The Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club is celebrating its 100th birthday this spring, and will kick off its centennial speaker series with a talk on the history of women’s clothing with Northampton author Kiki Smith on April 9 at the Shelburne-Buckland Community Center.

“Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore” looks at the lives of everyday American women: doctors, teachers, housewives, and what they wore and how women’s fashion has evolved over the past 200 years. 

“We’re really excited,” Women’s Club member Christin Couture said. “When we heard about Kiki’s book we thought it was so perfect to look at the lives of regular women as part of our speaker series.” 

Smith is a professor of theater at Smith College and a professional costume and set designer. As part of her work making costumes and teaching students about costumes, she’s spent a lot of time in the Smith College historic clothing collection. The collection began as a ton of “beautiful, fancy things” and donated couture garments. The clothes are not suitable to be used as costumes in performances over and over again, but could be used to show students how people would have dressed and to inspire costumes. 

Smith said that she and her students have grown the collection enormously over the past 50 years she has been teaching, focusing specifically on the clothing of everyday women. 

“I do a lot of plays and they’re not all about the elite, they’re about ordinary everyday people,” Smith said.

She said she and her students have run out of space for the collection, so her students encouraged her to write a book detailing items in the collection to spread awareness about it. Their goal was to convince the college’s administration to support them in getting a larger dedicated space to host the collection, as they’ve overtaken the theater department and need more room.

“We’ve lived down here in the basement without anyone knowing about us,” Smith said. 

The book was published in 2023 and an exhibit featuring items from the collection is currently on display at the New York Historical Museum. 

“Clothes tell stories,” Smith said. “You may not know anything about the person who owned it, but by looking at the style and how the garment was put together you can learn more about the person who wore it. 

“All too often we don’t know who wore it or why she bought it, but we can put it into context with what was going on in the world and [in] Shelburne.”

For example, two dresses included in the book (and which Smith said she will likely discuss in Shelburne), are from 1860. The dresses, which Smith found on Ebay, are black and white with dotted patterns, and by looking at it Smith can tell they were homemade with reused fabrics. The bodice has an inner lining that was made with a faded calico print fabric. 

Women would frequently reuse old dresses as patterns and lining for new ones. As the black dress with the calico lining also had a panel of calico fabric on one side, Smith believes the owner of the dress at one point took it apart and remade it to be a size larger.

“I bet she got pregnant or put on weight and didn’t want to throw it out, so she took apart the dress and expanded it with fabric from old projects,” Smith said. 

She added that one of the dresses had no cuffs on the sleeve, allowing the woman who wore it to easily roll up her sleeves so she could easily reach into pots for cooking and washing. 

“They looked like drab plain dresses,” Smith said. “It’s very likely these two dresses were hardworking dresses worn by not very wealthy women.”

The talk will also feature a few items of clothing from the Shelburne Historical Society collection. Smith will look at a few items, discuss how they were made, and put them in context of the history of the town. 

“I snooped around in the Shelburne Historical Society and I was amazed by a collection of hats,” Smith said. 

The Women’s Club is still working out the details of the rest of the events for the speaker series, but Couture said this year’s festivities will include an anniversary party in May, and the publishing of a cookbook featuring cookie recipes made by Women’s Club members each year for the cookie sale held during Moonlight Magic. This will be the second cookbook published by the group; the club published its first cookbook in 1927. 

“It’s amazing this club is still existing, and still selling cookies for our annual scholarship fundraiser,” Couture said. “We’re looking forward to the rest of the year.”

“Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore” is open to the public and free to attend. The event will begin at 7 p.m., April 9, at the Shelburne-Buckland Community Center on Main Street in Shelburne Falls. 

“Its a tribute to all of us,” Smith said. “We all wear clothes and express part of ourselves through our clothes.”

Reach Madison Schofield at 413-930-4579 or mschofield@recorder.com.