If Charlene Gross has to pick one item of clothing from the cornucopia that is Penn State’s Fashion Archive that best exemplifies perfection of design, style, execution, and sheer beauty, it is this one: a handsewn, silk velvet ladies’ wrapper (below) from 1892.

“The stitching is so immaculate and consistent,” says Gross, who’s served as director of the archive since 2022. She loves the intricate red thread work on the pale blue silk of the wrapper’s inner lining. She loves the garment’s buttons—made from resin, ivory, and shell—and the design of its sleeves, wide at the shoulders, then tapering down into a fitted, blue velvet wristband.

The wrapper is one of six items from the late 19th and early 20th centuries donated in 2008 by the Palmer Museum of Art to the School of Theatre that, along with 125-or-so pieces in the school’s costume collection identified as “historic,” inspired professor emerita Suzanne Elder to launch the Fashion Archive. Elder’s idea, says Gross, “had the same core purpose that we have today: to have a hands-on collection for students, faculty, and staff to study fabrics, fibers, textiles, silhouette lines, and construction techniques through the eras.”

A fashion historian and costume designer by background, Gross has been sewing since her childhood. She received an MFA in costume and scenic design from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she trained under award-winning costume designer Carrie Robbins ’64 A&A. She’s created costumes for theater, dance, and opera productions across the U.S. and on London’s West End. And she can date a garment based on its fabric: “If a piece comes in that looks like it could be from the 1930s, but we find it has triacetate fiber, there’s no way it’s from the ’30s, because triacetate was only invented in 1954,” she says.

Today, the Fashion Archive encompasses close to 3,000 items, most of them donated: Women’s dresses dating back to the 1850s in an array of styles and fabrics. Coats, jackets, and cloaks. Gloves and hats—top hats, cloches, bonnets, and even a number of Penn State “dinks,” the small beanies worn by underclassmen from the early 1900s to the 1960s. There are military uniforms, shoes, and bags galore—flapper clutches, kiss-lock purses, you name it.

Caring for such a massive and still growing collection is not easy. Many items are extremely fragile; others are moldy. But for Gross and her colleagues, art historian Carolyn Lucarelli and librarian Catherine Adams from the College of Arts and Architecture’s Center for Virtual/Material Studies, looking after the garments is a labor of love, and they have a system in place. Every donation is frozen upon arrival, anything that has mold on it is quarantined and then frozen—and Adams uses a special black light to routinely check the collection for new mold. Stained clothing is spot-treated with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and water, while those garments that need it and can withstand the process are sent to a dry cleaner.

Adams is also on guard for any stray moth or other flying insect that might find its way into the basement of the Theatre Building at University Park, where the archive is located, and wreak damage that is difficult to undo, as was the case after a moth invasion in the summer of 2023. “We literally had to go through every single item,” says Adams, “and pull things off racks. They were mostly in the outerwear, in the woolens and furs. We had to get rid of a bunch of things, and we had to box other things up [and] layer the boxes with plastic.”

But perhaps the greatest project for Gross, Adams, and Lucarelli is cataloging the contents of the archive. It’s a massive undertaking, says Lucarelli: “We had to start from scratch because, though the clothes had little number tags on them, we didn’t know what they indicated. We also discovered that multiple documents had the same number on them.”

In their quest for best practices and standards to create what Gross calls “a consistent controlled vocabulary” for the Fashion Archive, they studied other fashion museums and archives—The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. They spoke to archivists and experts in different disciplines. Every summer, they hire Penn State students to help with the project.

In collaborating closely with the Center for Virtual/Material Studies, which researches the materiality of historical objects, Gross’s end goal for the Fashion Archive is that it should serve as a student-centric research space using digital tools and techniques. In 2022, she worked with the CV/MS on a project that highlighted the archive’s linen collection and showcased the journey of flax—the “first fiber of the arts,” from which linen is made—from seed to finished product.

View galleries of Penn State Fashion Archive garments below