This old thing?

Katie Jones believes the garb of West Virginia’s ghosts can tell us how those people lived and who they wanted to be.

Jones, an associate professor at the College of Creative Arts and Media and coordinator for the fashion design and merchandising program at the School of Art and Design, is one year into a five-year USDA-funded research project to bring garment and textile collections statewide out of dark closets and into public view.

Jones said, “West Virginians have dressed for the entire history of the state, but we don’t yet have a good understanding, beyond stereotypical visions of hillbillies, of what that actually looked like, how different regions adapted national fashions. We should be able to tell the story of how West Virginians have presented themselves to the world and how they’ve contributed to a fashion economy.”

Some groundwork has been laid. The West Virginia Heritage Quilt Search was conducted in 1990 as part of a broader effort to create a national Quilt Index, the West Virginia State Museum in Charleston houses the most comprehensive collection of West Virginian historical material culture,

and Jones said WVU recently collaborated with Arthurdale Heritage, which has an “amazing” collection of textiles woven in a former cooperative New Deal community in Preston County.

“Overall, however, there are not a lot of clothing and textile collections in West Virginia that have been digitized so far,” she explained. “It’s a bit of a mystery which of our historic homes, art museums, historic societies or other institutions may be holding valuable textile-based goods. My goal is to peek into the closets of institutions all over the state and get a list together so people interested in West Virginia’s textile, clothing and fashion history have a place to start.”

Jones wants to document collections including anything people put on their bodies, from accessories and workwear to special-occasion garments like wedding dresses.

She has started “as local as we can get,” digitizing WVU’s own dress collection, which she estimates contains 3,000-5,000 pieces. Doctoral student Melissa Turner, of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, is handling the bulk of the documentation – “getting everything photographed, making sure our record for each object is as robust as possible, with proper dates, so we can really use the collection as a resource,” Jones said.

“We’re just stewards of these objects. They belong to the people of West Virginia, so we want to share them with the public. But first we need to know what we have. In the winter of 2025, I’m hoping we will have wrapped up documentation of our own collection and we can start going out into the community and knocking on doors and saying, ‘Whatcha got?’”

Jones emphasized that WVU’s collection isn’t museum grade – it’s a teaching collection of the vernacular dress of West Virginia. While it includes a couple “spectacular” pieces, most of the collection is simply representative of the clothing of people with a connection to the state.

Jones takes the clothes into her fashion history classes as a tangible representation of what people wore in their everyday lives.

“That’s valuable material culture, just as high fashion is,” she said.

The earliest piece is a simple house dress from around the 1840s. Jones called it “fascinating – a beautiful example of the kind of pre-mass-production garment people were wearing around the home. It’s very representative of what someone would have made for themselves from fabrics they purchased at a general store.

“If you look at it just from a fashion perspective, you’d think, ‘Oh, that’s kind of a mundane dress.’ But it’s one of our most treasured pieces. There are so many angles for thinking about it. The textile print, the dyes, the overall styling – each very indicative of the era, and each tells a different story.”

Jones’s favorite piece is a silver fox fur stole: three fox pelts with faces and paws attached. While it’s jarring for a modern audience, it allows her students to reflect on how they respond to material culture from the past.

“Students often have very immediate thoughts and feelings about this piece. But I love it, partly because the original care tags are still attached. That shows someone really wanted to take care of this object, including taking it to cold storage in the warmer months to make sure the fur, which is very delicate and difficult to preserve, didn’t degrade in the closet,” she said.

“The other reason the piece is special is that we have a Polaroid from 1960 of the original owner wearing it at a gala event. It helps us imagine who this woman was. We can see how proud she looks in her silver fox stole, and we remember that a real person wore this and loved it. However we feel about it now, we can approach it from a space of empathy and curiosity and consider how our relationship to this type of object has changed over time.”