Historical Clothing Collection

The BYU Historical Clothing Collection online is organized by period as well as gender, and other identification. Visual images, accompanied by written descriptions, have been electronically archived under five main categories: Women, Men, Children, Intimate Clothing, and Accessories. The dates of clothing artifacts are registered from the late eighteenth century through the 1990’s. Financial support of this university historic clothing collection is maintained by patrons’ donations and university, college and departmental grants. Over 6000 clothing artifacts have been historically researched and have accession numbers. Dr. Mary H. Farahnakian, Associate Professor of Theatre and Media Arts at Brigham Young University was the Curator of the BYU/TMA Historical Collection until her retirement.

Brigham Young University owns these unique artifacts and will happily share additional information and images with interested scholars, students, and genealogists for their research purposes. Please contact Kayla Willey, the current curator and cataloger of the collection at 801-422-6766 or kayla_willey@byu.edu with inquires. The original artifacts are housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, 1130 Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo UT 84602.

If you are looking for an object such as a dress, suit, hat or scarf, type the name of the object in the search box and select Title from the drop down.

If you are interested in the object categories, type one of the following in the search box and select Category from the drop down: women, men, children, intimate clothing, accessories.

The Description field gives the option to search for more specific items, such as black shoes or pink purse.