You’ve held a variety of jobs: teacher, financial analyst, and public relations practitioner among them. Now you oversee volunteers for the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection. Between all that, you managed to earn four degrees from Ohio State.
It had always been on my mind to pursue higher education for personal gratification, so I enrolled in graduate school in my late 50s after raising three children. I spent five years as a graduate student working with the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection in the mid-1990s. It was real easy to go back to college. It was a respite for me, someplace to get away and exercise my mind.

What sparked your interest in the history of clothing?
I took a class in the history of textiles during the summer while working part-time and just got sucked into the field. Dr. Lucy Sibley invited me to take a history of costumes class the following year. Designer Charles Kleibacker, who was director and curator of the Historic Costume Collection at the time, heard I had experience sewing and asked if I would volunteer. I got to know some of the faculty, and they invited me to pursue a graduate degree in textiles and clothing.

Tell us about the collection.
It’s known in the clothing world as one of the premier collections of 20th-century couture and is a museum as well as an academic research and study collection. We have two exhibitions a year, and each has a different theme or story to tell. Best of all, it’s open to the public and it’s free. Because we’re part of the university and an academic area, we’re really open to researchers. We not only have artifacts and objects—clothing, hats, shoes, purses, neckties, and jewelry or anything that adorns or enhances the body of a person—we also have volumes of books and fashion magazines dating back to the 1840s.

What’s the value of researching clothing?
It’s not frivolous. Clothing is our nearest environment and an environment that each and every one of us changes and modifies each day of our lives. You get up and put clothing on or get up and decide to not put clothing on. To fully understand human behavior, it’s important to understand how humans dress and adorn themselves.

Your focus at the collection has been on the Ann W. Rudolph Button Collection.
One of the most exciting things that happened has once we got this volunteer program going, volunteers who were button collectors knew experts in the field and brought in experts who were just thrilled to see the collection at their own expense. We get letters all the time from collectors saying, “May we please come?” We had a military button expert come last year who identified things we might have never known otherwise. He pulled out a brass button from the uniform of a Confederate naval officer that is one of only 14 known buttons of its kind. That was a hot number. All the button people got all excited.

How many buttons are in the collection?
When I first came here, the button collection was in big cardboard boxes filling two rooms and a warehouse, and you couldn’t begin to count them. We’ve now honed and sorted the collection and are going to end up with between 28 and 30 boxes. Each will have 20 to 25 cards, and each card will have 20 to 40 buttons. They represent one example of every significant kind of button in the collection. And we have everything from 16th century to modern buttons.

Interview by PAMELA BABCOCK