By Carol Colburn
Click on the image to read ““Well, I Wondered When I Saw You, What All These New Clothes Meant”: Interpreting the Dress of Norwegian-American Immigrants”
Editor’s Note: Carol Colburn’s analysis of Norwegian-American immigrant dress was published in 1994 in Material Culture and People’s Art Among the Norwegians in America, edited by Marion Nelson. It led the author to other research projects over the years. Here, she shares new insights in a special introduction for Norwegian Textile Letter readers. Read the full chapter here.
As a costume designer and a clothing historian, I am fascinated by what clothing can say about an individual. The world of a play is defined by the playwright, and within that world, the language of costume helps to define the character, adding nuance to the interaction of dialogue and plot. A different challenge faces the clothing historian, when the world you are studying is filtered by history and remembered only in fragments. Photographs can provide clues to fill in the gaps.
In my research for this chapter, I found it helpful to study clothing through family photo albums showing multiple generations. These reveal the progression of individual clothing choices in a context and over time.
As my mentors, Marion and Lila Nelson were inspiring and instrumental in getting this study of Norwegian-American clothing started. Their knowledge of the Vesterheim Museum collections and the Norwegian-American community in the Decorah, Iowa, area provided a basis for my research. I had interned at Vesterheim in the 1970s while I was an Art History/Museology graduate student at the University of Minnesota. By the late 1980s, Marion’s plans for Material Culture and People’s Art Among the Norwegians in America had come together. The edited volume was to include chapters on the material culture of Norwegian-American architecture and household artifacts. Marion suggested I undertake a similar study of Norwegian-American immigrant dress.
I visited families in Decorah and in the surrounding rural areas, looking at troves of family photographs. I was attentive to immigrants’ transition to fashionable dress, as well as retention of Norwegian habits of dress after immigration to the American Midwest. Thinking of clothing as a language helped my discussions with those families. Many interviewees were close to their relatives who were first generation immigrants and shared stories of the people depicted. A material culture research approach calls for using written evidence to help draw conclusions from objects (in this case photographs). Written passages directly quoted from the immigrant experience in letters and literature were also used as primary source material to help interpret what I was seeing in the family photographs. The title of my chapter is drawn from one of those letters.
After this book was published, new insights came to me as I continued research in the U.S. and Norway. Updating my research and conclusions about the clothing patterns I identified in this chapter became an ongoing project. It also led me to look at photographs in my own family’s albums with new eyes. Family photographs are not always as well composed or preserved as those in museum collections. Identification can be challenging and sometimes the names are lost. We often focus on facial features and hair and body types, looking for clues for observable connections between generations but clothing and accessories can also provide hints of daily life, even if studio portraits are not made in a realistic context. The clothing and props in these family photographs might tell us about important occasions, occupations, interests, and accomplishments. For instance, we can recognize a c.1900 wedding portrait because of the relationship depicted and accessories included, even if a white dress was not worn. In the same years, a formal white dress together with a rolled-up diploma points instead to a graduation. We try to ‘interpret’ clothing that does not always translate to modern eyes. Dating photographs by comparing family photographs to fashion is complicated by the length of time some individuals continued to wear their clothing. New clothing might also have been made in a favorite older style. Finding any collaborating family stories or written evidence is very helpful.
Joan Severa’s book Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840 – 1900 was published in 1995 and provides a useful cross-reference for looking at family photographs of that era. She presents a chronological scope of representative portraits from across America, including individuals from a broad range of backgrounds. Among those represented are immigrants, formerly enslaved and indigenous people. Each portrait includes a detailed clothing description. Her book can be seen as a window into the nineteenth century American family album with a focus on individuals rather than on fashion. She also includes some Norwegian-American family photographs from the Wisconsin Historical Society collections.
Research methods using photographs have evolved since the 1990s. One thing made clear by reading my chapter and Joan Severa’s book is that as researchers we were viewing actual photographic prints as we interpreted the clothing details contained in them, instead of viewing second or third generation reproductions (reprints, photocopies, or digital copies). Actual photographs provide a wide range of black, white and grey values resulting in remarkable clarity of detail. In most cases, this made it possible to analyze and describe details such as garment cut, fabric, and accessories in individual portraits or groups. Today in the digital world, researchers are lucky if they have access to high-resolution digital copies where it is possible to zoom in to discern details. Problems with clarity of clothing details can happen with digital reproductions when lower resolution is used for internet distribution.
Anonymous girl c.1900 from the author’s family collection (Illustration 23 in the pdf reprint). Looking at the portrait in this high resolution digital reproduction instead of the reprint published in the original book, we can see fine detailing of her silver lekkjeknapp. She has used this traditional decorated double button as a brooch on her very fashionable bodice, sending a message about her family heritage from Valdres, Norway.
The author poses next to a rack of busseruller, traditional Norwegian work shirts.
This study has become a springboard for a number of subsequent research projects concerning immigrant clothing history, and also has been important in shaping my current work as I make clothing reproductions for museum collections and teach heritage garment-making workshops. A custom sewing class becomes a cultural history class, as my students and I sew together. Teaching patterning and sewing techniques for custom garments has become another way for me to share this fascinating material culture study.
See “The Busserull (Norwegian Work Shirt) Tradition” and “The Busserull Tradition Continues” in Norwegian Textile Letter Volume 22, Number 1, March 2016.
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