Engaging with textiles from the Sammlung Textile Alltagskultur at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

One collection, an endless range of themes

From my years as curator of the STAK, one memory stands out. This encounter involved an orange mini sheath dress from the 1960s, an eighty-year-old artist, a fifth-semester student and me in the background, sometimes chuckling and sometimes appeasing the discussion. It got heated and loud, because the topic was emotionally charged. The topic was weddings, more specifically how to choose the “right” dress. One of the women had stood before the registrar in the 1960s in the colourful mini dress mentioned earlier, whereas the other imagined her forthcoming wedding as a dream in white, with church and horse carriage. There we had already gotten to the heart of the matter: the image of women, equal rights, sexualisation, religion, and two women defending their values. Other students and colleagues quickly joined in and further items were taken out of the collection shelves. 

This scene shows how the proximity of a collection to everyday life makes it appealing and offers biographical points of reference. Yet it also demonstrates the challenges of framing discussions and emotions to make them academically relevant through methodological training and reflection.

Shaping the collection

The STAK collection comprises a total of around 5000 objects – textile objects, writings and dyeing drugs, most of which from the 20th and 21st centuries (Krämer 2020). The centrepiece of the collection is the “Clothes and Stories” section. Its ethnographic concept is unique in Germany, as clothing is usually collected according to aspects of design history or regional and military history. Instead, the collection focuses on the individual meaning of the textile objects, subjective theories on clothing and practices around it. The definition of clothing is expanded in line with the concept of dress used by Joanne B. Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, who define it as an “assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body” (Eicher/Roach-Higgins 1992, p. 15). This opens up the possibility of collecting perfumes, cosmetics, body jewellery and the like. In addition, contextual materials such as photos where the clothes are worn, patterns, body-shaping items – like shoulder pads or bodices –, are also collected. The objects do not merely illustrate (textile) systems, they also testify to cultural, design and trade history. Therefore, they are collected only if their provenance can be traced.

Including the collection into the university teaching

Beyond its conservation purpose, the collection has a clear objective for research and teaching: to convey the potential of material culture as part of university teaching. Students have the opportunity to experience the haptics, optics, acoustics and olfactory properties of textile objects. Moreover, students can try out scientific work on objects and develop research skills which will be useful in cultural history, aesthetics and methodology. Particularly, main skills and knowledge are developed for describing, researching, exposing, mediating, conserving and digitalising objects.

Objects from the collection are used occasionally in individual sessions of various teaching events, but also for entire seminars focussing on the collections. In the latter, students start the semester by choosing a specific object from the collection. In the following weeks, they learn to describe it correctly, to take its digital inventory, and to contextualise it through participative observations and qualitative interviews of former users. The students support each other by developing interview guidelines and through supervision formats in the coding and analysing phases of the project. The findings on an object are compiled in a “research report” and graded as a portfolio. In addition, students present their results in the corridor of the Institute.

In our seminar, the orange mini dress was approached from the angle of its former function as a wedding dress. It might instead have been part of a workshop on preventive conservation, as a negative example of decomposition signs of synthetic fibres. Or it could yet have been an exhibit of a show conceived by students about the fashion of 1967 in the Schlaues Haus Oldenburg. This essentially depends on the students. Our aim is to enable students to choose their approach to the objects according to their own interests. 

A new training about the curating practice of university collections

Beyond the use of our collection for specific subjects, since 2017 the university has developed a variety of cross-faculties offers to engage with the university collections – born out of the creation of a Curation Working Group at the University of Oldenburg. The Institute of Material Culture and the Institute of Biology and Environmental Sciences joined forces to shape the core of a certificate programme for students: a seminar on the history of university collections and their potential for teaching and research, offered in tandem by both institutes, and an interdisciplinary and supra-regional lecture series on topics such as provenance research or participatory mediation approaches to university collections. So far, there has only been positive feedback from graduates of the certificate. They have reported that the courses enrich their own studies and are also extremely well received by potential employers in application procedures.

Since 2021, an online course on “Learning from things” also offers students a compact introduction to the topic and informs them of opportunities for working with the university collections.

The rich potential of working with everyday textiles

Not least because of its emotional charge, the STAK collection has a lot to offer. Among its potentials are:

• the visual appeal of the collection items,

• the accessibility and binding power of the items in teaching and knowledge transfer,

• the activation of everyday knowledge and the use of alternative forms of knowledge and teaching/learning formats to handle the objects (praxeology, performance, experimental archaeology, laboratory experiments, etc.),

• the good linkability with Citizen Science Projects,

• and the incentive to reflect on one’s own preconceptions on clothing and body images.

In addition to the necessary teaching of content and methods, open, associative, or even aesthetic-oriented approaches to the objects are needed, to ensure that the collections are used to their full potential. For example, a free-form text about the imagined former owner of an object says just as much about textile pre-concepts as a fictitious online dating profile for a man's shoe. Station works, offering (costume history) literature and magazines, but also materials for drawing, modelling, or for the production of sound collages, can broaden the view of the object and one's own approach to the field. The Institute's equipment with workshops and laboratories is thereby extremely valuable, just as the flexible and adaptable consideration of curatorial and didactic interests.