Situated in the historic Assembly Rooms at Bath in the United Kingdom, the Fashion Museum (previously known as the Museum of Costume) is dedicated to collecting, preserving, documenting, studying, exhibiting and, essentially, celebrating examples of fashion during the last 400 years. Doris Langley Moore, a collector, costume designer and author, donated her collection to Bath in 1963. The Bath City Council subsequently decided to use it to found the Museum of Costume.
The Fashion Museum acquired its present name in 2007. "The name change came about because the word ‘fashion' more accurately describes both the museum collections and the displays that visitors can expect to see when they visit than the word ‘costume'. ‘Costume' nowadays means garments that you put on when you are assuming a theatrical role, for example," explains Rosemary Harden, the museum manager.
The associations that the word ‘costume' bring to mind and the aim of the museum to present a collection of historic and contemporary fashion were becoming divergent, thus necessitating the renaming of the museum. "Now, it is clearer that the displays in the gallery reflect that this is a museum of fashion through the ages," Harden says. The museum offers a fascinating opportunity to voyage back in time and experience the multi-layered nature of sartorial history right up to the present day.
The sheer multiplicity and diversity of the exhibits reflect the great effort invested in presenting fashion as an essential tool with which to contextualise and understand prevailing contemporary social, aesthetic and design trends.
The museum invites the visitor to look beyond charges often levelled against fashion — of it being frivolous and fleeting — by emphasising that its evolution has been a cumulative result of its complex relationship with many factors such as socio-political developments, design innovations, technological advances pertaining to textiles and fabrics and other significant cultural occurrences. "We aspire to present [fashion] in beautiful, inspiring, interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking ways," Harden says.
According to Harden, the museum has more than 60,000 items in its collection. The institution is offered items to add to its collection and receives approximately 300 acquisitions every year. "Last month alone, we were given two stunning evening dresses by Versace from 2006, a trousseau collection from the 1930s and a collection of fashion drawings from the 1960s," Harden says. The collection consists of menswear, womenswear (which constitutes the largest percentage of the collection), childrenswear and accessories such as shoes, handbags and gloves. In fact, the oldest item in the collection happens to be a pair of gloves dating back to the 1630s and is reputed to have belonged to King Charles 1.
Present displays include Dress of the Year, Dresses of History and 17th Century Gloves. Each display strives to present a particular aspect of fashion in a relevant context. Dress of the Year, for instance, consists of dresses of each decade in the past 40 years or so, providing an illuminating walk through the fashionscape over the years. It is interesting to note how a dress selected for a certain year can often embody the defining trends of the particular decade it is associated with. The selection of the Dress of The Year occurs when each year a fashion expert chooses an example from the best fashions across the world to include in the collection. The dresses in the collection are by designers such as Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, Jean Muir, Versace and Paul Ford.
Dresses of History demonstrates how one can contextualise fashion with prevailing contemporary design and aesthetic trends. There is a showcase of 14 Georgian, Regency and Victorian dresses, which are placed in meticulously decorated and furnished rooms and are surrounded by objects used at that time. "We wanted to give the dresses on display a chronological context," Harden says. "For example, the 18th century twisted-stem glasses on display alongside the brocaded silk dress would have been produced at roughly the same time."
An example is that of a late Victorian evening dress which has an embroidered pattern of a long, sinuous iris. The exhibit also features a Tiffany vase of approximately the same time which follows the same design lines. "[Apart from indicating how closely fashion and other design trends intermingled] our aim in this gallery was also to produce a beautiful and visually compelling display — almost an installation — which would draw in visitors and be pleasing to the eye," Harden says.
In addition to displaying the dresses and associated objects, this gallery also has items such as miniature portraits and one of Queen Victoria's black wool dresses, in reference to her solely wearing black following the death of her husband, Prince Albert, for the remaining 40 years of her reign and also delineating Victorian social mores in which colours of mourning worn by grieving widows eventually graduated from unadulterated black to shades of white and grey over time.
References to retro and vintage fashion have increasingly become common nowadays in fashion parlance what with vintage trends and the items themselves being in great demand. A popular British high-street fashion chain, Oasis, collaborated with the Fashion Museum on a project in which Oasis based one of its lines of the Spring/Summer 2008 collection, Floral Frocks, (keeping in mind the trend then for florals) on floral-patterned dresses from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that the Fashion Museum possessed in its collection.
The translation of vintage designs into their modern avatars makes interesting viewing. Oasis donated one of each of the dresses inspired by the Fashion Museum collection to the museum itself. The display, therefore, features both the vintage and designer dresses, inviting the viewer to appreciate the synthesis of old and new.
"Floral Frocks was one of the bestselling lines of Spring/Summer 2008 and our most interesting undertaking," Harden says. "We are pleased that not only Oasis but other contemporary design practitioners are inspired by objects in the collection and we hope to facilitate other partnerships of this type in the future," Harden says.
The museum uses both physical examples of fashion and cultural references such as photographs and music album covers to convey the impact of fashion on contemporary popular culture. One display focuses on wedding photographs taken between the 1890s and 1930s, reflecting how prevailing social and political circumstances subtly altered the silhouettes and hemlines of the bridal gown or if men present in the wedding party eschewed hats or not.
Similarly, alongside the Dress of the Year display, viewers can also examine pop music album covers of the decades represented, tracing possible connections between the trends embodied within the haute couture of a particular decade and that of a more relaxed, street-fashion vibe present in the album covers.
Fashion in the museum often emerges as instances of such great visual art that the way a particular garment has been cut or the workmanship of another can make the viewer almost forget that fashion has a fundamental functional purpose: to be worn. In this context, the section in which museum visitors are encouraged to try out wearing corsets links to fashion dilemmas that contemporary fashionistas often encounter while attempting to negotiate the precarious balance between being comfortable in what they wear or perfecting a stylish façade despite physical unease. A garment that is primarily used to shape the torso into a desired physique, the corset is largely associated with 18th and 19th century women's hourglass shaped gowns; fashion trends then dictated full gowns and small waists, an effect that corsets were able to achieve although not without causing great physical discomfort.
While displaying examples of corsets from the 18th and 19th centuries, the museum also provides replica corsets manufactured to 21st century specifications for both adults and children to put on.
"We hope that visitors will get some sense of what it was like, first to get into a corset, and then what it might have been like to wear a garment such as a corset in the 19th century," Harden says.
The Assembly Rooms, where the Fashion Museum is located, were and continue to be a fashionable social hub, playing host to a variety of events and occasions in Bath.
Like its location, which offers a space for debate, play and discussion, the museum provokes rethinking of attitudes towards fashion by liberating it from its tendency to be straitjacketed as being frivolous and materialistic and representing it in a way in which fashion provides valuable examples of visual art, socio-historical markers and pop culture barometers.
Priyanka Sacheti is an independent writer based in Muscat.
