The Louisiana State Museum maintains one of the largest and finest costumes and textiles collections in the country that is admittedly broader than many similar collections because of the inclusion of a large collection of Louisiana Carnival materials, both costume and non-costume. 

Overall, the collection ranges from the eighteenth century to the present with the majority of the objects having a Louisiana provenance. Of the approximately 50,000 objects in the collection, 35% is the historic clothing, fashion, and accessories collection, 15% is the textiles collection, and 50% is the Carnival collection.

Furnishings and Household Textiles

Bedding

Quilts

The collection has approximately eighty quilts, quilt tops, and fragments dating from circa 1800 to 2006. It includes examples of piece work, white work, crazy quilt, and strip quilt techniques. Quilt patterns include Sunburst, Log Cabin, Rose of Sharon, God’s Eye, Trip Around the World, Whig Rose, Subtle Star, Charleston Beauty, Flower Basket, Flying Geese, Mosaic, and others. 

Quilts with historical associations include one made for President Zachary Taylor, one used by the Marquis de Lafayette, several associated with the 1884-1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition held in New Orleans, and a log cabin quilt made by an enslaved woman. Several quilts are associated with plantations such as Melrose, Roberta Grove, and Williams. There are two quilts made of Louisiana Acadian cottonade fabrics, two made by renowned self-taught Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter, and several made by master contemporary Louisiana quilters. 

Recent additions to the quilt collection include several quilts inspired by Hurricane Katrina.

Coverlets/Bedspreads

Artifacts in this category exhibit a full range of techniques used to make and decorate bed coverings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum has coverlets and bedspreads that were woven, pieced, crocheted, knitted, embroidered, and appliquéd.

Blankets, Sheets, Pillowcases, and Mosquito Netting

The collection contains an assortment of materials used to dress beds. Many of these items are from wedding trousseaux. Dates of these objects range from the 1840s to the 1930s.

Floor, Window, and Furniture Coverings

This category includes a variety of rugs, mats, curtains, drapes, shades, valences, portières, tie backs, curtain hooks, tablecloths, runners, scarves, doilies, antimacassars, ottoman covers, placemats, towels, bags, bellows, tea cozies, and tassels.

Acadian Textiles

The Museum has a large and important collection of household textiles woven and constructed by Acadian women of southwest Louisiana, reflecting the skills of émigrés from the Acadian region of Canada beginning in the eighteenth century. The majority of the items are utilitarian household textiles, including blankets, quilts, portières, rugs, tablecloths, and placemats, as well as a small number of garments. These items range from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In addition to finished textiles, the collection contains a wide array of cut woven samples in various colors and patterns. There is also one mid-nineteenth century dress and a white linen women’s cap that were handmade by Acadian dressmakers and needle workers as well as a plaid mouchoir (kerchief) made of genuine Indian handwoven Madras cloth.

Tools used to create Acadian textiles are also included, including large handmade looms, spinning wheels, hand carders for preparing yarn for spinning, and hand-carved wood spools to hold the yarn.

Personal Artifacts

Ladies' Clothing and Accessories

The objects in this category range from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Collection items are handmade by couturiers, dressmakers, artisans, and homemakers, or they were mass produced.  

Over sixty international, national, and regional couturiers and dressmakers are represented in the collection, including Charles Frederick Worth, Emile Pingat, Callot Sœurs, Paul Poiret, Lucien Lelong, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Jean Dessès, Yves St. Laurent, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Norman Norell, Pauline Trigère, Emilio Pucci, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, James Galanos, Diane Von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Halston, and Louisiana natives Geoffrey Beene and Mignon Faget, to name a few.  

Most are formal, costly, special occasion dresses and suits. The collection also includes over fifty wedding gowns from the 1830s to the 1990s and dozens more wedding accessories, including veils and shoes, as well as graduation gowns, debutante gowns, habits from religious orders, and costumes worn by exotic dancers.

Outer garments include capes, cloaks, coats, and shawls made with fine fabrics and with elaborate construction and ornamental details, many by renowned designers.

Intimate apparel such as nightgowns, underwear, and supportive wear exhibit a broad range of changing styles, forms, and functions over time. They are made of fine fabrics using intricate construction details and frequently very elaborate decorative needle and lace work. Some of the finer undergarments are from wedding trousseaux, and many bear the embroidered monogram or full name of the wearer.

Accessories include several hundred pieces of jewelry, as well as gloves, shoes, parasols, hats, hatpins, handkerchiefs, and handbags. Collections of special note include Victorian jewelry made from human hair, a large collection of decorative and utilitarian hand fans, and beaded handbags.

Among the most historically significant textiles in the collection is a group of six handwoven headwraps known in Louisiana as tignons. Mostly made from genuine Indian Madras cotton plaid cloth in vibrant colors, tignons are emblematic of traditional headwear worn by Black women in the West since the eighteenth century, particularly in the Caribbean Islands and the American South.

Headwraps were utilitarian garments employed by enslaved women and servants to protect their hair during strenuous physical labor and to provide protection from sun exposure. In the eighteenth century, among the sizable population of free people of color in New Orleans, the wearing of tignons was in part a reaction to the limits placed on women’s attire by Spanish colonial officials in a reductive effort to separate them from white women. Legal restrictions were enforced on the fanciful costume embellishments and hair ornaments favored by some free women of color.

However, in time, the wearing of increasingly sophisticated headwraps in vivid colors and tied into elaborate and symbolic knotted patterns became indelibly iconic of the pride women of color took in their identity and appearance. Tignons laid the groundwork for this realization of self-driven dignity, and only a handful of original examples from the nineteenth-century are known to exist, including the six in the Louisiana State Museum’s collection.

Men's Clothing and Accessories

Menswear items date from the late eighteenth century to the present. Most of the items are formal eveningwear from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, as well as suits, overcoats, and casual shirts. 

The men’s accessories collection includes shoes, neckties, collars, cufflinks, eyeglasses, match safes, gloves, and cigar and pipe smoking paraphernalia. There is a small but notable collection of walking sticks and canes, including ones associated with P. G. T. Beauregard, one used in the New Orleans Stockyards, ones made of glass, and one that conceals a sword. 

Uniforms

The Museum possesses a distinguished collection of military uniforms worn by the men and women of Louisiana. The museum has artifacts from every conflict in which Louisianians have been engaged from the War of 1812 to the Vietnam War. The earliest of these are War of 1812 uniforms worn by Philogène Favrot and two worn by Lt. Col. William S. Hamilton, one of which is said to be the only known existing example of its type. The collection also contains Zachary Taylor’s felt sombrero and white silk sword sash from the Mexican War. 

The Civil War collection includes uniforms worn by Edmund Kirby-Smith and Mansfield Lovell, as well as a bracelet made from the buttons from one of P. G. T. Beauregard’s uniforms. 

There are uniforms and related artifacts from the Spanish-American War and many uniforms from World Wars I and II, including General Claire Chennault’s uniform worn when commanding the famous Flying Tigers. Because the Louisiana State Museum was the only general history museum in the state throughout the entirety of the twentieth century, many uniforms from World Wars I and II were donated during and shortly after the wars by returning service men and women.  

There are many head coverings in the uniform collection, including two French-style shakos from the War of 1812, a Mexican War-era shako, and a sailor’s “liberty” flat cap from the USS Maine.

There is a small but excellent collection of women’s military and civil uniforms from World War I forward, representing the Army, Navy, Red Cross, and YWCA. The collection also includes numerous uniforms worn by both United States and Allied forces and Axis powers, including British and French uniforms and a set of Japanese World War II utilities.

Occupational uniforms are represented by numerous nineteenth and twentieth-century volunteer and professional firefighter uniforms and helmets, as well as uniforms worn by the New Orleans Fire Department and other first responders during rescues after Hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Police Department is represented with examples from the 1920s, 1980s-1990s, and uniforms worn by officers during Hurricane Katrina.

The collection of athletic uniforms worn by both men and women was dramatically augmented beginning in 2005 with the acquisition of the collection of hundreds of artifacts from the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame gathered over the years from their inductees. This includes a vast array of uniforms of players and coaches from Louisiana high schools and colleges as well as professional teams. 

Notable athletes like Pete Maravich, Archie Manning, and Marshall Faulk are represented in this collection. Many past and present professional teams are represented, including the New Orleans Saints, Zephyrs, Jazz, Buccaneers, and the Shreveport Steamer football team, as well as out-of-state teams for which Louisiana athletes played. The collection documents the sports of football, baseball, softball, basketball, track and field, boxing, golf, horseracing, motorcycle racing, and other sports. A group of uniforms worn by Louisianians competing in the Olympic Games is contained in this collection.

Religious and Ceremonial Artifacts

The collection contains items associated with Catholic religious services and orders, Jewish religious services, the Knights of Columbus, and the Masons.

Infants' and Children's Clothing

The collection of infants’ and children’s clothing ranges in dates from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Artifacts include dresses, suits, robes, coats, shirts, blouses, pinafores, bibs, chemises, underskirts, underdresses, drawers, pajamas, nightgowns, caps, bonnets, shoes, and school uniforms.  Reflecting the Catholic heritage of south Louisiana, there are over thirty christening gowns dating from 1840 to 1912, including two attributed to the hands of New Orleans Ursuline nuns.

Textiles

Textile Art

Ecclesiastical Needlework

One of the most treasured artifacts in the museum’s collection is the magnificent gold and silver embroidered altar cloth, called an antependium, made in the late eighteenth century for use in the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. It is thought to have been made in Spain and sent to New Orleans in 1795 for the installation of Luis Ignatius Peñalver y Cárdenas as Bishop of Louisiana. It exhibits the dazzling technique of three-dimensional goldwork produced mostly in the city of Seville, Spain. The antependium measures nearly nine feet wide and was recently thoroughly restored.

Samplers

The collection of girls’ samplers includes embroidered and Berlin work pieces dating from 1804 to 1876.  A number are identified with individuals, families, institutions, and places in Louisiana.

Needlepoint Pictures and Portraits

The collection includes several examples of popular nineteenth-century women’s and girls’ portrait needlework.  Done in wool, silk, chenille, metallic thread, and glass beads, these portraits depict figures such as George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Stonewall Jackson, and Henry Clay, as well as Biblical scenes and the Old State Capitol at Baton Rouge. 

Furniture Decoration 

Examples from this collection category include needlepoint fire screens and chair covers.

Newcomb College Embroidery and Artworks

The collection includes examples of fine needlework made by young women enrolled in the art program at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in the early twentieth century. This group of important Arts and Crafts embroideries includes utilitarian textile works commonly made by Newcomb artisans, such as table runners, pillow covers, and handbags. Samples of original Tussah silk embroidery thread, the preferred medium of Newcomb craftswomen, have also been acquired for the permanent collection.

Newcomb art students received training in a variety of media, including pottery, metalwork, bookbinding, and painting and drawing. The collection includes two large 1920s canvas panels with images of dancing ladies on them, painted by renowned Newcomb artist Sadie Irvine. They were used as decorations at a Mardi Gras ball held at the college.

Embroidery Fragments

There are two gold embroidered bees that have a history of being made by French embroidery master Augustin-François-André Picot and designed by artist and royal favorite Jean-Baptiste Isabey for the coronation robes of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Flags and Banners

The Museum has a distinguished collection of over 400 military and ceremonial flags and banners.

Flags

Among the Museum’s treasures is a recently authenticated eighteen-star/eighteen-stripe hand-sewn silk American flag made in 1812 in recognition of the admission of Louisiana into the Union as the eighteenth state. This large flag is the only silk version of the few known original eighteen-star American flags in existence and the only one that bears eighteen stripes rather than the customary fifteen stripes. It is also the only version in a museum collection.

The rarity of this artifact is due to its distinction as an unofficial version of the American flag. In the early nineteenth century, American Flag Acts could not keep up with the addition of each new state to the Union. When Louisiana became the eighteenth state in 1812, the American flag still bore fifteen stars, reflecting the admission of Vermont and Kentucky into the Union in 1795, and did not change again until 1818. Louisiana (1812), Indiana (1816), and Mississippi (1817) were never reflected in the number of stars on the flag, inspiring residents of those states to sew unofficial flags if they wished to fly one to reflect the entry of their states into the Union. 

Other significant flags include a hand-sewn American flag used during the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to New Orleans in 1825, flags from the Mexican War era, and a number of Civil War-era flags, including one of three original silk prototypes later adopted as the battle flag of the Confederacy. Civil War regiments represented in the flag collection include the Washington Artillery, the Pelican Rifles, Hardee’s Corps, Fenner’s Battery, and a Second National flag that is said to have draped the coffin of Jefferson Davis after his death in New Orleans in 1889.

Banners

Banners of note include several nineteenth-century examples associated with benevolent societies, like the Screwman’s Benevolent Association, as well as banners representing other professions. Numerous examples of political, athletic, and advertising banners are also part of the collection.

Personal Symbols and Souvenirs

A large collection of textile souvenirs includes cloth badges, ribbons, streamers, small banners, handkerchiefs, programs, scarves, fabric samples, and aprons commemorating political figures, causes, social groups, momentous historic events and occasions, and expositions. 

This collection includes samples of fabric associated with the life of Andrew Jackson, a handkerchief used by Napoleon Bonaparte, body banners for women’s suffrage, police and fire badges, an apron and ribbons from the 1884-1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, political textiles from the campaigns of John Tyler, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, and Bill Clinton, and a badge commemorating Lafayette’s visit in 1825.

Documentary and Research Materials

Fashion Plates

The Museum has an extensive collection of nineteenth-century fashion plates from French, German, English, and American journals. Most of these were donated to the museum by the Fashion Group of New Orleans.

Fashion Periodicals

Costume and textile reference materials in the permanent collection include examples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century periodicals like The Ladies’ Monthly Museum, La Belle Assemblée, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Peterson’s, The Delineator, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and Vogue. Hundreds more fashion magazines from the 1960s to the present are kept as reference material.

Patterns and Sewing Books

This category includes patterns from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s for various clothing items, particularly for women. There are also patterns for needlework, Berlin work, crochet, and embroidery. The collection has two needlework sampler books.

Carnival

Costumes

The Louisiana State Museum is the only museum in the world that actively collects Louisiana Carnival costumes on a large scale and continuing basis for preservation as artifacts. The collection of over 1,500 individual costume items distinguishes the Costumes and Textiles Collection at the Louisiana State Museum from other similar historical museum collections. It consists predominantly of court costumes from New Orleans Carnival krewes, including a small number of important costumes from the late nineteenth century.

Carnival costumes were usually made by skilled dressmakers, milliners, and tailors, both in New Orleans and in other American cities, as well as European cities, especially Paris. These costumes are generally composed of tunics or dresses, long mantles, pants, hose, boots, shoes, gloves, and other accessories and were made from luxurious fabrics using complex construction techniques. These costumes were often heavily ornamented with exquisite beadwork, embroidery, lace, bullion braid, and fringe. 

The women’s costumes, especially the custom-made gowns worn by young ladies selected to reign as queens of Carnival balls, reflect the fashionable tastes of their era. Many of the men’s costumes are adapted from the elaborate garb of medieval European courts, Middle Eastern monarchs, and African potentates. Roles played by the wearers of these costumes include king, queen, captain, maid, duke, page, and lieutenant. The collection includes costumes worn by well-known entertainers, including New Orleans musicians Pete Fountain and Harry Connick Jr., and film star Dennis Quaid.

In addition to court costumes, the collection also contains very distinctive costumes associated with the unique styles and characters of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the Acadian courir de Mardi Gras, Black Masking Indian tribes, LGBTQ+ organizations, walking clubs, marching bands, modern superkrewes, street maskers, the Bourbon Street Awards costume competition, women’s and children’s krewes, and float riders. 

These costumes have been made by professional dressmakers, designers, costumers, and the wearers themselves. A small number of costumes acquired from outside New Orleans represent cities like Lake Charles, Houma, Franklin, Morgan City, and Shreveport.

Carnival Jewelry

The collection contains a glittering array of faux crown jewelry of Carnival monarchs. The most elaborately designed and bejeweled crowns, scepters, and parures are from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were made in Paris. Most are gilded with gold or silver over a base metal and set with fine European glass gemstones.  

Early queens’ parures included not only crowns and scepters but also matching necklaces, bracelets, brooches, earrings, and jeweled belts. Some kings carried jeweled cups instead of scepters and wore golden helmets of knights and Viking warriors in place of crowns. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club crowns and scepters in the collection often display Egyptian and other African design motifs.

One of the most significant recent additions to the collection is a group of original designs for many of the jewels worn by New Orleans Carnival monarchs in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Until recently, there were few clues about the identity of the Parisian jewelers who made regalia during this time for New Orleans carnival monarchs. In 2019, the name of one of the most prominent Parisian jewelers was finally identified when a large group of sketches appeared in a private European collection and was acquired by the Museum.

LeBlanc-Granger was established in Paris in 1824 as a metalworking company. In the late 1800s, the firm’s director, Richard Gutperle, assumed ownership, renaming it LeBlanc-Granger and Gutperle. The company supplied high-end costume jewelry and costumes for operatic and theatrical companies across Europe, including the prestigious Paris Opera and La Scala in Milan, Italy. The company made pieces for the European premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at La Scala in February 1872, and the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt was a loyal client.

The firm’s designers drew sketches for their jewelry first in pencil and ink on tracing paper, transferring them to heavier paper to make finished illustrations. Some drawings were done in watercolor to represent the colors of the glass stones to be used in the final works, and many of them include written instructions for the fabricators.

Carnival Favors

This category includes examples of high-quality gifts given by krewes to members and guests at balls, particularly female guests, and often marked with the name of the krewe and the date of the ball. These highly sought-after favors include krewe pins, ducal badges, small personal accessories like compacts, hairbrushes, hand mirrors, and cufflinks, and a wide variety of utilitarian items like vases, key chains, small clocks, pocket knives, and bar sets. This collection also includes other types of commemorative souvenirs and objects thrown by float riders to parade goers, including beaded necklaces of glass and plastic, cups, doubloons, and other trinkets.

Carnival Paper

This is the most extensive division of the Carnival Collection, totaling over 10,000 items. Almost since the founding of the Louisiana State Museum in 1906, efforts have been made to document Louisiana’s unique Carnival traditions by collecting an extensive array of paper ephemera. This effort repeats every year with additions of contemporary materials to the collection. The Carnival paper category includes ball invitations, programs, and admit cards dating from the 1840s to the present. The most elaborate invitations are from the so-called Golden Age of Carnival, roughly the 1870s through the 1920s, a time when the artistic sophistication of lithographed paper items was at its peak.

In 2023, the Museum acquired a once-in-a-generation collection documenting the history of Spangenberg Studios, a family-owned company founded in 1889 by brothers Robert Ferriday Spangenberg Jr. (1871-1936) and William Henry Bower Spangenberg (1873-1941). Sons of Philadelphia-born Robert F. Spangenberg Sr., brothers Robert and Bower were born in New Orleans and pursued careers in the early development of electricity in the late 1800s.

Their pioneering work in numerous commercial properties in the city, including theatrical venues, led them to add lighting effects and scenic design to their specialties. These skills naturally lent themselves to Carnival balls, and by the 1920s, the Spangenberg firm had virtually cornered the market on designing and installing sets for Carnival balls.

This unparalleled archive includes thousands of examples of original artwork, photographs, and company records documenting decades of work for nearly every Carnival krewe in New Orleans as well as numerous clients out of state. 

Carnival Illustrations

This category includes a large and diverse group of both original works of art as well as mass produced two-dimensional art. Original works include an extensive collection of watercolor costume, float, and tableau set designs by renowned local Carnival artists, including Charles Briton, Jennie Wilde, Bror Anders Wikstrom, Ceneilla Bower Alexander, Louis Andrews Fischer, Léda Hincks Plauché, Helen Clark Warren, H. Tardy Hart, Susus Von Ehren, Lucia and Philip Liuzza, Kathryn Dyer, Larry Youngblood, Olga Peters, Alice Peak Reiss, Joseph Barth Jr., Joseph Barth III, Grace Granger, Danny Frolich, John Scheffler, Susu Kearney, San Nicholas, Anthony and Shirley Colombo, Kellie Hyatt, Gironda, Deborah Smith, Carter Church, Lewis “Jamie” Greenleaf III, Earl Woodard Jr., Manuel Ponce, Stewart Gahn, Bruce Orgeron Jr., Don Stratton, John Zeringue III, Julie Bouy, Charles Kerbs, Jimmy Keyes, Joel Haas, Caroline Thomas, and others.

This category also includes a collection of approximately 350 large format parade newspapers, known as bulletins, dating from 1874 to 1941, as well as numerous lithographs and engravings meant both as fine art and illustrations in such publications as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly. 

The poster collection includes examples representing such krewes as Rex, Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Bacchus, Orpheus, Endymion, Petronius, Armeinius, Amon-Ra, and the Mystick Krewe of Louisianians, which sponsors an annual Mardi Gras ball held in Washington, DC. The collection also includes a small number of rare original portraits in oil or pastel of Carnival monarchs and court members in costume.

Photographs

Under the purview of the Curator of Costumes and Textiles is the collection of over 10,000 Carnival photographs. These photographs date as far back as the 1870s and up to the present day and reflect the work of both amateur and professional photographers, including substantial collections from noted photographers John Norris Teunisson, Joseph W. “Pops” Whitesell, C. Bennette Moore, Leon Trice, deSylva-Dyer, Raymond W. Muniz, Peggy Stewart, Michael P. Smith, Syndey Byrd, and others.

Photographs depict Carnival parades, monarchs, balls, and street masquerades from all over Louisiana. The collection includes a large group of thousands of accessioned color slides from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Equipment

This small segment of the Carnival collection includes such items as no-parking street signs, flambeau torches, two throne chairs made in the late 1800s for Carnival monarchs, and a group of hand-painted theatrical tableau set pieces, including two very large groups acquired from Schmit Scenic Studio.

Audio/Video

This collection includes a number of mostly vintage 16 mm films made at parades and balls. Newer media are also represented, including VHS cassettes and DVDs. 

To see examples of these films, visit the Louisiana State Museum’s YouTube page.