Melissa Huddleston is the only person at Getty—heck, probably even the art world at large—to ever receive this job assignment: clean and repair a dress adorned with breasts made of rubber latex.
The Breast Dress, as it’s become known by Getty staff, is part costume, part symbol of defiance, and part fascinating example of 1970s feminist art. Artist Anne Gauldin created it with some help from members of the Waitresses, a performance art group she cofounded with Jerri Allyn in 1977.
The Waitresses performed at cafes and diners throughout Los Angeles, with unsuspecting patrons as their audience. The group used the archetype of the waitress to attract attention to the realities of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and wage inequality.
To make the dress, Gauldin cast the breasts from the bodies of the women in the group. During an interview at a Conservation Study Day event hosted by the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Gauldin recalled staging the project in the back of her car so she could work on it during breaks from her job at the time. She described brushing thin coats of rubber latex mixed with paint into the plaster molds, then sewing the breasts onto a pink dress in the style of a 1950s diner uniform.
By the time the dress arrived at the GRI in 2018 as part of the Woman’s Building archive, it had begun to deteriorate. Rubber is notoriously unstable: the breasts sagged and had become discolored, cracked, and misshapen. The cloth from the dress was soiled but otherwise in good condition. Huddleston, an assistant conservator at the GRI, often works with modern materials and took on the task of repairing the damage and stabilizing the object while preserving its original character.
Conservation treatments for contemporary art and modern materials are still in large part uncharted. The dress’s unique blend of sensitive materials kept Huddleston constantly experimenting with conservation treatments and even pioneering new techniques. The goal of the treatment was to stabilize damaged areas, minimize the evidence of deterioration, and safely exhibit the dress upright. The entire conservation process took about a year.
“This dress tells a story. With the dress now conserved and stabilized, I hope it can be a story about these incredible women, and not a story of how rubber degrades,” Huddleston said.
Remove, repair, reshape
Before developing a multistep treatment plan, Huddleston conducted a series of tests to help determine the best methods of repairing the breasts. She purchased vintage rubber items on eBay and exposed them to heat and UV light to reproduce the type of deterioration found on the breasts. Getty Conservation Institute scientist Joy Mazurek analyzed the samples and the breasts to determine if the chemical properties were similar. Huddleston then used these samples to test various methods of warming, reshaping, and mending deteriorated latex.
With 14 breasts in total to remove, repair, and reattach, Huddleston treated two or three at a time. Once she removed the breasts, she immediately stabilized the material by mending tears in the latex and applying a lining. To mend the tears, she applied a sticky adhesive to tiny strips of paper and pressed them across the tears, like surgical stitches. The mends can be peeled back to adjust as needed. “The mend should be weaker than the material around it, so that the material is able to flex without causing new breaks,” she explained. Once the tears were stabilized, Huddleston applied a thin, loosely woven silk lining material called Crepeline to the entire interior of the breast to provide long-term stability to the latex.
Once stabilized and lined, the breast was placed in a dish of warmed glass beads, aka a dry heat bath, where it relaxed with soft weights placed inside to gently re-form dented areas.
Building support from the inside out
Next, Huddleston enlisted the help of mountmaker BJ Farrar to create molds of the inside of each breast using a 3D printer.
Each mold helped Huddleston create interior supports for each breast. She tore pieces of Fosshape, a nonwoven polyester fabric, into smaller pieces, then layered them inside the mold. She used a heat gun to warm the Fosshape and press it into the mold. When heated, the Fosshape conformed exactly to the shape of the mold and continued to hold its form after it cooled.
The Fosshape mold acts as a strong but soft interior support inside the breast. “We were amazed at how precisely the supports fit inside each breast,” Huddleston said of her Fosshape-molding technique, which she and Farrar dubbed “Fosshé” due to its similarity to papier-mâché.
After some final cleaning, filling in cracks, and inpainting, it was time for the last step: sewing each breast, with its Fosshape support inside, back onto the dress.
Feminist history, preserved
One of Huddleston’s favorite moments of the conservation process came when Gauldin visited the studio to check on the progress. She was delighted that the dress was undergoing such careful treatment, Huddleston reports, and was interested in the treatment process itself, since she is an artist with a keen sense of craft.
With the work finally complete, Huddleston said it’s exciting to work on developing new treatment methods for these unstable materials and to exchange ideas with colleagues in the conservation field. Mostly, though, the project left her with an even greater appreciation for the artists themselves.
“The Waitresses were brilliant artists. The way they used comedy to address serious issues using their own personal experiences as the springboard is really inspiring,” Huddleston said. “It feels good to preserve feminist history.”
