A Look at the Fabric of History : The County Museum of Art’s Doris Stein Research and Design Center puts treasures from its collection on display

Edward Maeder smiles at the unusual document in his hand.

Maeder is in one of the workrooms of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during preparation for a new show documenting the resources of the museum’s Doris Stein Research and Design Center. He is holding not some hand-tinted engraving of an Ottomon costume (although the center has its share of those), but rather a sketch from the early 1970s of costumes for the singing group The Fifth Dimension.

You can almost hear Marilyn McCoo and her fellows belting out, “You Don’t Have to Be a Star, Baby,” in these overwrought costumes from an era that now seems very far away. The outfits are all bell-bottoms, boots and unisex chiffon, in swirls of black and white.

“Aubrey Beardsley, eat your heart out!” cries Maeder, alluding to the famed British illustrator of the 1890s who gave shape to the decadent aesthetic that Oscar Wilde and others gave voice to.

Maeder explains that the sketch is one of a dozen in the show by the late rock designer Boyd Clopton. Why rock costumes in a museum show? The curator of costumes and textiles points out that Clopton, though virtually unknown outside the music industry, had an enormous impact on everyday fashions of the period. Although few men ever appeared on the street in anything as extreme as Clopton’s designs, his influence was part of a process, Maeder says, “of getting men to look like peacocks again, after looking like guinea fowl for a couple of centuries.”

“That’s why this center is so important,” he says. “Who else would have something like this?”

The Doris Stein Research and Design Center, founded in 1987, is a place where scholars can go to study design and costume, where they can delve into the mystery of why men and women cover their bodies as they do. (That mystery, Maeder speculates, has to do with a deep-seated human need for change and stimulation.) The center has a library of almost 6,000 volumes; a hands-on collection of 2,500 fashion-related objects; 10,000 fashion sketches, plates and drawings; vintage photographs and extensive clip files on regional dress, designers and history.

“500 Years of Treasures from the Doris Stein Research and Design Center 1490-1990,” which opened May 21, puts some of the center’s choicest holdings on display. Among the treasures: A leaf from a 16th-Century English house book that shows exactly how many ermine tails noblewomen of different ranks were permitted to wear to the coronation of Henry VIII.

In Tudor England, Maeder explains, the placement of ermine tails was a way of making status visible. It had a now-forgotten name, powdering. “People don’t think of Los Angeles as a place to study 16th-Century dress, but it is,” says Maeder as he looks with affection at the centuries-old document that reveals so much about Tudor dress--and thought. “That was my entire book budget for one year, that one sheet,” he says with a sigh.

At the Doris Stein center, researchers can discover the context for a particular style or garment. It is easy to forget, in an age when video cameras are ubiquitous, that there is no visual record for most of human history. People have always worn something, but students sometimes have to become detectives to find out what those fashions were. The center is a sleuth’s paradise.

Travel was a revelation to earlier generations, and travel-related documents are often an invaluable source to students of costume. Maeder points to a little book that an army officer filled with sketches of scenery and costume during a grand tour of Europe in 1823-24.

The unknown officer carefully documented the appearance of the people he saw and made anthropological observations about their cultural habits. He drew the headdress of a particular order of nuns and noted that the sisters were often beautiful women who tended invalids as a form of penance. In one of the sketches that appear in the show a peasant woman of Illyria wears a bright red dress and black shoes with silver buckles. The buckles contain a pound of silver, the keen-eyed officer noted, and are so large they strike the ground on either side.

Maeder, 47, has lectured at the Vatican on the costumes worn by Christ’s ancestors in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Recently, he was off to Germany to tell the Third International Congress on Ancient Textiles what he had learned about an embroidered altarpiece from 14th-Century Saxony.

But, though Maeder is scholarly, he is not pious about fashion, textiles and his other professional passions. He has given a lecture called “The Rise and Fall of the Female Breast, or, The Aesthetics of the Bosom in History” both to design audiences and to plastic surgeons. Its provocative thesis: Nature has never managed to put breasts where fashion says they should be.

The center is named for the late Doris Stein, who was married to MCA founder Jules Stein. Asked what Doris Stein did, Maeder quips: “She wore hats and competed with Hedda Hopper and frequently won.” As Sandra Rosenbaum, who runs the center, explains, the women, who were friends, tried to out-chapeaux each other for years.

After Stein’s death in 1985, the museum asked for her collection of more than 100 cocktail hats. “It arrived along with an endowment,” Rosenbaum says. The center, which is open by appointment, serves scholars and design professionals of all kinds, although, because of space and staff limitations, she says, “We can’t have kids doing high school reports on Vogue magazine.”

The exhibit is not a costume show, although it features one notable dress, a 300-year-old court dress from the Savoy region of France. According to Maeder, it is the oldest complete formal gown in an American collection.

“It’s older than the oldest one at the Met,” he says, alluding to the far better known costume collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “It does make me happy,” he adds, with a proprietary grin. When Maeder acquired the dress, it had been altered so many times (at least seven) that it no longer revealed its original silhouette. Teresa Knutson, then a Mellon fellow in conservation at the museum, spent 1,300 hours solving the puzzle of what the dress originally looked like, and restored it.

As Maeder points out, the restored dress, of blue silk satin embroidered with gold and silver, is larger than we have come to expect of a 300-year-old gown. Museum collections have been somewhat misleading as to just how small our ancestors were, he says. Most were certainly smaller than we are, but the clothes that have survived in museum-quality condition were usually those of individuals who were much smaller than average. Garments that would fit other people were typically recycled into oblivion.

As to the precise shade of blue of the restored dress, Maeder decides it is “Gorgeous!”

In a number of cases, the show includes a group of related items. An oil painting of Louis XIII of France by Frans Pourbus the Younger shows the king wearing a lace collar. It appears with a piece of Renaissance lace and with a lace pattern book by Venetian Cesare Vecellio from 1593-1600.

As Scarlett O’Hara knew, eyeing the curtains, sometimes necessity is the mother of fashion. During both World Wars, when other materials were in short supply, designers began making garments and accessories out of paper. The exhibit includes two high-fashion hats made in 1943 by American milliner Stuart Kent Harper. They look as if they might be straw but they are actually made of woven twisted paper.

The show includes all 101 illustrations from a rare album amicorium , or album of friends. This little book, which was an autograph album of sorts, was carried by a German army officer during the siege of Gran in Hungary in 1595. The book consists of scenes and costumes from England, France and Italy, drawn by professional artists, and the inscriptions and often the family crests of the officer’s fellows in arms. It is a microcosm of European costume of the period, Maeder says, and it appears with an embroidered silk velvet purse similar to one illustrated.

The earliest piece in the show is a history of the world, the Nuremberg Chronicle, from 1493. Among the newer items are Hollywood costume sketches. One that seems especially apt, given the spirit of the show, is a Walter Plunkett design for “Diane,” an MGM costume drama in which Lana Turner played the mistress of French king, Henry II.

“All she really does is come and go in one gorgeous dress after another,” Maeder says. “The text is pathetic, even though Christopher Isherwood wrote it.”

“500 Years of Treasures from the Doris Stein Research and Design Center 1490-1990” continues through Aug. 30. at the Los Angeles County Art Museum, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. For hours and more information, call (213) 857-6000.