The earliest documented mention of a fashion museum comes from the eighteenth-century journal The Spectator. The 1712 article that first suggested such a notion was written by Sir Richard Steele as an indictment of male and female folly in following fashion. The author proposed “to have a Repository built for Fashions, as there are Chambers for Medals and other Rarities,” with the façade of the building in the shape of a Sphinx and its architectural details imitating lace, fringe, ribbon, and other modish accessories, with a suitable poetic motto in Latin over the door (219–220). The space inside would consist of two galleries (for men and women), with shelves of false books: actually boxes containing dolls1 dressed in historical fashions. Contemporary designs would also be documented in a like manner, and the author humorously suggests that an old dandy, bankrupted by his interest in fashion, might be appointed Keeper.
The author of this parody furthermore insists that the museum will succeed because of the education in appropriate dressing that the visitor will receive; the prestige that will be afforded to England over France (the capital of fashion); the documentary evidence it would afford of the persistently extravagant nature of fashion (shaming young and old alike); and that it would free up historians for more noble pursuits:
Whereas several great Scholars, who might have been otherwise useful to the World, have spent their time in studying to describe the Dresses of the Ancients from dark Hints, which they are fain to interpret and support with much Learning, it will from henceforth happen, that they shall be freed from the Trouble, and the World from useless Volumes. (Steele 1712: 220)
The piece is satirical, but simultaneously visionary, not least because museums devoted to any aspect of everyday life had not yet actually been founded. Its comic effect comes from the risibility of such a notion for an early eighteenth-century audience. Yet it also communicates the main objections to a fashion museum, ones that would continue to be raised for nearly two hundred years
until the first fashion exhibition was staged in an English-speaking museum;
fashion had long been associated with meaningless frippery, and for this reason, even serious calls for its close study (Planché 1834) and collection and display (“Notes and Incidents” 1869), which came in the nineteenth century, were largely ignored until some decades later. The very notion of a fashion museum would continue to inspire only humor and contempt until the late nineteenth century.
In her book Establishing Dress History (2004), Lou Taylor has outlined the fitful and often fraught development of collections of textiles and clothing in museums in Britain, France, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Her well-researched narrative need not be repeated at length here, but of her conclusions, it should be highlighted that unlike other aspects of the fine and applied arts, fashionable costume was not widely seen as a natural museum object, at least in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In addition, even at the early stage of its musealization, varied disciplinary approaches by collectors and curators ensured that the display of antique fashion, infrequent and uncommon as it was, was often as an accessory to narratives about materials, techniques, or political events and not exhibited on its own merits as it is today (Taylor 1998: 340).
A confluence of factors from outside the museum world finally served to enable the exhibition of historical costume as an artifact of social history and art in museums in the early twentieth century. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Petrov 2008), the Museum of London’s display of costume at Kensington Palace in 1911 was the first such permanent display in the UK; however, a reviewer at the time seemed unmoved by the aesthetics of the exhibition (Figure 1.1), writing,
In the methods of exhibition employed for the main collection there is nothing startlingly novel. Several Tudor worsted caps, rescued from the London Ditch, and forming part of Mr. Seymour Lucas’s large collection, are effectively displayed on roughly carved wooden heads, with the hair represented in the style of the period. The costumes generally are mounted on manikins without hands or feet, but provided with appropriate wigs which, to judge from their freshness, are of modern date. (Bather 1912: 295)
Despite the relative novelty of the presence of fashionable dress within a history museum, the critic failed to see any novelty in the method of its display. This suggests that historical fashion had been publicly exhibited prior to 1911, as expectations of display conventions had already been preformed.
The very earliest displays of dress were commemorative and royal in nature.
For example, the fourteenth-century military accoutrements of Edward the Black Prince, hung above his tomb in Canterbury, included his tunic (this was recently exhibited in Opus Anglicanum, V&A, 2016–2017). Similarly, armories often included items of ceremonial clothing, and the Livrustkammaren in Stockholm in particular had a tradition of preserving the bloodied clothing of
royals wounded in military glory since the seventeenth century (Gronhammar and Nestor 2011: 12). Royal clothing was also displayed on effigies, such as those at Westminster Abbey (first described as a public attraction in 1754; see Timbs 1855). These, in turn, inspired the waxworks of the eighteenth century such as Tussauds, established in 1802 in London. Tussauds in particular was famous for purchasing the authentic clothing of the individuals it memorialized (Sandberg 2003).
The first example of an exhibition of civilian dress, however, occurred in the early 1830s. As I have described elsewhere (Petrov 2014a), the heirs of an eccentric recluse named Mrs Luson, descended through marriage from Oliver Cromwell himself, arranged for her collection of the clothes worn by Cromwell’s family to be displayed on realistic wax mannequins in London’s Regent Street in 1833 and again on the Strand in 1834 and 1835. The costumes were accompanied by accessories as well as relevant biographical details culled from journals in the family’s possession. Critics of the time were gratified by the authenticity of the presentation and the educational opportunity to study historically significant objects.
Figure 1.1 Unknown photographer, press image, c. 1912: “Costumes Added to the London Museum, Kensington Palace. Tudor caps (in top row) and shoes of the 15th century (two bottom rows),” London Museum Photo Albums, Museum of London archives. © Museum of London.
While it does not feature a museum exhibition in the contemporary sense of the term, the episode described above does illustrate the necessary prerequisites for the public exhibition of historical fashion. A growing interest in the minutiae of national history, combined with a desire for authenticity in visual detail, allied to the traditional taste for relics of great men was, throughout the nineteenth century, given ever-greater circulation within an expanding number of institutions for public entertainment, recreation, and education. The growth of these institutions also permitted the display of the authentic (or authentic-looking) objects (Sandberg 2003), as opposed to generalized simulacra reproduced in books of engravings or in paintings. (Even so, fashion objects were, and frequently still are, used as illustrations of an implicit time line or as proof of the veracity of visual representations, not the other way around; see Mackrell 1997.) In addition, as collectible objects moved from being rare and exotic unique treasures to being parts of series in categories of broadly similar mass-produced objects, the quantity of these created the possibility of more and more such institutions—a symbiotic system.
A sympathetic public for a museum of fashion, however, took a long time to develop. In 1864, mirroring the much-earlier disdain of Sir Richard Steele, the Birmingham Daily Post sneered at the citizens of Dresden, who “having nothing better to do just now, are devoting their attention to the all-important question of clothes” by erecting “a kind of national gallery of the artistic in clothes, to be called ‘The Museum of Fashion’” (“News of the Day” 1864: 1). History does not record whether this project ever came together, although it is possible that the “Costume Chamber” of the Historical Museum portion of the Museum Johannaeum contained the fruits of those efforts by 1870 (Baedeker 1870: 368).
Elsewhere on the Continent, the Practical Art Exhibition held at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris featured eleven galleries devoted to “a grand exhibition of the garments of the past, the Retrospective Museum of Costume” (Hooper 1874:
624). This was a temporary display (in 1896, a permanent museum of dress for Paris—the Salon National de la Mode—was mooted, though it was not until much later2 that this was to happen; “Museum of Dress” 1896), which included paintings showing fashions over the ages, lay figures dressed speculatively in costumes of periods before any artifacts survived, as well as dresses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in glass cases. Because it was held in Paris, the capital of fashion, such an endeavor was not seen as strange by contemporary commentators.
Back in Britain, the International Health Exhibition, held in London in 1884, also featured displays of historical dress, but these were costumes made up by the firm Auguste and Co. from the designs of organizer Lewis Wingfield and were meant to set off the designs of “rational” dress proposed for contemporary women. The costumes were presented on wax figures manufactured by John Edwards of Waterloo Road—“which if not so finished in their modelling as some
of the portrait figures which keep up the fame of Madame Tussauds collection, are still sufficiently lifelike for the purpose” (“Health Exhibition” 1884: 3)—
representing wealthy and peasant classes for each period from 1066 to 1820 (Wingfield 1884: vi–vii), with sixty mannequins in total.
Ten years later again, an exhibition similar to the 1874 Paris venture was held in New York’s Madison Square Garden for the benefit of charity. The International Costume Exhibition featured modern and historical fashion, and the latter was displayed on lay figures (mannequins) on a stage. The dress on display seems to have been a mixture of costumes as well as historical artifacts, representing men’s and women’s wear from the thirteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century; a newspaper description listed a “Costume of the Time of Henry VIII”
and followed it with “Genuine Spanish costume of the time of 1560” (“Exhibition of Costumes” 1895: 8), which aptly illustrates the slippage of terminology that makes research in the field difficult. The early nineteenth century was represented by a display of objects associated with the Napoleonic period; the description of the “multitude of pictures, costumes, and hangings pertaining to the time of the First Empire” (“Exhibition of Costumes” 1895: 8) is ambiguous and does not clearly identify whether these were genuine historical artifacts or representations.
The rising public interest in the material history of dress did eventually have an effect on museums: for example, the Met began actively collecting historical fashion by the beginning of the twentieth century and listed two purchases of fashion (a French waistcoat, 07.70, and a cotton embroidered Regency dress, 07.146.5) for the first time in 1907 (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1907a: 74, b:
146). In 1908, it received a gift of a
blue silk brocade dress, Italian; two embroidered silk coats, one embroidered velvet coat, pair of embroidered knee breeches, pair of Louis XV leather slippers, one Empire dress of embroidered mull, one linen waistcoat, three silk waistcoats, two collars of embroidered mull, and one bone [sic] waist of satin brocade with sleeves, French. (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1908: 104–105) from painter William J. Baer and in 1910, it acquired a major collection of costumes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century garments among the contents of the houses belonging to the Ludlow family from descendant Maria James.
Although the Baer gift and the Ludlow dresses were put on limited display in the recent accessions gallery, this did not herald a sea change in attitudes. Indeed, Vogue magazine crowed that “America has narrowly escaped an invasion by ghosts,” when reporting on the fact that the painter Talbot Hughes’s collection was to stay in England at the V&A and not, as had been originally intended, America (“Other Times, Other Costumes” 1914: 37). Although the V&A and the Museum of London established their displays in the prewar period, there would not be a fashion-specific exhibition at the Met until 1929, when a loan collection
of eighteenth-century French costume and textiles from Mrs Philip Lehman was exhibited (Morris 1929: 78–79). While models wearing the museum’s gowns appeared on photographic postcards showing the American period rooms in 1924 (Figure 1.2), the museum’s own collection was only physically displayed in 1932 (Costumes 1750–1850), twenty-five years after it seems to have first established and thirty-seven years after historical fashion had been displayed to
Figure 1.2 Two postcards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Wing series, 1924. Models are wearing dresses from the Ludlow gift (11.60.232a,b and 11.60.230).
Author’s collection.
public acclaim in Madison Square Garden. While this may seem like the fulfillment of the facetious prophecy made by the Spectator over 200 years earlier, it must be noted that a gallery of fashion within a museum is not the same thing as a fashion museum; that was not to happen in the United States until the Museum of Costume Art was founded in 1937 in New York and in Britain with the 1947 establishment of the Gallery of English Costume at Platt Hall in Manchester (as a subsidiary of the Manchester Art Gallery), which was followed by the founding of Doris Langley Moore’s independent Museum of Costume in Kent in 19553 (for short histories of the musealization of fashion, see Fukai 2010 and Steele 2012).