wool skirts
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My grandma was named Audrey, and she was born in 1922. She was born in Oslo, Minnesota, moved to Minneapolis as a child, and to Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul, as an adult.
She began collecting secondhand wool skirts in the 1960s and continued for four decades, until around the year 2000. These were pivotal decades in the history of wool, the history of clothing production, and the history of dress in the United States. Wool waned as petroleum-based alternatives pervaded the market. Home sewing ceded to domestic, unionized production, and later to offshore production. Skirts, once enforced as part of a gender-based dress code for women, became elective in most settings. This collection encompasses these historical transformations. My grandma lived through them, too. Wool skirts were one medium through which she measured the march of time.
As secondhand garments, the wool skirts also reflect the lives of the women who wore them. Some have stains, a splash of gravy, or a splatter of mud from a passing car. Others are dotted with ash burns from an era when smoking indoors was common. Many are altered. That is, shortened, lengthened, or taken out as a waistline grew. One has a maternity panel added to the front. Others are in near perfect condition, worn to work, church, or school, then cycled out of a wardrobe in place of something new, a different size, a different style. These signs of wear mirror aspects of my grandma’s own life. In her way, I’m sure she identified with the skirts’ former wearers. This may be one reason she chose to collect them.
The function of the skirts in my grandma’s own life remains obscure. She rarely spoke about them. We know that she collected skirts large and small. A select few she kept in her closet and occasionally wore. Others she deconstructed and used as material. She made several blankets, and with her blessing, my mom, dad, and aunt wove a dozen or so rag rugs from the wool skirts. The great majority remained in her basement, in boxes, until she moved from her house to an apartment toward the end of her life. At this point my parents moved the collection to their garage in Duluth, Minnesota. Before this move, my mom and aunt sorted the skirts by color, imagining a future where they would all be woven into rag rugs.
The collection’s maintenance now spans three generations, long enough for its function to have evolved several times over. The skirts now have an historical function, in addition to their material function, in addition to their original function as skirts. For my grandma, I believe the function had to do above all with the act of collecting, and the ritual, dedication, and discretion that collecting entails. It may also have had to do with value. That is, seeing the wool as an investment. And with legacy, the idea that she would pass this high-quality garment wool on to future generations. In a cold climate like Minnesota, wool is a source of warmth, comfort, even safety. I am tempted to trace a connection between these attributes and the experience of family she passed on her children and grandchildren.
I wonder now, having photographed every skirt, how my grandma visualized the collection, and how she experienced it over all those years. I wonder if she went down to her basement to thumb through the wool skirts, if she emptied out boxes on her floor to sort through them, if she had favorites, and which skirts those were. I wonder if she ever wished to see the skirts on models, or racks, or walls, or illustrated in a book. I wonder if she ever speculated about how many skirts she had, and how she would react if she found out she had 632. She expressed amazement with her eyes wide and mouth open. Wow. I remember this. She passed away in 2022.
Airing out the skirts on my parents’ clothesline was the first time any of us had seen the skirts exhibited. This was spring of 2024. Airing out has a practical purpose. It is an effective method of refreshing a wool garment. The fibers swell, lifting odors and dirt to the surface. In this case it also had a poetic purpose. The skirts became flags, waving in the wind, warming in the sun, blanketed in dew. Neighbors took note. One came over and asked if the colorful rotation he saw on the clothesline was art. Yes. Another brought a wool jacket from her own collection that matched a pair of wool pants she saw on the clothesline. Take a photo. Airing out was the first step we took before documenting each skirt.
This process took two weeks, working long hours. Each day we hung up five or six boxes of skirts on the clothesline, shaking them, brushing them. We took one batch inside at a time and labeled each skirt, noting the box and skirt number. I worked with my mom, a clothing historian, to describe each skirt in detail. We recorded ourselves talking and the meandering conversations that ensued, sounds of the garage door, the birds. One at a time, my mom steamed the skirts to remove creases. I photographed them against a panel my dad, a photographer, set up in his studio. My parents’ participation made this effort possible. My aunt and uncle also contributed, helping at the clothesline, sharing memories.
This makes me think about questions of fate, even destiny. How much of this intricate collaboration did my grandma engineer? All of it. How much of it did she anticipate? None of it. This vision only emerged for us after she passed away.
In my own life, I now see resonances with the collection everywhere. At a gallery, I see a clip of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, where Joan of Arc is upbraided for wearing men’s clothes and commanded to wear women’s clothes. On a rare visit to the studio of artist Louise Bourgeois I notice plastic bins of fabric, likely intended for the soft sculptures she began making towards the end of her life and now left for future generations. As I upload the photographs on this website, I think of Joseph Beuys’ Felt Suit, and the formal experience of seeing a garment against a wall, its lines and shadows, the space around it.
Most moving was the moment after my mom and I first arrived with the wool skirts at my studio in Brooklyn, after driving them across country from Duluth. In a new context, in front of a new audience with new questions, we became newly aware of the collection’s historical value and also its value to us. The same woman who made the collection made my mother, who made me. Material, and maternal. The collection reflects middle class lives in middle-America starting in the middle of the twentieth century. Three ‘mids.’ My grandma began collecting the skirts in middle-age. Four ‘mids.’ I also think of the middle of the body, the waistline of each skirt, the navel. Five ‘mids.’
Perhaps six. I first began engaging with the collection several years ago under the premise of weaving all the skirts into a rag rugs, following the prompt my mom and aunt imagined over a decade ago when they sorted the skirts by color. I wove a square foot study and calculated that the collection would yield some 925 square feet of rag rug. This piece was exhibited, and it was in conversation with the curator that I first began to consider the value of documenting the collection. It took a leap of faith to pursue this path because we did not know what we would find. Now, no matter what the skirts become, the collection has been documented. This turned out to be the middle path. Six ‘mids.’
In pursing this path, it occurs to me that the destinies of the wool skirts in this collection will be plural, like the lives of people who once wore them. Some will be worn, some refashioned. Some will be cut into strips and woven into rag rugs, or cut into squares and quilted. Some will enter new collections, with an asterisk to indicate that they were once part of this one. This is ultimately my interest in rag rug weaving: tracing flows of textiles through space and time, human interventions, chance encounters. Above all, destiny, dispersal. My grandma was not a rag rug weaver, but I see my own process alive in hers. I work at the loom, collecting strips of fabric between warp yarns. Her warp was her boxes, her studio her basement, her rag rug is the version of what you see on this website that lived in her mind.
Mae Colburn
July 2024
July 2024