There are all sorts of interesting clothes inside Mary’s Stuff, at 2409 W. Belmont Ave., as well as some furniture and other items from days and nights gone by.
Owner Mary Bert (that’s Bert in the Osgood photo, sharing a couch with a mannequin and a half) has filled Mary’s Stuff with clothing and other items familiar to those who were alive in the years 1900 to 1950, and campy, silly or intriguing to those of us who were not.
A friend who patronizes the place says she does so to “look like a movie star.” And Mary’s Stuff is often used when movie companies are looking for a historically accurate look.
But if you are looking for really vintage clothes, visit the Clarke House Museum, 1827 S. Indiana Ave., and see a fascinating new exhibit, “Fashion, Family and Middle-Class Dress, 1836-1860,” which runs through June.
The Clarke House is the city’s oldest house, built in 1836. Ed Maldonado is the curator of the museum and co-curator of this show.
As only the best and most thoughtful museum presentations are able to do, this one does not just present historical items but also puts them into a context that helps explain an era and a place.
“The majority of the clothes are women’s fashions because women’s clothes did change with some regularity. Men’s clothing did not,” says Maldonado. “The hope is that we are not merely giving people some interesting things to look at but providing a way for them to understand the city during these years. This was a fascinating and often-ignored period in Chicago.”
He’s right. Chicago at the time was a wild and raucous place, little more than a frontier town.
The city’s population swelled between 1830 and 1849, from 100 to 4,470. Chicago officially became a city on March 4, 1837, but it wasn’t until two years later that the city had its first policeman. He was a busy fellow, for the town was filled with all sorts of hoodlums, pickpockets, gamblers and other unsavory types. One observer noted, “I have never seen a town that seems so like a universal grog shop.”
But Henry and Caroline Clarke were firmly members of the middle class, and seeing how they lived and dressed illustrates, says Maldonado, “that the city’s early residents were not only rustic, but educated and cultured people who cared about their appearance, manners and propriety.”
Sometimes I wonder: What ever happened to that kind of people?
