When Dr. Carma deJong Anderson, a Brigham Young University faculty member and nationally known authority on historic clothing, first considered a research tour of Scandinavia, she felt daunted.

“I’m old and sick and tired,” thought Anderson, who was 70. But then her passion for history and clothing, and the opportunity to put a capstone on 40 years of work, took hold.

“I don’t want to, but I have to,” she decided, “because so many of the early settlers of Utah were from Scandinavia and we in Utah don’t know beans about Scandinavian clothing.”

So last summer, she and a translator embarked on an eight-week tour of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, visiting museums, historic villages, clothing storage centers and libraries, and interviewing curators.

She shot 55 rolls of film, and bought $1,200 worth of fabrics that are only produced in Scandinavia.

Turns Research Into Replicas
Back in Provo, Anderson began turning her research and the fabrics into replicas of the types of clothing worn by 19th Century Scandinavians, such as the early settlers of Sanpete County. Eventually, Anderson aspires to make at least 20 costumes representing men, women and children.

She started sewing a Swedish costume on her own. As work progressed, and as she launched work on other garments, she called in other experts, including tailors, knitters and embroiderers. She also offered internships to BYU students.

The first products of what became a huge team effort will be debuted Saturday, May 26 at the Little Danish Supper, the kick-off event in this year’s Scandinavian Heritage Festival. The dinner, open to all without reservations, begins at 6 p.m. at the Greenwood Student Center at Snow College.

Eight Ensembles To Be Shown
The show, featuring local models, will include eight ensembles. One male suit and five female costumes were sewn by Anderson and her team. The show will also include three original outfits.

One is a woman’s festival skirt and bodice, estimated to be about 150 years old, from Amager, Denmark.
Another is a man’s suit and hat, about 100 years old. The father of Ephraim resident Charles Hilmer Peterson brought the suit from Sweden. Peterson, who is in his 80s, will model the garment.

The third original is a teenage girl’s dress purchasd in Sweden in 1925 and donated to the Costume Institute of Utah, a nonprofit organization launched by Anderson.

Each model’s attire will reflect a specific location in Scandinavia, ranging from Reykjavik, Iceland to East Telemark, Norway. Anderson will narrate the show, explaining where each ensemble fits in Scandinavian history, geography and culture.

Models Will Parade
On Saturday at 11 a.m., the models will wear their costumes in the parade down Main Street. Accompanying each model will be a young man wearing a red cap like those worn in Scandinavia today and carrying a sign identifying the country and region the model’s attire represents.

From noon-2 p.m. back in the Greenwood Center, Anderson and the models will present previous evening’s fashion show at the smorgasbord luncheon.

As the daughter of Gerrit deJong, founding dean of fine arts at BYU, Anderson grew up surrounded by the arts—music, theater, dancing and visual art. She loved and worked in all of them, she says.

But by the time she started on her master’s degree, her focus was clear. She worked toward the degree in theater with an emphasis on costuming and a specialization in historic clothing.

Before she finished her master’s, her professors encouraged her to move directly into doctoral work. For her dissertation, she studied clothing worn by converts who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the first half of the 19th Century.
Besides studying clothing in the eastern part of the United States, she traveled to the British Isles to delve into the clothing styles that were in vogue in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales at the time thousands of Britons were converting to the church and leaving for America.

The third major region from which 19th Century converts originated was Scandinavia. Until recently, Anderson says, 40 percent of Utah’s population was of Scandinavian decent. The Scandinavian research is vital because it completes her coverage of clothing of 19th Century Mormon pioneers.

Shows On Mormon Clothing
Over her career, she has created costumes for and consulted on projects ranging from PBS documentaries, to exhibits at the LDS Church Museum of History and Art in Salt Lake City, to LDS Church historic sites across the country.

One of her biggest projects was creating costumes used in connection with exhibit that opened the BYU Museum of History and Art in 1993. The art in the exhibit, loaned Vatican, covered the Etruscan era from about 900 BC-100 BC. Many docents and dancers at the event wore Etruscan costumes. She also made costumes visitors to the exhibit, especially children, could wear for picture-taking.

She has gathered and preserved about 30,000 apparel items ranging from an 1805 Scottish wedding dress to contemporary American designer clothes and placed them under ownership of her Costume Institute of Utah.

“People throughout the country have given me mountains of precious things because they haven’t known what to do with them,” she says. “I would eventually like to establish a museum.”

Anderson is a self-described perfectionist and stickler for historical accuracy. She describes some Mormon pioneer exhibits as “hideous” because the clothing on the models bears no resemblance to what pioneers really wore. “It doesn’t do our ancestors justice not to have the beauties they produced,” she says.

She has brought that same commitment to authenticity to preparation of the costume show for the Scandinavian Heritage Festival.

After landing in Copenhagen last summer, Anderson, accompanied by her translator, Andrea Darais, fanned out to across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, with a focus on sites that were hotbeds of Mormon conversion during the mid and late1800s. Darais had served a mission in Norway 15 years earlier and kept up her Norwegian.

Left companion in the dust
On occasion, Anderson left her companion metaphorically in the dust. The younger woman asked for a day or two off to rest, while Anderson took off to more museums.

Anderson says that during her trip, as she viewed garment after garment from other centuries, she “felt the presence of the people who had owned those clothes. I felt their influence and appreciation that someone was taking an interest in what they had spent their lives creating.”

At the end of the trip, she attended a Mormon History Association gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark marking the sesquicentennial of the arrival of missionaries in Scandinavia in 1850.

At the conference, she met up with a former student, Betty Robinson, of Eureka, Utah. Robinson also had an interest in Scandinavian clothing, particularly Icelandic wear, and had made research trips to Iceland. Robinson presented a paper at the conference. (Robinson sewed the Icelandic costumed that will be featured in this weekend’s show.)

Scandinavian clothing, Anderson explains, falls into three categories: plain clothes with moderate regional design worn day-to-day by the poorer classes, fashionable clothing of European design worn among the upper classes; and finally, and most importantly, festival clothing. Festival wear was elaborate dress, with inherited pieces used for generations, worn at church, weddings, funerals, and especially Christmas or midsummer festivals.

Scandinavians, though sometimes poor, were proud of their regional identities and incorporated colors and designs representing those regions into their festival clothing. Even today, clothing is one of the main ways they tell others who they are.

Not only does the style of one’s festival clothing tell where one is from, but various touches tell more about the wearer. For example, a young woman from Rattvik, Sweden who is not married ordinarily wears work aprons. But for her wedding, she wears a Chinese blue work apron covered by an embroidered white linen wedding apron. (Anderson notes that all she has to do when she gets home from the wedding is remove the white apron and she’s ready to go to work!)

A girl’s or teenager’s apparel might include a simple hood or cap with long hair flowing below it. But a married woman might wear a tight headwrap that completely covers her hair.

The items displayed in this weekend’s fashion show reflect an amazing amount of work and skill. Anderson personally styled, patterned and cut all of replica clothing. Eleven other women helped with various aspects of the project.

One example is a man’s suit representative of Nordmor, Norway. Anderson tailored the breeches, another woman tailored the coat, an expert needle worker embroidered the vest, a woman from the Salt Lake spinner’s guild died yarn for the stockings, and one of Anderson’s neighbors knitted the stockings.

The accompanying article gives a brief sketch of each ensemble to be presented during the Scandinavian Heritage Festival. The Nordmor suit is one of the highlights.

Elegant Blekinga costume
Another highlight will be an elegant woman’s costume representing Blekinga Province in Sweden. It include a champagne silk vest with embroidered wildflowers and a chemise under dress with embroidery along the front buttons reflecting waving grain.

Still another notable piece is the 150-year-old original costume from Amager, Denmark, which includes a red skirt with vertical stripes woven into the fabric, a gray flannel petticoat, a sea-blue bodice, and a white batiste under blouse.

As Anderson was doing research before heading for overseas, she heard about a woman who had an original Scandinavian outfit. She contacted her, and “true enough, she pulled out a goat hair wool skirt.” Anderson immediately bought the skirt and the accompanying petticoat and cap for $1,000. She and her team made the bodice and under blouse that will be worn with the acquired items.

Goat hair, Anderson notes, is perfect for the windy, rainy Danish climate. When it gets wet, it expands and acts like a raincoat, keeping the dampness from soaking through to the skin. The sturdiness of the fabric explains why the skirt has survived for so long yet seems to be in good condition.

The crown jewel of the show is a flared, 10-gore dancing dress with green velvet and metallic trim from East Telemark, Norway. The ensemble includes a dark red bodice with green-gold metallic braid, over a gold calico shirt with embroidery around the collar.

Besides the basic garments, the models will wear a host of aprons, headpieces, belts, jewelry, footwear and other accessories, many acquired from Scandinavia recently but aesthetically and culturally consistent with 19th Century dress.

In the weeks before the Scandinavian Heritage Festival, Anderson was in constant touch with shops in Scandinavia attempting to purchase items ranging from birch bark shoes to hand-woven belts in order to complete the costumes.

Several months prior to the show, Anderson became seriously ill and lost substantial weight. Two weeks before the show, she was still waiting for a definitive diagnosis. During an interview, she mentioned her illness but quickly shifted to the clothing, peppering her descriptions of garments with words like “beautiful,” :gorgeous,” “wonderful,” exquisite.”

She says she hopes her presentation in Ephraim will give viewers “a window into the past” and an appreciation of the celebratory lives their ancestors lived as they donned their festival wear to participate in church-going, confirmations, baptisms, weddings, funerals and holidays.

“I hope people will realize how beautiful their lives were in spite of primitive conditions.” she says, “and appreciate the fact that it was beauty created of their own hands.”