The Body, the Patternmaker, and Clothing       back to the Gallery : About

This selection of historical garments from the Cornell Costume and Textile collection was photographed by costume historian Susan Greene.

Apparel design is the process of creating complex 3D engineered objects (clothes) from an almost infinite variety of materials, for a great variety of sizes and shapes of people and a great variety of activities (read more about this process here). Clothing fills both physical needs and cultural/aesthetic needs, and the clothing designer often relies on historic examples of clothing in developing new styles. Photographs are the main source for designers of information about these historic garments, but photographs only show a limited amount of information about the front view of the garment. These VR views were designed to show the full garment with an emphasis on its 3D shape, with the additional ability to zoom in to examine details of the way the garment was constructed.

This technology allows us to not only make available a portion of Cornell University’s extraordinary costume collection in an easily viewable format, but also to help young apparel designers understand and create clothing that celebrates and integrates with the full three dimensional characteristics of the human body.

The development of this site was funded by a Faculty Innovation and Teaching Award given to Susan Ashdown and Richard MacPike in 2003. The project was designed to introduce and integrate 3D-VR technology into the course content for apparel designers and theatrical costume designers at Cornell

Project management: Noni Korf Vidal
Web design: Roberta Militello
Costume historian: Susan Greene
Photography: Soule Golden and Megan Cass

©2003-2007 Cornell University