“It smells kind of like feet down here,” I say. In truth, it smells very much like feet.

“Well, yes, that’d be the shoe room,” Mary replies, pointing to an open door, through which I can see rows upon rows of shelves, overflowing with shoes of all types. It’s the smell of generations of feet, it turns out.

We’re seated around an elevated work table in the costume shop behind the Tedford Stage in the Scales Fine Arts Center. The ceilings are low—Mary claims the architects had to improvise after forgetting to include space for costume storage—and if there are walls behind the ceiling-high stacks of fabric, I can’t see them. Hats, scarves, and handbags hang in bunches from pegs. Dress forms and mannequins stand in various states of undress. Wigs colonize the in-between spaces like anemones. There’s so much possibility in the chaos, and I catch myself daydreaming about learning to sew.

After more than 40 years designing sets and costumes at Wake Forest, retiring Department of Theatre and Dance professor Mary Wayne-Thomas doesn’t seem to mind the disarray—or the foot smell. “You should see this place when it’s not this organized!” she says. Our attention turns to the stack of nondescript gray boxes filling another table.

A Remarkable Collection

For more than a decade, Mary Wayne-Thomas has quietly stewarded a remarkable collection: nearly 150 theatrical garments and accessories, most dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the oldest piece—a coat—dating back to the 18th century. While too fragile for the stage, these garments are invaluable for teaching and research. Over the years, Mary has studied, photographed, and inventoried each piece, using them as teaching tools for courses in Costume History, Art History, History, and even Spanish. But for most students and faculty, the collection remained largely unseen, its stories hidden in archival boxes and stored on Mary’s computer.

When Mary approached me and Molly with the idea to digitize the collection, her goal was clear: make these garments accessible to as many people as possible. With funding from the Humanities Institute and support from URECA grant recipient Sadie McDonald, our team set to work.

New Photographs

The first step was photography. Mary’s original photos served their purpose for basic documentation—identifying which garments were in which box—but they were never really intended for public consumption. Taking inspiration from other costume collections like those from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Met, we developed workflows to photograph and catalog each garment anew.

Over the summer, Mary and Sadie carefully sewed unique identifier labels onto each piece, photographed every garment on dress forms under high-quality studio lighting, and selected the best shots. The process was painstaking, but the resulting images are stunning, highlighting the rich textures and unique features of each garment.

Meanwhile, I tackled the influx of images and metadata. Using scripts in Google Drive, I automated the process of duplicating, renaming, and organizing photos as they were added to their respective garment folders. This ensured that all of the photos were neatly organized with consistent filenames, allowing us to pair them seamlessly with the metadata we would soon generate.

Descriptive Cataloging

We were extremely fortunate to have found Costume Core, a metadata toolkit created by Arden Kirkland specifically for historic dress collections. Costume Core provided us with a metadata schema, controlled vocabulary, and a customizable Airtable database template, saving us months of schema development. I set up an Airtable workspace to ingest each garment’s corresponding photos and basic metadata, then Mary got to work applying descriptive cataloging to each garment. Over the following months, she described each garment in painstaking detail: garment types, materials, construction techniques, colors, patterns, time periods, and even measurements. Costume Core ensured our descriptions adhered to archival standards, making the collection interoperable with other databases and discoverable in various research contexts.

Putting it Online

We spent a considerable amount of time deciding where the collection should live. Ultimately, we decided on JSTOR’s Shared Collections, a platform ZSR has been using since 2020, due to its reliable infrastructure, broad adoption, and global reach.

With cataloging complete, I exported the metadata from Airtable and prepared to ingest it and the photographs into JSTOR. This critical step transformed our local database into a globally accessible digital collection. Now, the collection lives on JSTOR as an open access collection, where it sits alongside other scholarly and cultural resources, including similar collections like those from Smith College and the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Researchers, costume historians, and designers worldwide can explore these garments and their rich histories.

Digitizing this collection was about more than preservation. It was about making the collection accessible. These garments, once tucked away in archival boxes, are now part of a living resource. Students, researchers, and designers can engage with them in ways that were previously impossible, finding inspiration and insight across disciplines. By using tools like Costume Core and JSTOR, we’ve ensured that this collection contributes to a larger understanding of historic dress.

You can see the full WFU Historical Costumes Collection on JSTOR.

Special thanks to Mary Wayne-Thomas, for her passion, dedication, and contagious energy. Happy retirement, Mary!