What do you do with 632 wool skirts? That’s the question Mae Colburn, a New York-based artist and weaver, is trying to answer with an exhibition, aptly titled “Wool Skirts,” on view through March 15 at Sudestada in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.
In the 1960s, Ms. Colburn’s grandmother Audrey Huset began to visit thrift stores in her home state of Minnesota to purchase wool skirts of varying shapes, sizes and colors. For 30 years, her near-weekly outings yielded a collection that grew well into the hundreds.
“My mom remembers bags of skirts starting to show up in a spare room,” Ms. Colburn said.
At that time, she said, her grandmother was most likely collecting because she knew the wool was good-quality material that could be reused — many were woven into rag rugs. Most, however, stayed in storage for 10 years. In the spring of 2024, Ms. Colburn worked with her parents, Carol Colburn, a costume historian, and Richard Colburn, a photographer, to catalog and photograph the pieces in the collection, adding informational tags to each. “As a family, we’re very well set up to do this,” she said.
Gimena Garmendia, the co-curator of the exhibition and founder of Sudestada, saw a talk that Ms. Colburn did for New York Textile Month and reached out in January 2025 to collaborate on what would become “Wool Skirts,” an exhibition of 130 skirts and 29 new pieces by artists and designers made using 47 skirts from the collection. Each piece is available for purchase. Releasing the skirts, Ms. Colburn said, is an integral part of the project.
“She didn’t tell us what she wanted to do with them,” Ms. Colburn said of her grandmother. “I think she just kind of trusted that we would sort something out.”
The collection of skirts, which spans from the 1940s to the 1990s, reflects some of Ms. Colburn’s personal family history, but it also shows broader changes in societal expectations of women and developments in clothing manufacturing.
A study in home sewing
“When we zoom out and use this as a way to think about the clothing industry over the second half of the 20th century,” Ms. Colburn said, “we start out with a lot of handmade skirts that are made for an individual, by an individual.”
This handmade miniskirt from the 1960s is, as its tag reads, “a study in home sewing.” Constructed out of hefty, rust-colored plaid wool, the skirt wraps around the body and buttons neatly in the front, with magenta thread finishing the buttonholes and hem.
Fitted for comfort
This olive-green pencil skirt, ornamented with three pleats, tabs and buttons on its right-hand side, dates to the 1950s. Ms. Colburn pointed out the economical design. “This is a style that doesn’t require a great deal of fabric, it’s quite fitted,” she said.
In the 1950s, she said, “skirt fashions went from pencil like that to large and voluminous.” This skirt in particular, Ms. Colburn added, “has this really interesting asymmetrical feature that gives it interest and life.” The design in the front also serves as a kick pleat, a necessity in fitted skirts to allow the wearer to walk comfortably.
The one skirt the collector wore
“It’s important to point out that my grandma didn’t really wear most of these skirts,” Ms. Colburn said. “She bought them in all sizes: mini skirts, maxi skirts, junior-size skirts. So we have just one skirt in the selection that we have a photograph of her wearing in the 1980s. This is a handmade skirt from the ’50s, but she wore it in the late ’80s for a holiday.”
The precise engineering of the Pendleton Turnabout
This 1950s skirt, labeled a Pendleton Turnabout, is reversible — when worn, one of the patterns shows on the outside, while a second pattern peeks through from underneath the pleat folds. The Turnabout debuted in 1953, and it required such precise engineering that Pendleton patented the design. This particular skirt was photographed for the fliers promoting the exhibition, and it was the first one to be purchased by a visitor.
Pendleton rereleased the Turnabout skirt in 2013, but after so much time had passed, there were “no records on the technique,” according to the brand’s website. “It’s constructed with careful planning and engineering by our fabric design and manufacturing personnel.”
Construction so complex the skirt has to be custom-made
“This is a style that we love that simply is not made anymore,” Ms. Colburn said, referring to the specific production method similar to Pendleton’s Turnabout where the bands of gray, red and blue that appear on the exterior pleats of the skirt give way to flashes of a bright, eye-catching red pattern revealed on the inside folds when the skirt moves. To make it requires bespoke production.
“The fabric has been woven specifically to size to become this very specific skirt,” which was made in the United States in the 1980s, she said.
From protest sign to skirt
For his contribution to the “Wool Skirts” exhibition, the artist Jason Rosenberg selected a long white wool skirt that he could use as a canvas to reference his own family history. In a photograph from 1963, his mother holds a sign that reads, “When a system starts telling people what to wear, then it’s time for that system to be changed.”
The photograph is from a walkout that his mother organized at her school in the Bronx to protest a longstanding dress code requiring female students to wear skirts to school, “even in the cold winter months,” he wrote in his artist statement. “The words painted on this skirt are the same words she wrote on her protest sign that day.”
A workwear-inspired standout
This heather-gray A-line skirt, dating to the 1970s, has a subtle railroad-stripe pattern, belt loops and practical side pockets. The placement of its zipper makes it stand out.
“It’s the only skirt in the collection that has a fly or a closure in the front,” Ms. Colburn said. Typically, the skirts have closures on the side or in the back. This skirt, she said “is referring to workwear, to jeans, to men’s tailoring.”
A classic 1990s silhouette
The 1960s and ’70s saw a rise in union-made clothing, followed by an increase in offshore production in the 1980s and ’90s. This black and white straight skirt from the ’90s is one of the most recently produced skirts in the collection, with a “pegged” silhouette, narrower at the hem than the hips, and typical of the time.
Ms. Colburn’s grandmother died in 2022, but she stopped making her weekly thrift store visits at some point in the 1990s. “I think both the availability of high-quality wool and of skirts started petering off,” Ms. Colburn said. “By the time fast fashion came in, she stopped collecting.”
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