There is an obvious problem with the history of dress in all of its displays and that is, although textiles survive from early periods and cultures of recorded history, actual garments do not provide an uninterrupted flow of evidence across the same long time-span. Therefore, to give the study of dress equal significance to other areas such as architecture, painting, prints, drawings and sculpture, it was (a) inevitable that these other areas would provide much of the source material. The history of surviving dress really only starts in the 17th century, and like all artefacts described as fine or decorative art, is a highly visual subject. However, unlike most of the categories of collection and study that make up those areas, it is fluid rather than static. Garments should be seen in (b) movement on a human body, not frozen on a display figure. This is one of the many difficulties when curating collections of costume and also why some modern writers find costume collections physically and intellectually (c) lifeless Fortunately, in the period after 1660, when more items of dress survive to enrich our understanding of the history of the subject, there are also many painted, printed, photographed and filmed sources of evidence of people in clothing, caught in movement. Often a variety of different types of illustrative examples will (d) provide evidence about how a garment was worn within the period in which it was made. Without the information contained in art in all of its forms, from drawing to sculpture, it is (e) unlikely that displays of historic dress would be awkward imitations of the intentions of their original makers and owners.
* garment: 의복