Tuesday, October 7, 2014

If This Ain’t Love, I Don’t Know What Is

By Hannah Donnelly

Even the most hardened history hater would be converted if they saw the collection.

By “the collection”, I’m referring to the Robert & Penny Fox Historic Costume

Collection.

Rather unfortunately, a lot of people have no idea what I’m talking about when I

say I’m working in a historic costume collection. The best reaction I got was from

my boyfriend’s parents who simply said, “Oh, so you’re working in the theater

department?”

Not quite. What the FHCC (Fox Historic Costume Collection) really does, is provides

a learning resource. As it says on Drexel’s FHCC webpage, “Our mission as a

University-based collection is to educate and inspire, while providing a significant

resource for an ever-expanding community of historians, scholars, artists, and

designers.” I really could not articulate it any better than that.

The FHCC is not simply a temperature-controlled closet, and the garments and other

items within are not simply “things”. What you really see when you walk down the

aisles of the storage unit is the coming-together of decades of style and culture.

It’s visual, tangible things like these that really make history more than pages in a

textbook. But I digress...

The tasks I am given as a Collections Assistant tend to vary, going anywhere from

tag-writing to data entry, from shadowing in the donor process to actually handling

the lovely items that we possess. That said, I still have much to learn, and I am

excited by the opportunity to do so. (To give you some perspective, I stayed later at

work the other day just because I wanted to. I actively chose to remain in what often

feels like a refrigerator.)

If that ain’t love, I don’t know what is.

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