RL Fifield vacuuming samplers with a dental vacuum in the old Textile Conservation Lab, MFA Boston, 2001. Back in the early aughts, I was...

RL Fifield. I attended the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis at the end of May. The opening reception...

RL Fifield, 2012. Last weekend, The Brigade of the American Revolution hosted an Authenticity Event at Don Carpentier’s Eastfield...

I predicted in this post from April that people would be hot to trot for Downton Abbey influenced costumes this Halloween. True to form,...

Online databases are incredible tools. While my museum career has mostly focused on textiles, dress, and ethnographic materials, I never...

Manhattan is a special place, no doubt. I live on the Upper East Side in Yorkville, a formerly German and Czech community. I jokingly...

The summer is full of living history events, and moreso, the laundry that follows a hot sweaty weekend out in a field without a shower....

Der Wöchentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote 9/17/1773. As part of my research on 18thcentury working class clothing, I have been studying...

Maryland Gazette, August 9, 1787. Library of Congress. RL Fifield photo. The Runaway Clothing Database project uses newspaper runaway...

Continental Journal. October 23, 1783. Photo: Newsbank, American Antiquarian Society. #costume #dress #England #fashion

New: see the full article online here. If it doesn’t come up, go to the home page and search again. Abraham Emmit labeled her “an ill...

Baa. Cool it, already. Photo: Imaginactory. John Wily wrote the motivational pamphlet A Treatise on the Propagation of Sheep, the...

I hear the occasional grumble. Why is that photo of that object so bad? Why isn’t there an online database? Why are only selected objects...

A swatch preserved in the billet books at the London Metropolitan Archives. Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. Foundling number 12250,...

A swatch preserved in the billet books at the London Metropolitan Archives. Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. Foundling number 12250,...

A visitor at New Windsor Cantonment photographs reenactors at the Brigade of the American Revolution’s School of Instruction, April 28,...

A visitor at New Windsor Cantonment photographs reenactors at the Brigade of the American Revolution’s School of Instruction, April 28,...

For those of you who are scrubbing floors this weekend and taking down cobwebs from those hard to reach places, a morsel of knowledge...

For those of you who are scrubbing floors this weekend and taking down cobwebs from those hard to reach places, a morsel of knowledge...

While I think the city of Baltimore had little to do with inspiring the creation of this dance tune by Fred Rich and the Hotel Astor...