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Figge Features Evolution of Women's Fashion for Sports

Figge Art Museum

The evolution of women's clothing for sports and other outdoor activities is the focus of a new exhibit at the Figge Art Museum.

Kevin Jones
WVIK News
Kevin Jones

"Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960" opens Tuesday and continues through early May.

Kevin Jones, museum curator for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, says at first if women wanted to swim or play baseball they had to invent clothing for it.

"Sometimes that was actually wearing men's clothing because women were not a target audience for retailers and for manufacturers. Or they invented it themselves and made it themselves."

He says every woman, whether she was ice skating or bowling, was what he calls the "modern woman of her day."

"Bathing 1900's"
WVIK News
"Bathing 1900's"

"One of things we never wanted to do while working on this project was to compare one of the women to a future woman, as if the future women had it better. Every woman was really modern in her time, not something that necessarily we would want to wear today. What we would consider an enveloping, itchy wool bathing suit at the time that was very fashion forward."

The new exhibit, on two floors of the Figge, features 64 life size mannequins and nearly 500 historic objects from the Fashion Institute museum.

The Quad Cities is one of six stops during a three-year national tour that will end in the summer of next year, just in time for the Paris Olympics.

A native of Detroit, Herb Trix began his radio career as a country-western disc jockey in Roswell, New Mexico (“KRSY, your superkicker in the Pecos Valley”), in 1978. After a stint at an oldies station in Topeka, Kansas (imagine getting paid to play “Louie Louie” and “Great Balls of Fire”), he wormed his way into news, first in Topeka, and then in Freeport Illinois.