Professor Carey is Lasell College’s sole fashion historian, guiding students both in and out of the classroom.
Tell me more about your background in fashion history.
I developed an interest in fashion history from an art history background, so in undergraduate school I was a fine arts major with an art history minor. The thing that I loved about art history was analyzing artifacts over time, and how I could always see the applications to present culture. It didn't matter what we were studying, I saw evidence of how that manifests itself in, you know, aesthetics today. So I was always interested, and I was asked to design a fashion history course… I was teaching at a very small business college that had a fashion program. I designed it around my slides from art history, except looking at it very differently: looking at the dress and decoration, and the symbolic representations for people in different communities and different times. So that’s how I got started.
How did you land a job as a professor at Lasell? Did you know you wanted to teach?
I, uhm, I was making a career change. I was in the retail industry, and I was invited to design [and teach] a course by a colleague who was teaching at the same institution. I liked it so much that I thought, you know what, I really think that I could do this full time. I had to go back to graduate school, and I was really looking for curriculum development and classroom management — things that I did not have an awareness of because my background was not, in any way, shape, or form, a part of that. I started teaching fashion history at four different institutions part-time, so I would go from one place to the next in my car. Then a full time position was opening up at Lasell College in the fashion department, so I applied and was hired…
How long have you been with Lasell?
I have been at Lasell since 1988 as a part-time faculty member, and in 1992 was given a full time position.
What are some of the extra duties you have being the primary fashion historian at Lasell?
I curate the Lasell Fashion Collection, we have a lovely collection of around 2000 artifacts. The oldest dates from 1800 and the newest is from 2006, so it spans 200 years. In my role as the curator, I have developed professional partnerships with other museums or collections for shared resources and mentoring. I have received a lot of fantastic mentoring about being a curator and managing a collection. The collection also brings me very close to donors. People donate to the collection or we receive pieces from other museums, and that has developed further associations. The most important thing is that this resource is used in teaching and scholarship for the community, and more specifically for the students and faculty.
Do you ever find yourself searching for new subjects within historical fashion to research?
All the time! All the time. We have a benefactor who is very close with the department. His name is Frederic Sharf, and he’s a wonderful collector who loves working with students and has lots of resources. We’ve done a number of projects with him which have led to exhibition work, publications, uhm, infused new pieces into the collections. It’s been a really fruitful relationship; there’s always something new in the pipeline. He has come to my Collection Research course, an invitational course for students who really do well in fashion history, and have a passion for research and collection management. He’s come to campus on numerous occasions for presentations and to work directly with the students.
When did you realize you wanted to curate exhibits and dig deeper into the history of fashion?
I’ve always had a tremendous interest in people, with their body covers and the way they decorate themselves. It’s always been a fascination. So, I was volunteering at an organization called Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries, and they had a collection. They’re a recycling company, but had trained sorters to pull aside pieces of historic value. They put together a little collection and I was volunteering, looking at the pieces and helping them identify the pieces. Then [the company] decided they could no longer house those items at Goodwill, and asked if we would take their assortment on loan to campus. That’s how we started our collection. I said yes; it was a big undertaking without the support and resources, but over time we had a wonderful place that’s built to house the collection, so it has really changed from when it first started.
What inspired you to curate the Fashion and Satire exhibit?
Oh, that started I guess three or four, yes four, years ago now. I had a meeting with Fred Sharf in his office, and he told me that he started collecting all these wonderful illustrations from the turn of the 20th century by two different artists: Orson Lowell and Charles Dana Gibson. He asked if I would like to get a group of students together to research the pieces and find the fashion. I said yes, because we would find the fashion connection, and then use our collection and other collections to bring together a research study. So that’s what we did over time. It took about three years of constant work, and then critique and reshaping… It’s quite a process.
When, or how, did you realize that there was a connection between fashion and satire?
The illustrations, most of them, have a comedic character. It was pretty obvious looking at them from the beginning. They revolved around topics like courtship, emerging women’s rights, social environments, you know, beautiful women and awkward looking men. The humor at this time was really kind of… it was really funny. The earliest piece is from the latter part of the 1890’s, and the most modern piece is from the latter part of the 1920’s. It was fun to see the work evolve overtime, to see how comedy shifted overtime, and how both of the artists involved definitely illustrated fashion and the humor associated with it. It was kind of right there from the beginning.
How did you approach working with the students and embracing their ideas?
It was really nice to have the perspective of young scholars involved, because they tend to look at things slightly differently than I would and Fred would. So that was very fresh and exciting to us, to gain that perspective from their lens; how they were looking at the work and the fashion connection. It was really great.
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