The Betty Smithers Design Collection (BSDC) is a teaching collection of mainly 20th-century objects housed in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies at Staffordshire University.
It exists as a learning resource and therefore all the objects (with a few restrictions) are available to borrow and handle by staff, students and the wider educational community – in fact, handling of the objects is actively encouraged.
We monitor the use of all the objects and students are given an induction and handling guidelines before being allowed to access the collection.
The accessibility of the collection recently enabled a visually-impaired placement student to complete a project on the changing attitudes towards clothing, examining the “make do and mend” era to modern, “throw away” fashion.
The student spent £50 in Primark and then compared her purchases to the utility garments in the collection. Because of the BSDC approach to handling objects, she was able to understand how they compared to modern, more disposable fashion.
By being able to feel the different fabrics used and the different methods of construction (hand versus machine-stitched seams, seam allowances, quality of fabric etc), she was able to gain an understanding of the differences in the making processes used then and now.
And, in contrast to the idea of “throw away” fashion, the items bought from Primark for the research were accessioned and added to the collection.
