安妮·托维教授，博士.D., studies Victorian mourning mores and steampunk, and puts her extensive clothing history 研究 to use in costume design for UNC mainstage 制作和在课堂上.
You have shiny gold or silver buttons, replace them with dully buffed glass.
You see a widow you know at the market, shopping in her black dress; don’t approach her for a chat unless she approaches you.
You’re a woman mourning your husband: make sure every item of clothing is black for 至少三年.
你的妻子死了. Prove your love by wrapping your hat band with black crepe. 哦,另一个
鳏夫裹着一顶更高的帽子? Buy a hat the height of a train car to prove you loved
你的妻子更多.
These are a few of the rules and anecdotes of mourning in the Victorian era, and no one knows them like Theatre Professor Anne M. Toewe, Ph值.D.，服装设计师和负责人 of the Theatre Design and Technology program at UNC.
Her 研究 on Victorian mourning took her to London in the fall of 2019 to present at the 国际 Conference of Dress Historians, where she shared her 研究 on Victorian mourning rules, especially for men. 她 found they are not any less codified than rules for women, but the mourning periods are typically shorter, as men were more likely to need to remarry to keep their households functioning. (她的演讲中, “Men’s Victorian Mourning Practices in America” was published in the Summer 2020 edition of the “Journal of Dress History” and will be published as a chapter in the upcoming book from the Association of Dress Historians devoted to Victorian history.) Toewe is also a contributing 研究er with the University of Leeds on Frederic Forster’s Mourning Warehouse, along with Lou Taylor, a prominent scholar on mourning 实践 在欧洲.
Toewe’s work as a clothing historian and fashion designer melds on stage and in the classroom, where she immerses her students in clothing history — a set of binders from each historical era spans half of her office — and then sets them to work using 服装设计研究.
Toewe herself designs five to 10 mainstage UNC productions each year. 2014年，当 大学上演 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, director David Grapes came to Toewe with a request: To outfit the actors in steampunk garb, playing off the 1980s subculture born from sci-fi and alternate history literature.
Then, when Grapes directed George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara in 2017, he asked for 蒸汽朋克再次. This time, Toewe dug into the scholarly roots of the genre and found something surprising about steampunk subculture adherents.
“There are a lot of them out there that are incredibly studied in Victorian social 实践. They’ve just found a way to bring that to life,” she says. “说你 不允许穿黑色衣服. ‘Oh, well then, I’m going to make my costume black.’ ‘My 紧身胸衣穿在外面.’ Which would be completely inappropriate for Victorians. ‘I’m going to have three quarter sleeves.“什么? 你的胳膊在白天露出来了?”
Toewe studied Biology as an undergraduate and went into costume design after looking for an easy “A” led her to a Costume Construction class at the College of William and Mary, which she took to boost her GPA for medical school. 这就变成了 另一堂服装课. 和另一个. 她 went on to earn a Master of Fine 艺术 — a terminal degree in the field — and became a professional costume designer, working 在全国各地.
她 entered the University of Colorado’s Ph.D. 程序(向男朋友证明) Ph.D. programs weren’t that hard to get into), but found it filled the gaps left by her nontraditional academic route (as well as getting “Dr.——她是 从一长排医生那里. Toewe came to UNC for three years but has stayed 19, having found a love for 研究 and teaching. 她把她的激情归因于她自己 mentor in those undergraduate classes, and that’s partly why she’s a teacher now. On that note, she says 研究 is a way to develop as a professional while still being available to her undergraduates, rather than leaving 校园 for weeks at a time 去设计其他节目.
Costume history is a great way to learn history, Toewe says. 理解文化 gives context to clothing, and clothing trends are a way to remember dates. 她把 her students to have extensive information on file in their brains for when a director makes a spur-of-the-moment request or comment in a meeting.
“Rumor has it that my Costume History class is the second hardest class on the college 校园. 仅次于物理，”她说. “Well, I mean, 20,000 years of fashion 16周时间很长.”
In addition to helping make her tough, her Biology degree has not gone to waste.
“Everything I learned as a biologist, looking down the tube of a microscope, in terms of layers of observation, scholarly study, detail, is what I do now,” she says. 她 jokes that she can’t be an impartial juror because she would notice and judge every 被告和公诉人的详细资料. “我是一个科学家. 我只是一个服装科学家， of fashion, of historical time periods, of mores and social cultures.”
——丽贝卡·奥布莱恩
