By people who keep their clothes, for people who keep their clothes.

Records exist for records, for books, for cars, for paintings. For clothing there is nothing. A dress leaves a shop and from then on its history lives in one person's memory, and then nobody's.

Historic Thread is the community's answer: a user-built database of garments and their histories. Each garment gets a page, a thread, with a short code. The thread is a list of chapters: the label and who made it, where it came from, where it was worn and with what, who has it now. Anyone can read a thread. Anyone who has held the piece can add to it, and when the piece moves on, the link moves with it.

What goes in

Anything that has lived. Couture and camp shirts. The record is for clothing that has been somewhere, not for clothing that is expensive. The small and defunct labels nobody has written up matter here as much as the houses everyone knows, which is rather the point.

What it is not

It is not authentication. If you need a laboratory to say whether a bag is real, there are services for that. This is the human record: the stories, dates and places that make a garment itself and not just an example of its kind.

How it grows

One garment at a time, through contributions, and whole collections at a time, through connected feeds. The first connected collection is the rental closet at FashionablyGood, a Milwaukee nonprofit, whose garment pages were the prototype for the thread. Contributors are credited on every thread they touch. Donor names are never shown without consent, and no dollar values are ever published.

Say something

This is early. If you have an idea for how it should work, or something is wrong, tell us.