Museum spins textile history into great yarns

“We used to stop about 1910,’’ says James Coleman, museum president and CEO, who took the reins in 2006. The 30-year veteran of the textile industry sheepishly admits, “I kind of hated history before I came here.’’ But his mind was changed by the transformation of the museum from “vignettes of yesteryear,’’ as he calls the older exhibits, into an engaging yarn of both the growth of an industry and the private lives it has touched.

Visitors familiar with the earlier incarnation of the museum will recognize some of the artifacts, like the spinning wheel and dye vat of a Colonial kitchen or the cluster of circa1780s wooden hand looms from Pennsylvania. But now they have the opportunity to sit down at a small treadle loom and actually try weaving.

The museum takes a broadly national perspective on textile history, but the exhibits are strongest when they make a personal, often local connection. For example, a pink dress comes with a story. It was worn (and probably made) by 16-year-old Mary Jane Merrotte in 1904, when she was an employee of the Massachusetts Mill in Lowell. Accompanying photographs show Merrotte and her mother, Nellie, who immigrated from Canada in the early 1870s to work in the mills, dressed in their homemade finery. Another set of exhibits, wonderfully surreal talking lunchboxes that launch into their tales when the lids are flipped open, relate oral histories of working in the Lowell mills in the 20th century.

The tales are engrossing, but the reality of the mills becomes thunderously immediate in the Techniques Gallery, which displays 15 historic machines that perform essential tasks in the manufacturing processes, from spinning and twisting yarn to weaving fabric. All are, or will soon be, in working order, and when an operator is not on hand to set the floor thrumming, an excellent big-screen video shows the machines in motion as the operator explains how each one works.

It is, of course, impossible to separate fabrics from fashion and the museum has some striking examples of various vogues, from the truly dandy electric-green man’s suit from the late 18th century to a voluminous golden evening gown created in 1897-98 for Back Bay socialite Ellen Rodham Motley Pickman and shown with a photograph of her and her sons. A fashionable scallop-edge woman’s red jersey dress designed and made by Aliki Giatas Kyricos in 1945 when she was working for Boston designer Baron Peters introduces a more modern era of design that extends to the amusing mid-1970s polyester Op Art dress designed by Jonathan Logan for Bonwit Teller and the even more amusing plaid polyester sports coat created by Stehli in 1973 to demonstrate the suitability of polyester double knits in men’s fashion.

Synthetic fibers aren’t all about aesthetic lapses and fashion faux pas, and many of the museum exhibits rehabilitate man-made fibers by demonstrating their genuine usefulness. One exhibit, for example, displays two very different swimsuits that cover the entire torso. One is a woolen ensemble from 1900 designed with modesty in mind, the other a 2008 Speedo LZR Racer like those the US swim team wore to the Beijing Olympics. The Speedo’s high-tech fiber is designed to mimic the toothlike structures on a shark’s skin, cutting friction by channeling water through microscopic grooves. See it now - it becomes illegal in international competition next year.

Textiles are a lot more than yard goods, and the most up-to-date exhibits focus on fibers for special applications. Most of us hope never to get up close and personal with an inflated air bag, but at the museum you can climb into a small car and feel just how one would stabilize your body in case of a crash. Likewise, most of us have no intention of needing a parachute anytime soon, but it’s instructive to strap on a 30-pound World War II-era silk chute and then try a modern synthetic one that weighs only 14 pounds. Museumgoers are even invited to climb into a small airplane (complete with noisy fan to suggest the engine and prop) and imagine jumping out. (The museum’s insurance carrier put the kibosh on letting visitors actually bail out of the craft, even though its wheels stay on the floor.) In a more familiar realm, we can definitely appreciate the performance differences between a weighty, steel-tube bicycle from the 1940s and a light but strong modern carbon-fiber racing bike.

There’s even a bit of a gee-whiz factor about the fibers that go into making modern gear for firefighters: Kevlar (also used in bulletproof vests) for strength, Nomex for heat protection (also used in race-car helmets), and Gore-Tex for moisture wicking and ventilation (also available in everyday hiking boots). Kids, in particular, get a kick out of slipping on a firefighter’s jacket, and a soon-to-be-installed video will show how such gear is tested by a mannequin named “Pyroman’’ inside a chamber that simulates flash fire conditions.

Yet sometimes nothing beats fibers we’ve been using for thousands of years. US currency is made from 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen. The inside of a baseball is largely made up of tightly wound woolen and cotton yarns. And when the museum decided to install a mini-flock of three model sheep, the curators hoped to use synthetic materials as fleece to avoid attracting insects that could endanger the historic textiles in the collections. “We tried,’’ says Coleman, “but none of the manufacturers could come up with something that felt like wool.’’

So the fake sheep are covered in real fleece.

Patricia Harris and David Lyon can be reached at harris.lyon@ verizon.net.