RL Fifield vacuuming samplers with a dental vacuum in the old Textile Conservation Lab, MFA Boston, 2001. Back in the early aughts, I was...

Oil painting on canvas, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Cherryburn, Northumberland, National Trust. NT 530359. In digging through the British...

Ladies in nymph-like attire twirling and leaping through fields – sounds like the turn of the century pageantry movement to me. The...

The Accident in Lombard Street. Charles Wilson Peale. Winterthur Museum. 1962.88. A pie lays broken in the street, a distraught servant...

I spent July at a Research Fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden. This mainly meant identifying manuscripts and object...

RL Fifield. I attended the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis at the end of May. The opening reception...

An embroidered apron at LACMA, similar in concept to those depicted in the Winterthur fraktur below. M.2007.211.131 I’m not a...

Eddie Izzard puns on the Church of England: “Cake or Death?” For people found guilty of committing small crimes in England,...

I roll over this analogy in my mind as I work with my study of 1,000 runaway indentured and enslaved women and their 6,000 garments,...

RL Fifield, 2012. Last weekend, The Brigade of the American Revolution hosted an Authenticity Event at Don Carpentier’s Eastfield...

I predicted in this post from April that people would be hot to trot for Downton Abbey influenced costumes this Halloween. True to form,...

I was inspired by this salted paper print from the 1850s of people posing for a photograph on a Baltimore and Ohio engine. I thought...

Speaking as a museum professional and a living history practitioner, what a great project. Theatrical designer Thomas John Bernard and...

Online databases are incredible tools. While my museum career has mostly focused on textiles, dress, and ethnographic materials, I never...

Manhattan is a special place, no doubt. I live on the Upper East Side in Yorkville, a formerly German and Czech community. I jokingly...

Der Wöchentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote 9/17/1773. As part of my research on 18thcentury working class clothing, I have been studying...

Maryland Gazette, August 9, 1787. Library of Congress. RL Fifield photo. The Runaway Clothing Database project uses newspaper runaway...

Continental Journal. October 23, 1783. Photo: Newsbank, American Antiquarian Society. #costume #dress #England #fashion

Cosplay-Japan Expo 2012. Photo by Lomita. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. I was minding my own business on...

New: see the full article online here. If it doesn’t come up, go to the home page and search again. Abraham Emmit labeled her “an ill...