sub-sub-series 9 - FIT Oral histories project

Identity area

Reference code

US NNFIT SC.FITA.3.20.4.9

Title

FIT Oral histories project

Date(s)

  • 1967-2023 (Creation)

Level of description

sub-sub-series

Extent and medium

  • More than 370 recorded oral history interviews stored on audio cassette tapes, VHS tapes, mini-DV tapes, and born-digital files.
  • Recordings on audio and video magnetic tape media.
  • Digital surrogates created in 2014 from magnetic media originals comprised of preservation masters and access copies. File formats vary.
  • Born-digital video files in various formats.
  • Transcription documents for most interviews in paper and/or PDF/A digital format.
  • Various documents also exist for each interview and series in physical and/or digital format.

Context area

Name of creator

Administrative history

The Gladys Marcus Library is the library at FIT and supports the academic and research needs of the FIT community. Collections are comprised of both physical and electronic resources which include: trend forecasting services, sketch collections, clipping files, and fashion show DVDs. The library also houses a special collections divison (FIT SPARC) that includes rare and manuscript materials, as well as corporate and academic archives.

Name of creator

Biographical history

Director of the Library at FIT in the 1980s who played an integral role in the development of the institution's oral history collection.

Archival history

  • Approximately 1977-1981: Mr. John Touhey initiated the Oral History Project of the Fashion Industries (OHPFI). This project was created to document, preserve, and make accessible primary source recollections of decision-makers in American fashion and related creative industries. At the time of the founding of the OHPFI, John Touhey was the FIT Library Director and his background was in the area of Media Services. Touhey hired personnel to interview selected subjects and to transcribe information from reel-to-reel or audiocassette tapes. Over time, some of the interviews were also videotaped. The master audio and video tapes were kept in Touhey’s possession in Library administration offices while the transcripts were sent to what was the beginning of the unit of the FIT Library’s Special Collections for preservation and researcher access.

  • Touhey established an Advisory Committee specifically for the project. Mrs. Austine Hearst, a former reporter for the Washington Times-Herald and better known as the wife of the American media magnate William Randolph Hearst, Jr., was the Advisory Committee’s chairperson. Others representing various sectors included Mr. Richard Martin, representing FIT’s institutional interests, Mr. Ralph Lauren, representing the American fashion design sector, and Ms. Geraldine Stutz, president of New York City department store Henri Bendel, representing the fashion retail sector. The inaugural meeting of the Advisory Committee took place on December 4, 1980. The project had strong support from then-President of FIT, Mr. Marvin Feldman. Mr. Bob Young was the first FIT Library staff member that Touhey hired specifically for the program. These transcriptions were the only means by which the content was made accessible to researchers for decades. Touhey later engaged Mr. Robert L. Green to conduct interviews from circa 1978-1981. Touhey selected interviewers of high reputation and respected experience in the fashion world. Green, for example, was a men’s fashion editor, consultant, lecturer, and was the fashion director of Playboy Magazine for more than twenty years.

  • 1982-1990: Touhey hired Ms. Mildred Finger as an interviewer who had worked as a top buyer for department stores and as a consultant to clothes makers and retailers, as vice president of the cosmetics company Charles of the Ritz, and was head of fashion merchandising for Yves Saint Laurent before becoming an independent fashion consultant. Within his leadership role for the Museum at FIT, Mr. Richard Martin became very involved with curating ground-breaking fashion-focused exhibitions at FIT where he worked with Mr. Harold Koda and Ms. Laura Sinderbrand, the one-time director of FIT’s Design Laboratory (the precursor to the Museum at FIT).

  • 1990-1993: When Touhey left FIT, Mr. Richard Martin took over the supervision of the OHPFI, again mainly to serve as an archive of industry leaders and decision-makers. Martin was a member of the teaching faculty, Head of the Educational Foundation for the Fashion Industries (the non-profit, charitable arm of FIT), Director of the Museum at FIT, and served as Acting Library Director. In 1991, Martin was appointed Executive Director of the Shirley Goodman Resource Center, and as such, he became responsible for FIT’s prized collections held by both the Museum and the Library. Martin left FIT for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, and the OHPFI project paused. At this time, there were circa 150 interviews in the collection and only the transcriptions were available for researcher consultation.

  • 1994: On the occasion of FIT's fiftieth anniversary in 1994, a collection of interviews were administered by what is now the division of Communications and External Relations (CER). Interviewers included Ms. Carol Poll, FIT faculty in the Social Sciences, Ms. Valerie Steele, current Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at FIT, and Ms. Estelle Ellis. Ellis was selected as an interviewer for her work for Business Image, Inc., an advertising agency and creative marketing firm. She also worked for notable fashion magazines including Seventeen and Charm, which was later incorporated into Glamour.

  • 2009: Dr. Joyce F. Brown, President of FIT, formed an internal council and associated grant program with a focus on diversity. Members of several different FIT departments, including and not limited to the Library, Foreign Languages, and History, seized the opportunity to reinvigorate the oral history program and applied for a Diversity Council grant in its inaugural grants cycle and interviewed long-standing professors including Ms. Elaine Stone, professor in the Fashion Merchandising Management department, and Mr. Barry Ginsberg, professor of Science.

  • 2010-2012: Ms. Karen Trivette, Professor-Librarian, Head of Special Collections and College Archives, was approached by Ford Models, Inc. to collaborate on an oral history project to capture the stories of the Ford modeling firm. Over the course of two years, Ford and FIT gathered more than seventy interviews with models, set designers, photographers, editors, and stylists who worked in the modeling industry. Ms. Patty Sicular, a long-time model booker and the archivist for the Ford agency, and Ms. Doreen Small, the agency’s attorney, spearheaded the effort.

  • 2012 - present: President Brown funded the OHPFI program's future series entitled FIT Talks, administrated by Ms. Karen Trivette, which continues to this day. It has been and is the product of a strong collaboration between the Division of Communications and External Relations (CER) and the FIT Library’s unit of Special Collections and College Archives. Trivette has engaged additional, well-informed and experienced interviewers such as Mr. Alexander Joseph, Chief Storyteller of FIT and former Managing Editor of the FIT campus magazine Hue, fashion historian April Calahan, Special Collections and College Archives Associate James Fergasun, and Ms. Phyllis Dillon who is an independent scholar and consulting museum curator. Dillon has worked for over thirty-five years in the fields of costume and textile studies and in museums as a textile conservator, curator, and arts administrator, and was also Associate Producer and Main Researcher on the documentary film entitled, Dressing America: Tales from the Garment Center (2014).


  • This oral history collection program and its media was initially maintained by the Gladys Marcus Library. Maintenance of the collection was transferred in 2008 to the newly established library unit of Special Collections and Archives where it remains. In 2014, analog media was digitized by George Blood LP. Starting in 2018, a larger effort to publish the digitized media online along with newly created, born-digital interviews was begun. The oral history collection continues to grow incrementally.

  • Arrangement, description, and/or archival processing by:

2014-2017 - Tess Hartman Cullen, Ashley Kranjac, Samuel Neuberg, Rebecca Love, and Molly Seegers

2018-present - Samantha Levin (archivist), with help from Kari Belsheim (intern: bios and scopes), Oleg Mindiak (intern: subject terms, bios and scopes), Vanessa Tascarella (intern: bios and scopes), Lee McIntyre (intern: rehousing of physical materials).

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Content and structure area

Scope and content

This collection is comprised of oral history interviews with prominent twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion industry businesspeople, designers, and artists, as well as members of the FIT faculty and staff.

Appraisal, destruction and scheduling

  • Notes dating back to the 1980s indicate that some original recordings were removed from the overall collection because they were deemed lectures, and not traditional oral history interviews.

  • The majority of interviews recorded on magnetic media were digitized in 2014. Some recordings were not digitized, however there are no notes indicating why, and the original copies of these are not in the possession of the College Archive. Process sheets about these recordings indicate they may also have been lectures by Robert Green, and not true oral histories.

  • Overall quality of recordings is very positive. Variations in quality depend on who was controlling the recording equipment, how loud the ambient noise was in each interview location, and how well the original medium has survived over time until it could be digitized. Some recordings are very difficult to understand, and others have experienced extensive damage.

Accruals

  • New interviews are added occasionally into the FIT Talks sub-series.
  • Soul Club oral history project conducted in 2022-2023 added as sub-sub-sub-series 14

System of arrangement

Conditions of access and use area

Conditions governing access

Access is open to researchers by appointment at the Fashion Institute of Technology Library, Department of Special Collections and College Archives. If you have any questions, or wish to schedule an appointment contact us at fitlibsparc@fitnyc.edu or call (212) 217-4385.

The contents of this collection are also available to the public via our Archive on Demand repository: https://archiveondemand.fitnyc.edu/items/browse?collection=22

Conditions governing reproduction

Language of material

  • English

Script of material

  • Latin

Language and script notes

Physical characteristics and technical requirements

Finding aids

Allied materials area

Existence and location of originals

  • Born-digital and digital files are stored in FIT's networked servers. These files will be migrated to a new digital repository in 2023 to provide a higher level of preservation storage.

  • Original media (e.g. magnetic audio cassettes, VHS cassettes, reel-to-reel tape, paper documents, etc.) are kept in the College Archive.

Existence and location of copies

A portion of the recordings in this series can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fitspecialcollections

Related units of description

Related descriptions

Notes area

Alternative identifier(s)

Access points

Place access points

Name access points

Genre access points

Description control area

Description identifier

Institution identifier

Rules and/or conventions used

Status

Revised

Level of detail

Partial

Dates of creation revision deletion

Language(s)

    Script(s)

      Sources

      Archivist's note

      • sub-sub-sub-series 13 consists of recorded lectures and conversations with Robert L. Green that fall somewhat out of the scope of this collection, and mostly consist of anectodal information about Hollywood photographers and celebrities.

      Accession area