As I sit down to write this post, I think of the title I have been given in regards to this show: Costumer. And while we are indeed creating costumes, to take us back to a time and place little known to us, we are creating the clothing that these people wore all the time. I wonder if, at the end of the day, when the layers came off, that same sigh of relief was heard as when we peel off our layers after a long day of teaching history to kids. If, when loosening their stays, they felt just as happy as us to be taking them off! I know I am always relieved to be taking my stays off, yet at the same time, it never bothers me to put them on. To me, my costumes are just clothing, clothing of a different era yes, but still just clothes.

And in recreating these clothes, we are helping people today to see the people of yesterday as just that: people — people with hopes, dreams, fears and all the little  things that make us just like them, that teenage girls still worried about the color of their gown, and the ribbon on their cap, and little boys couldn’t wait to be out of their infant gowns and be breeched, so that they were just like daddy. And while it is not the clothing that ultimately defines a person, it is a very important part of who we are, and how we perceive ourselves. In this series, I hope to help these people come alive, in clothing they would have been likely to wear. We hope to dress them in aprons a little bit stained, and stockings a little bit wrinkled, and maybe not always perfectly in style, but real none the less.