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My mother had a "fashion book." I still have it, actually. It was one of those history of fashion through the ages things. It had colour illustrations based on artwork. I used to love to look at it as a kid, and when I got older, I'd draw paper dolls for my little sister using the outfits in there as basis for the outfits. I liked history things just generally, and me being interested in, say, how the advent of the button changed the way people dressed was an out growth of that. i liked imagining what people's lives were like in different time periods. It all sort of went together in my head. We didn't have much money, but my parents made sure we put aside money for trips to museums and historical sites and the like. This suited me just fine. My favorite was the Philadelphia Art Museum. They had rooms set up from different periods with real floors, and furniture and the like from those periods. I'd imagine the people that might have lived there, dressed in the outfits of the time and place, and tell myself stories about them in my head. I got so excited the time they had a fashion through the ages special exhibit planned. My Mom was pretty excited too, so the three of us (my dad was not a museum sort of guy) all went to see it. We were planning to play a game where we'd guess the decade they were from than look at the tags. I don't remember the exact year, but I'm thinking my sister was a toddler, which put me in Lower school or what most Americans call primary school. I am a little blown away by the costume geekery I exemplified, because at that age, I had a pretty good chance of guessing correctly. There are no words for my disappointment. It was nearly all twentieth century haute couture, which didn't interest me at all. We'd been hoping for whole bunch of 19th century things, hopefully some things ordinary people wore, and maybe some older heirloom textiles. We'd got ourselves all worked up for something like three or four Victorian-Roaring twenties pieces, and a whole lot of post war sequins. My Mom tried hard to hide her disappointment, but I was pretty sure she was let down too. In Paris in my teens, I actually got to see a medieval shoe they'd dug up somewhere. It was so cool to me that someone wore that hundred's of years ago, an ordinary person, who's story we'd never know, but there it was, long after that person was dust. Geeky, I know. Anyway, I just saw this thing on exhibiting historical clothing and I... well, I'm still that sort of geek. I wish I could go see this exhibit soooo bad.

http://lacma.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/fashioning-mannequins/