22.4.2025

The Theatre Museum’s artefact collections and archives are an important resource for research on Finnish performing arts, and scholars across Finland use the museum’s materials in their work. Costume researcher, Doctor of Arts Joanna Weckman’s research has focused on the museum’s extensive collection of performance costumes, its formation and content. Weckman’s work has opened up important perspectives on the representativeness of the costume collection and helps to identify gaps that have emerged in the donation-based collection over the years.

The museum’s collections include about 2,300 performance costumes, the oldest dating back to the late 19th century. Weckman first immersed herself in the costume collection and photographs when curating the exhibition Silk, Velvet – Opera’s Costume Treasures, which showcased costumes from the Finnish National Opera. The 2013 exhibition project Made of Dreams sparked her interest in collection work and ethnic-type costumes in the museum’s collections. This led to a broad research project, The Others on the Finnish Stages, in which the museum’s costume collection is a central research subject.

As her work progressed, Weckman also had to delve into terminology and find Finnish equivalents for English terms. She defines ethnic-type costumes as those “in which the design and production phases prioritized representing belonging to a specific ethnic group over other costume design solutions, such as emphasizing the era of the performance or the character’s mental state. The issue concerns not only ethnic minorities but any ethnicity represented through stage costumes.” Gradually, the research expanded to include the portrayal of racialized and othered people on stage from the perspectives of costume and makeup. The latter refers to costumes worn by characters representing ethnic minorities and PoC individuals (persons of color).

The article “Unknown stories: Costumes representing ethnicity in the Theatre Museum Finland”, published in 2024, addresses the representation of ethnicity through stage costumes in the Theatre Museum’s collections. Currently, Weckman is working on her study ”Jaapponilainen kimono ja korillinen kaukaasialaisia hattuja” – Kansallisteatterin etnistyyppiset näyttämöpuvut Teatterimuseon kokoelmassa (“A Japanese Kimono and a Basket of Caucasian Hats” – Ethnic Type Costumes of the Finnish National Theatre in the Theatre Museum’s Collection) with a personal grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

The costume collection has provided the researcher with abundant material and the museum with valuable information about its own holdings as well as theatre repertoires. Weckman emphasizes that Finnishness has been constructed on stage just like other ethnic identities. In her next project, she aims to explore how ancient Finnishness has been represented from the perspective of costume research.

Marginalized Characters Come to Light

According to Weckman’s 2024 article, at the time of research, ethnic-type costumes accounted for about 8 percent of the museum’s collections. Of these, costumes for characters representing ethnic minorities and PoC individuals made up about three percent. However, she estimates that the number of costumes in the collections does not reflect the proportion of such roles in Finnish theatre repertoires: there were likely more roles than surviving costumes. Similar character types appeared in different plays. Roles representing ethnic minorities and PoC individuals were often servants or other generic, recurring figures played by unnamed extras not listed in programs. Costumes were reused as long as possible, and those at the end of their lifecycle were discarded. Weckman is interested in how each era views these characters and texts differently: “Through them, we better understand the change of time.”

Identifying costumes is detective work, where old theatre programs and photographs are essential tools. Photos reveal that stereotypical portrayals of certain character types were recurring. At the Theatre Museum, identification is facilitated by the fact that the archive and object collections are housed in the same building.

Research Fills the Gaps

Weckman refers to the large number of period costumes in the museum’s collections, which most often belonged to leading actors. However, she is particularly interested in costumes that at first glance seem unremarkable. For example, the worn, nameless, clumsily made costumes made of flannel from Lahti City Theatre turned out to originate from the Lahti Workers’ Theatre of the 1920s. “Apart from the costumes of Tampere Workers’ Theatre, this is a unique material. — When I think that they worked there right after the Civil War and something of that has survived. — There was also other material, such as a small notebook asking if it would be possible to get a lamp for the attic costume storage. They didn’t even have a sewing machine; things had to be borrowed and rented.”

Museum collection work emphasizes the importance of contextual information, but Weckman also defends objects lacking such data or with incomplete details. Ideally, research supports finding this information. She stresses the importance of studying collections because it helps form an understanding of their gaps and biases. At the same time, we must be aware that there are methodological, conceptual, and research-related questions we have not previously considered.

Preserving the Design Process

With shrinking resources, museums must increasingly consider what can be preserved and how space can be managed. As a costume designer herself, Weckman encourages designers to review their productions and identify their most important works, selecting a few key costumes for the collections in collaboration with museum representatives. At the same time, it is important to preserve other material related to the design process, such as sketches, work diaries, and photographs, so that the material is as rich and informative as possible from a research perspective.

Based on an interview with Joanna Weckman, written by Museum Director Johanna Laakkonen.

This is an artificial intelligence translation from Finnish.