation and also the safety of the garment that wasn't hanging so much on the mannequin. Here's the back view and this is something that we find sometimes and we kind of have to fudge certain things. The waist on the pants was smaller than the mannequin but what I've done is take some embroidery floss it comes in a lot of colors so you can match your trying to get the arrow to move down there you can find a color that's not so obvious but what I do is loop it through one side of the hook and eye closure at the waist and then tie it to the other side and then you can tuck that in and attach you see that and then here's the back of the mannequin as it was for display and with the shirt bloused over it wasn't obvious I don't think that was something that caught people's eyes what I'm going to do now is sprint through some case studies of the mannequins that we've dressed this Halston jumpsuit is cashmere it's a knitted fabric it's very drapey and what you see on the right hand side is the modifications that we've made to support the pantsuit I've got cotton stocking net body stocking on there to sort of it has some nap to it so having that in contact with the net the cashmere net will help that from pulling under gravity and then on the knee the leg also the forward leg I wanted to just sort of grab that and give that fabric a little support you'll also notice that the bottom of the foot on this mannequin I don't know why I can't get my arrow there there it is we've blocked that up to make the mannequin taller because the pants are quite long as part of the jumpsuit here are some more details again 1970s nipples were really important then in fashion but I didn't want over time to stretch out the knitted fabric so what I've done is make those a little less extreme so there is polyester fiberfill here and just rounds of needle punch batting and I've used those to cover the breath and that's just tucked under this cotton stocking net cover and to do these this is that 8 inch tubular just pull it over flip over the mannequin and cut out a bit for the neck and pull up the front and back and at the shoulder seams just stitch it there and then you can also cut out for your armhole and to hold things if I want to do the whole body I just pull it down between the legs and you can see here poke a little hole and then tie it and then that makes a good firm anchor in this case it's just sort of a non-slip covering for the mannequin but in other examples this sort of thing serves as a foundation on which to build your changes there's a close up of the modified foot our exhibit prep guys do these things for us you could also just have a build up that's separate from the mannequin to raise it well with the really long leg we had a problem with the heel of the foot draping sort of awkwardly there so a solution to that that was really easy was taking a piece of two ply map board and scoring it so that it would curve to mimic a heel and just tying it onto the foot and here we see a little bit better drape as though she's got a shoe on with the heel another Halston dress this one is a nice 1970s image that is a reference for us of what we're going for in terms of the look of the dress and this diagram is nice it also shows the sort of spiral cut Halston was known for these really amazing and very in their simplicity and just sort of different garments and so this puts the garment fabric on the bias as it's on the mannequin and here's one of our dresses that's cut in this manner so bias here and you can see some sort of puckering along the seam which is on the straight of grain but this garment too was for some reason it was stored hanging so over time in storage we've had some drooping and there's actually a lining inside the dress and that had expanded at a different rate than the fabric of the dress so we had to make some alterations there again the concept here is to create a non-slip covering to help support this garment we didn't have to do a lot of changing of the silhouette of the mannequin because this is great to have a 1970's mannequin when you're doing Halston clothing from the 70's there was however a really severe sort of break at the knee so what I've done is padded that out here and we've got the two inch tubular stocking that pulled over the leg to hold that padding in place and that gave it a bit more elegant drape here and then also I think it'll be more clear in the next slide there is a panel of nylon net it's right here that I've stitched to the front of this sort of herringbone stitched it right across the bottom edge of the stocking net and this is serving as a sort of slip to keep the dress from collapsing between the legs and then I think you can see there are layers of padding built up here one underneath and then a bigger piece on top and I tend to layer them and sort of bevel the edge and that gives you a smooth more smooth transition when you are adding padding another point to consider when you're looking at your garment and planning how you'll approach dressing the mannequin so that we're not handling it aggressively the sleeve openings here are really too small for the hands to pass through so they need to be removed definitely before the arm is inserted into the sleeve and then this picture here is showing the top of the arm versus the cuff of the sleeve and there's no way that those will fit together so to dress the mannequin in the neck and then down the or the arm needs to go in the neck and down the sleeve here and this is why it's good to understand that mechanism that attaches the arm it's difficult to see that when you're actually trying to do it with a garment in place so it's helpful and you have to also be careful not to pinch the garment in the join when the arm does attach and then pop the hands on after the wrists have gone through the sleeves another Holston dress this one is a beautiful chiffon print and again another one of his masterful pieces it just slips on and then there's a little sort of keyhole shape here under the tie and that holds everything on I was a little worried about this lightweight chiffon dress on the Slippery mannequin falling down during the course of the exhibit so again I've done this sort of non-slip body stocking this one was just pulled over the head that 8 inch stocking at and we padded the bust out a bit to help with supporting the dress and keeping it on but with a strapless we needed to keep that foundation in place so what worked in this instance was to use some sewing thread I picked a color that was close to the mannequin color and I've just stitched into the stocking at foundation and then brought it over the arm and stitched at the back of the mannequin so very invisible also the thread could push into this seam here and there's a close up view of bust padding and this is great when it can just sort of slip under the stocking at and the stocking at holds it in place for you oh, Petra you can talk about this guy okay well we actually had a question from someone about how do you draw something when maybe the arms don't fit and this is a perfect example this is a Chanel suit with very heavy brocade stiff fabric and in 2002 we just didn't have the means or the know-how to create a correct mount for this and so the conservator at the time just basically made the decision to show the garment without arms you can see that the jacket is just draped over the shoulders and it gives them a very different feel and look whereas in 2012 we developed a new way of basically dealing with this issue and you can see that there are arms and there are hands and it really does change the way change the way that the piece is displayed okay this coat here Bill Blastcoat had the same issue the shoulders were too broad for the coat when the arms were on and this coat had a lot of structure and quite a straight sleeve so what we've done is just hang the hands and then you can see here how we've adjusted the mannequin to improve the silhouette this is stuffed in the chest area with there's that arrow with nylon netting and then it's got a little stockingette support foundation and then to accommodate for the missing top of the arm I've done some sort of shoulder pads here covered with stockingette and it's inside a quarter inch thick needle punch batting and then here's the hand hanging and this is how we do it this is a bent wire that fits into the little keyhole that holds the arm we have a fabulous museum here and he works in metal all the time and he just whipped up a number of these for us I think that there would be other ways you can do actually we've done them with a toggle too if you just have a straight piece of metal that you can put in here and then tie your twill tape around that and then pull it down inside it will hold as well and what I found is that it's all tied on with twill tape looping it through that hook at the arm first and then just leaving a long length then you can tie the twill tape around the hand when the garment is on and you can adjust the length then what this is here is some hot melt glue and that's holding the twill tape in place there's not a lot of purchase on these slippery mannequin parts that's what's there and then that can pop off after the exhibit of course you don't want to be hot melt glueing in the vicinity of your garment so that was sort of a test fitting and then removed and glued here you can see that the sleeve has been stuffed out with nylon net to give it the shape of an arm since the arm is missing this is another one where the sleeve was quite fitted the shoulders were narrow and the dress would not fit with the arms on the mannequin so we've done we thought oh we'll hang the hands that'll be great it didn't work in this case however because the sleeve was so fitted it was shaped dark set the elbow and it actually swung forward on the body so when we put the hanging hands in there it didn't give us the look we needed at all nylon is sort of mock up an arm with this pipe that fits into the keyhole there and mounted the hand on the bottom of that here is some padding that we needed to do to modify the silhouette or the fit of this garment nylon net in the chest area and then this is showing the sleeve is stuffed out and a bit here to compensate the loss of the arm and there she is ready to go and this dress also needed a little fullness at the ham in the bottom area so this is another use of the cotton stocking net just zipped over the mannequin and then this is some nylon net that is just pushed under the edge of it so it's a quick and functional approach I would like to say that there are methods for mounting garments that this is sort of a quick way of doing it, I think it's functional and supports the garments but there's a book by one of the costume mounters at the Victoria and Albert Museum that shows you just an exquisite method for mounting and doing very tailored and finished works for garments we're usually running with about two months lead time for our installations so I would love to work slower but here we are this coat is Halston and it had some quirks one side of the coat is longer than the other side and this is something that was just inherent in the garment and the operator didn't necessarily want to call attention to that so what we've done is selected a mannequin with a bent knee and I think that that helps visually explain what's going on there or at least sort of camouflage it also the coat is open in the front so we needed something to put with this garment what you're looking at are props and here's a reference image right next to it that Petra provided so we wanted something that would provide the silhouette but also just fade into the background and not be an assertive part of the exhibit so what I've done is get this is a black polyester fabric it's got a matte surface texture or sheen and pre-washed of course and then we're making up garments that appear as though they're from the 1970s one thing I found initially I had done a short little top for this but it was very distracting having the hemline here so made a tunic where the hem ended at the bottom of the coat this is a fun one too Norma Norell cape suit from the late 1950s just a beautifully tailored and constructed garment but we needed a blouse to go under it we just had the cape and the skirt we wanted to show some of the skirt rather than just buttoning the cape up all together so I said well we'll just kind of construct something to go under there another prop garment did some research online and we looked at various illustrations of blouses with the same feeling so this is just a mocked up blouse actually what you're seeing here is just a sleeve that's attached to the arm by a tube of two inch stockinette a faux collar just a piece of the polyester blouse fabric that's oriented on the bias on the neck and then just a blouse front so it really was sort of like a long dickey and it's secured with twill tape so quicker to do and we got the color and look we wanted these are showing the padding out of the bottom part of this mannequin to fit the skirt here's the foundation of the cotton stockinette there are several layers of needle punch batting that I've stitched on here you might see here some of the herringbone stitches that's a really quick way of attaching also I kind of like to round the edges of pieces that helps them blend and then a really quick covering just pulling over another tube of the eight inch wide cotton stockinette and this is a lovely dress and our curator does like to show things in sort of an emphasized way this has a full skirt but we wanted to make sure that it was a really beautiful really full skirt so what we've done is use one of our prop petticoats this is part of our collection of undergarments that we've made specifically for dressing mannequins and this is one that was on our rack and was able to be used again you can see in this image here there's a black nylon net and this is sort of a coarser stiffer net that really the fullness and it's covered over with a plain weave cotton fabric one of the nice things about this one I didn't make this one it was here when I came to the museum but this is a tube of cotton knit fabric that you slip this on with so it is flexible in terms of its sizing to fit many different mannequins so that was nice that we had that ready to go this is a Steven Sprouse garment and this is an interesting one because the bodice as you can see is a really lightweight nylon fabric and then there's a sort of heavy faux fur skirt here with that transparent top there wasn't really any place to support this red heavy skirt often I would use twill tape or something maybe and support it from the shoulders so in this case what I've decided to do is make this sort of big extension around the hips that will actually touch the inside of the fur skirt and hold that in place so here lots of padding wrapped around the hips I've marked the skirt length on with blue tape on my mannequin so I don't make it too long this is an example where the mannequin that has the split across the hips came in handy because I needed to hang that padding on because it's below the waist there's nothing that would really hold it there over time so what I've done is take a piece of cotton plain weave cotton fabric and make a platform across the waist or across the cross section of the hip of the mannequin you can see that there I picked a color that was close to the mannequin because I was worried that it may show with the sheerness of the bodice and that's what you're looking at here this is the hip sheer bodice part and then looking inside here's the black covered hip padding and then this picture is large again it's a little difficult to see I actually used some pins to hold this in place in the back and because of all the padding the pins could go through the garment into the padding and I've opted for these really fine sewing pins with a white glass head I wanted to be sure that I would be able to find the pins again when it was time to deinstall this so that's why I opted for that you can just sort of hide them in the fur there over time so I'm rushing this mannequin is also Steven Sprouse and a man's tuxedo with a key tearing print and what we've done here is used a female mannequin and adapted it to display this man's suit the way I've done this is add padding in the chest area to serve as sort of pectoral muscles there and kind of disguise the breasts we selected a mannequin with flat feet rather than high heels of course and then another thing that I felt sort of characterized a male figure was having some more fullness in the thighs so in this case what we've done is put one pair of pantyhose on the bottom of the mannequin cut out some pads of needle punch batting and you can see how they're layered to sort of blend and not have a sharp edge and then the legs of another pair of pantyhose were cut off and that was pulled over the padding and then once the jacket was on did a little bit more padding to support the jacket and create the silhouette that I wanted this is that high density gasoline plastic that's flipped in there and then a big swath of it wrapped around the waist this is a Patrick do you want to talk about this one I'm sure this is just an example of how depending on what the purpose of the excision is and the purpose of displaying that garment how pieces can be displayed in different manners the similar captain is I'm sorry it's a wrap I actually pin mounted on the view on the right which is from an excision call simply Halston from 2008 and then it shows how the piece looks draped over our mannequin and obviously we have not put any undergarments under it and you can see that that would not be at all appropriate to display in the galleries that way and so we did some research and again found images of pieces that would have been worn underneath and Kathleen very graciously made for them okay and there's our reference image and the props I made and I didn't do such a tiny little bra I decided to go for something bigger and we're coming to the end now this is a recent acquisition to the museum beautiful Christian McClaw and I mounted this and these strapless ones are sometimes tricky the bust of this garment was quite a bit larger than the mannequin and but you still want it to visually correspond with the mannequin so looks pretty good getting a little closer looks pretty good and then when you get really close you can just see how much difference there is and what I found works in these situations is to just fit the back of the garment and push the bust fullness forward pad it out and then what I've done is filled in the gap with the fabric that is close in color to the mannequin or maybe the garment that sometimes that works but you can see that it's just pinned in there with the insect pins to camouflage that and that was sort of a sprint through I hope that the images just seeing them is instructive and I guess we can take some questions now Jenny do we have time for that yeah we do we have about five more minutes I'm going to quickly pull over our survey thank you for everyone who's hung on past three o'clock we're going to try to fit a few questions in before three fifteen if you guys could take some time and fill out our survey we really look at all your responses carefully they really help us play in our future events so I'm going to go ahead and try to get a few questions in before our time is up Peter I'll ask this one to you and then Kathleen if you want to jump in that's perfect Anne had a great question of what are the most important traits you look for in a mannequin for use at your institution is it based on the exhibit is it based on the piece well we don't have you know I don't think anyone has a ton of money what we're you know worried about sometimes is how can we get the most bang for our buck and so when looking at mannequins I think versatility is very important and so I see mannequins and then also the way in which mannequins are pieced together particularly for male mannequins that we've seen examples where the arms will become will detach below the shoulders which will make it very difficult for a narrow a narrow or piece whereas if the arms detach at the actual arms by it makes it a lot easier to do those kinds of modifications that Kathleen talked about and so that is a consideration of how they're pieced together but also sometimes facial features and a lot of the exhibitions that we do with ethnographic pieces or textiles we will use faceless mannequins because we don't necessarily again we use the mannequin as a pedestal or as a frame and we aren't trying to provide any kind of personal context with pieces and so those are some of the things that we look at when we're purchasing mannequins great and Peter did a fantastic I may not ask some of the questions that were posed in the Q&A box because Peter already got them so thank you for that we did have a question from Elizabeth Kathleen I'm going to pose this one to you are there any special considerations when you're working with ethnographic items she says largely made of hide we often with the ethnographic garments will make a custom form rather than a mannequin sometimes it's easier to support the ethnographic key shaped garments or if it's not quite as tailored to sort of fashion model body but I don't think that in terms of hide you can't really pin through hide so if you're needing to make attachments or do anything to support that would be something that you would be limited in terms of the mannequin itself and any kind of negative interactions with the mannequin I don't think that there'd be a problem with the hide we have used magnets to attach hide when we have to mount a hide object vertically I don't know does that answer the question yeah I think so I think so let me ask one more question before our time is up this is a multi-part question we had a Judy bring up the fact that a volunteer made some wood forms just raw wood sanded she was wondering if there was any problems there and then a few people responded to make sure to sand it and paint it so the first question I guess is there any problem with using a raw wood form yes in a word wood tends to be an acidic material having museum objects in direct contact with that is not recommended also if it's unfinished it probably has a rough surface so that could be problematic as well the sanding and painting will help you definitely don't want to display something on the wood for a long period of time because the acidic volatile acidic products from wood they can pass through paint one solution might be to wrap the wood with aluminum foil in areas that are under the costume because the aluminum foil is a really good vapor barrier so one could do that and then flip some cotton stocking over it or cover that with fabric that you sew on there might be a way to improve those wooden forms make them more safe what was the other part the follow up question to this was a lot of people were asking can I use mannequins from a department store that I get and then how would they prep those do they sand them, what paints do they use to cover them yes and some of the mannequins in our collection are in fact from department stores that's what they're intended for is visual merchandising in clothing retailers if the mannequin is rough yes just go ahead and sand it what we use to paint our mannequins is a water born lacquer paint and that's got sort of a tougher surface than a latex paint you can use latex paint as well spraying it on gives you a better finish brushing it on you'll get brush marks what's really important critically important is that you don't put any garments on there until the paint has had a chance to cure and off gas and that would be a minimum of two weeks and you want to make sure that the paint is curing properly before I came here some mannequins came from a manufacturer and just the way they were wrapped in bubble pack transferred onto the paint and then we've had an instance where some of our under padding has actually stuck to the paint on a mannequin so I'm not sure the best way to know absolutely that you're not going to have problems with paint but waiting a good period of time is painted before you put it in contact with the garment and then isolating the actual garment from the paint is good and some of those under structures that we put on serve that function as well in addition to being kind of non-skid or holding padding in place so that's an argument for that well great thank you so much and I think there are a few questions we weren't able to get to but there will be resources posted as soon as this recording is available you'll be able to find the recording on the online community on the home page for a bit and then you can also find it under that menu called webinar archives so we'll have some more resources for you and if you do have a question that's still burning and we haven't gotten to it right now or in the Q&A box I encourage you to go on the community and post the question in the discussion forum we'll keep an eye on that and you'll also get some great feedback from other members on the community Kathleen and Peter thank you so much for leading this discussion today well thank you thank you for having us and clearly we could have gone on and on much longer there's a lot to cover but it was fun to share a little bit great and thank you to all our participants have a fantastic afternoon thank you