Fashion Show Stirs Memories for Seniors

Cutting-edge fashion from the ‘90s--the 1890s--enabled the elderly residents of Ventura’s Victoria Care Center on Friday to “Take a Trip Down Memory Lane.”

Embroidered scarves and lace shawls, beaded slippers and what Ventura County Museum of History and Art docent Betty Matson called “god-awful mink stoles” were modeled at the quarterly “memory lane” program.

“People love to talk about things that they know and they love to talk about themselves,” Matson said. “Most of the time in the museum we’re telling people things. Today we’re trying to get them to tell us what they remember.”

And remember they did.

Bessie Coon, 102, recalled wearing the circa-1900 white canvas button shoes she was shown.

“They were dress-up shoes,” she said.

A new pair of the fancy shoes probably cost about $3, Matson said, an expensive luxury at a time when a suit could be purchased for $5.

“I remember seeing them, but I never had them because my people never had that kind of money,” 84-year-old Rose Ross said wistfully.

Still, some senior citizens resented the implication that they might have worn many of the fashions on display, noting that while their mothers and grandmothers may have, they were too young to have ever donned such clothes.

Museum docents have conducted the program at several Ventura County retirement homes since 1991 and hope to see it expand. Artifacts displayed to residents range from black bonnets with ostrich feathers to antique flatirons.

Sometimes an object can provoke a deeper reaction than simply jogging memories, Matson said.

On her first trip to a Santa Paula residential care center about six years ago, Matson showed a Watkins Vanilla Bottle to a new resident who was “withdrawn and uncommunicative.” Suddenly the woman remembered the Watkins Co.’s horse-drawn carriages, which would deliver spices to houses on her street.

“Those memories allowed her to come out and make way for her entrance to the community,” Matson said.