By Grace Holloway
Have ever pondered what “Hot Pants” were or where they originated from? All you would have to do now is go to Moffett Library to the reference section and flip open The Complete Costume Dictionary.
When you get your answer, you can give thanks to Elizabeth Lewandowski, the Midwestern State University theatre professor that wrote the book.
The Complete Costume Dictionary is 632 pages of garment definitions and history. It can inform you about clothes by type, country and by era. It has 300 illustrations.
“I wrote the book because nothing like that existed and I wanted to give my students something that I didn’t have,” Lewandowski said.
It took her about 31 years to develop the contents of the book. It all began in 1980 while she was in college.
Lewandowski went to Bradley University to pursue an opera performance degree. She double majored in theatre to better her odds of having a career out of college. During her sophomore year, the school built a new theatre.
“We were working on the first show for it, and they said, ‘who can sew?’ Suddenly I was in charge of the costume crew because I knew how to run a sewing machine. That’s how it really started.”
Whenever she learned a new sewing term she wrote it down on a notecard.
“I should write this down so I don’t forget,” she would think to herself.
After a long talk with her voice coach her senior year, she had to face a startling reality. She’d have to put her dream of being a dramatic soprano on hold. Her voice wouldn’t mature until her mid- to late 30s. Lewandowski was only 22 and couldn’t wait that long. She asked herself a question.
“What else do I really like? I really liked costumes and at that point I had done them on just about every show. That’s how I decided what I wanted to do.”
Within five years, she acquired thousands of notecards. Dan, her husband, advised her to transfer her definitions onto the computer. Later her friend LaLonnie Lehman, Costume Designer at Texas Christian University, told her that she should create a book.
“So I started getting serious about collecting terms,” Lewandowski said. “I had about 10,000 and submitted it to a publisher. I had multiple contract offers and picked the one I liked best, Scarecrow Press.”
Lewandowski started spending her summers reading foreign language dictionaries and work on research while she traveled with her husband to different cities for his job.
“When I finished I had over 20,000 terms from around the world and throughout history. Nothing of that magnitude had been published before.”
The Complete Costume Dictionary’s official publication date was Oct. 24, 2011.
“I didn’t actually know it had come out until one of my students who had pre-ordered it told me she had gotten an email from Amazon saying they had shipped it. My publisher didn’t even tell me!”
She celebrated her accomplishment with friends and family at the winter solstice party they throw every year on Dec. 21.
She will be working on her next project this summer with friend William Henshaw, associate professor of theatre at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Ark, on writing a book about the history of drag.
