Jenny Sullivan grew up idolizing singing cowgirl Dale Evans and her husband, Roy Rogers.

“I had the lunch box and my mother blames my whole horse love and veterinary career on the two of them,” said Sullivan, a small animal and horse veterinarian in Sedgwick County.

Sullivan loved Evans’ colorful Western costume, too, and on Sunday she’ll re-create it as one of 70 models in a historical fashion pageant for Bartlett Arboretum’s annual Mother’s Day celebration.

Some models will portray actual people, such as Evans and Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony and Sandra Day O’Connor, Jackie O and the Spice Girls. Others will be more generic suffragettes and flappers, hippies and civil rights protesters. Participants range in age from 8 to 85.

The show starts with clothing dating back to 1910, the year the arboretum was founded. Arboretum owner Robin Macy wanted to tie the property’s history into the event, as well as what was happening in music, culture and the world at large.

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For instance, she said, the arboretum shut down during World War II – “just like the whole world shut down. Women went and started building at Boeing so Rosie the Riveter is highlighted” in the fashion show.

While the models take their turns on-stage, Wichita Eagle correspondent and former fashion writer Bonnie Bing will offer commentary as a band provides a soundtrack of more than a century of music.

Altogether quite a production, as Macy and her fellow organizers acknowledge.

“I think it probably started out with maybe 30 (models), but we kept finding outfits.,” said Cindi Gentry, a self-described vintage fashion addict who’s providing many of the costumes. “We’d think ‘Who could wear this? Oh no, we forgot this person or this decade. Or somebody would say my niece would make a fabulous Louise Brooks.’” Brooks was the Kansas-born actress of the 1920s and ’30s credited with popularizing the bob haircut.

“It kind of blew up, you know,” Macy said of the show’s size. “We started off in a reasonable manner but … ”

Many of the models are “soil sisters,” as women who volunteer their gardening talents at the arboretum are known, or their daughters and friends.

Gentry expects one of the most admired outfits to be an intricately beaded blouse and underskirt from 1910 that soil sister Sally Kimball will wear. The outfit has been in Kimball’s family since its purchase. Clothes like that “are so hard hard to find because they’re usually in museums,” Gentry said.

Sullivan might be a showstopper as well. Attired in cowboy hat, bright red shirt with fringes and sequins, chaps and some “very colorful boots,” she’ll enter atop a friend’s horse that looks like Evans’ mount, Buttermilk.

Gentry provided many of the costumes from the 1940s forward, while another collector, Pat Watt, furnished clothing from the Edwardian and Victorian eras.

“Her aunts and grandmother were from Philadelphia,” Gentry said. “They would send these garments to her and her mother back in Kansas because they thought those poor kids, they don’t have any clothes.”

Models won’t wear corsets Sunday, but there will be an exhibit of underpinnings at the event, as well as a collection of hats on antique hat stands lent by Hatman Jack owner Jack Kellogg in one of the arboretum’s gardens.

Gentry said she hopes the show and commentary make people realize that, while some people think women were “liberated” in the 1960s, many of their predecessors were actually more rebellious for their times, demanding the right to vote, raise their hemlines and, yes, smoke.

Macy’s singing group, the Cherokee Maidens, will perform, as well as the Sycamore Swing band, joined by saxophonist Lisa Hittle and pianist Emily Strom. Guitarist Ken White has woven together a score of 25 songs.

Freshly dug tulip bulbs will be given away and vendors will sell food.

Macy noted that long-term weather forecasts showed a possibility of rain on Sunday. She said the status of the event will be updated on the arboretum’s website and Facebook page.

“I have already had this event in my mind so many times, if it doesn’t happen, it was a fabulous event,” she said.

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