Conservator Talk: Having a Ball
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Hartford
Sept. 6, 2025
It takes a lot of work to look this good.
Not me, of course. I mean the “Empress Josephine” dress on display as part of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Having a Ball: Fancy Dress exhibit.
The Empress Josephine is a beautiful piece of clothing, with intricate embellishments, an elegant mantle and emerald sash that highlights the various colors of the dress.
If I sound like I know what I’m talking about, that's entirely thanks to Johanna Tower. She’s an associate textile conservator at Windsor Conservation, an art restoration service in Massachusetts. Johanna spent hundreds of hours working with her colleagues to restore the Empress Josephine dress, and walked the audience through the process during a fascinating presentation at the Atheneum.
The Empress Josephine is notable not only for its beauty, but also for the involved process of helping to restore it to its former glory. One aspect that complicated her work is the fact that the Empress Josephine is actually a doubly-historic dress. It was made in the 1890s, but is itself a replica of Napoleonic-era dresses, which were in style in the beginning of the 19th century. Johanna and her colleagues were tasked with not just repairing the dress according to late 19th century standards, but also accurately representing its Napoleonic roots.
Johanna explained that conservation is about improvement, not perfection. Much of the clothing she works with is quite old, and vigorous attempts to fix stains and broken elements may end up causing more harm than good. Instead, she goes through a painstaking process of identifying issues with the clothing, and finding the best way to mitigate the ravages of time. When she began her work, the Empress Joesphine had structural damage, stains and soiling, missing embellishments and degradation of the fabrics used to make the dress.
After a thorough survey, the first step in the restoration process is cleaning. Naturally, she can’t throw a 130 year-old dress in the washing machine, so instead she uses eyedroppers of mild soap and a special suction device to clean the entire garment inch by inch. Metal embellishments on the dress are cleaned with alcohol.
Next is stabilization, where physical damage to the fabric and other areas of the dress are repaired. This includes repairs to the dress’s inner lining and the neckline of the bodice. This aspect of the work is another that benefits from focusing on improvement. Johanna said that the key is to ensure that any work done is easily reversible, as future conservators may need to repair or correct her work someday.
One element I’d never considered was the act of displaying the dress. Paintings and pictures are simply hung on the wall, and statues and sculptures are placed down. Yet dresses and other clothing items are displayed on mannequins, and the process of dressing a mannequin in fragile clothing is quite involved. However, Johanna says it’s worth it, as seeing a dress on a human-type form conveys so much more about the item than just throwing it on a hanger in the rafters.
Johanna’s presentation wasn’t just about the painstaking effort of restoring a Victorian-era replica of a Napoleonic-era dress though. It was also about the power of following dreams and interests, no matter where they may lead us.
One of the audience members asked Johanna how she managed to find such a specific job as textile conservator. She responded that she’d played dress-up in Victorian clothing as a child, and never looked back. Her love for old clothing led her to costume design, which eventually led to conservation.
It was an encouraging message, and an interesting look into a branch of history that I’d never engaged with.
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