The physical arrangement of historical fashion within museum galleries suggested the possibility of time travel. The 1952 Pathé newsreel cited earlier had a narration that suggested this: “To stroll with James Laver, the author, down centuries of men’s fashions, is to quicken your understanding of the past” (Pathé 1952). While Laver was able to touch the items on display, something that would certainly not have been possible for the average museum visitor, his journey through museum space and, simultaneously, chronological time was typical.
This section, therefore, will discuss how the museums researched as part of this book have deployed visual conventions to position their audiences in relation to the past in this way.
While the success of individual museums at communicating this notion effectively to their audiences is debated (Penny 2002; Noordegraaf 2004), few writers on museology argue with Tony Bennett’s assertion that museum space2 was fundamentally conceived of as a means of intellectual time travel: “the museum visit thus functioned and was experienced as a form of organized walking through evolutionary time” (Bennett 1995: 186), which became a tradition shared between curators and audiences. An experienced costume curator, Naomi Tarrant believed that most audiences preferred a chronological approach, and that this type of display implicitly answered the majority of the general questions they might have about dress over time (1999: 19). Indeed, the institutions studied as part of this research each had some element of chronology in their galleries in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.
The earliest displays of historical fashion at the V&A were cases arranged in a line (Figure 7.3) to represent the chronological development of dress throughout modern history. This arrangement was established in 1913 and continued relatively unchanged until the gallery was redisplayed dramatically in 1962; the new “costume court” was octagonal in shape and the physical sequence of cases could no longer be totally linear, but the display was still fundamentally evolutionary, “showing the development of fashionable dress in Europe between about 1580 and 1948” (Thornton 1962: 332). It was before this latter renovation that the Pathé News corporation filmed in the museum, when the space was arranged in a way that easily communicated the notion of the linear passage of time.
This is a conceit whose tradition lives on: the majority of the galleries in the Fashion Museum (Bath) are arranged chronologically, so that visitors can metaphorically walk through time, where history is represented by historically dressed and accessorized mannequins in glass showcases on either side. It was always museum founder Doris Langley Moore’s ambition that this should be so—as Picture Post reported in 1951 (before the collection had found a home):
The word museum has such a musty sound. For most people it means a dead world of empty glass cases. But Mrs Langley Moore intends that London’s new Museum of Costume, for which she has given her own magnificent collection, shall be refreshingly different. […] Perhaps its greatest value will be that it will not only show dresses of long ago, but also those of the recent past, as well as contemporary clothes. (Beckett 1951: 19)
It was Moore’s opinion that by bringing fashion history to the present, the past would be made more accessible and lively.
Likewise, the Costume Institute’s collection was always intended to be encyclopedic, and although displays have varied in the logic of their organization, the desire to be comprehensive has always underpinned both collecting and display activities. In a 2001 exhibition, the Costume Institute documented its own history; the section for fashion (the collection also includes ethnic dress) Figure 7.3 Undated postcard showing V&A Central Court; cases of costume visible in upper gallery at right. Author’s collection.
was titled “Costume History Timeline” and was organized chronologically. White mannequins with relatively detailed features were styled with white paper wigs (by contrast, the folk and ethnographic costumes were mounted on headless jointed tailor’s dummies, thus highlighting their technical aspects rather than their being worn by human actors in social and cultural contexts) in a “continuous parade of fashion” (Koda 2001). Although the text noted the disparate collections and conflicting curatorial interests across the institute’s development, the display was cohesive, reflecting what curator Harold Koda suggested was the original
“simple formalist criterion” for the collection: “to clearly represent the style of their day […] intended to form a timeline of Western fashion” (Koda 2001). Thus, in this exhibition, it was once again the continuous evolution of historical silhouettes rather than the piecemeal development of the collection that was on display.
Indeed, permanent or long-term exhibitions, even if they do not attempt to reflect all eras from which fashion survives in the museum’s collection, do nevertheless tend to present an evolution of stylistic and social change. The McCord Museum’s Form and Fashion exhibition (1992–1993), for example, documented only the fashionable clothing worn in nineteenth-century Montreal but nevertheless attempted to make larger claims about the history of fashion change more generally: “The women’s attire held in the McCord Museum collection provides an apt illustration of the stylistic changes of this period through the evolving shapes of skirts, sleeves and bodices” (Beaudoin-Ross and Cooper 1992). This formalist manner of presenting historical dress seems to have been an institutional legacy: the McCord’s 1965 exhibition, Silhouettes, was a survey arrangement of evening dresses from 1840 to 1965, demonstrating a typological evolution over time, ending in the contemporary.
Indeed, it was not just the case study institutions that featured such display techniques. The galleries of costume in Florence’s Palazzo Pitti, for example, are characteristic of the typical approach to the display of dress. Opened in 1983, the displays were installed in forty-seven freestanding cases among the period setting of an enfilade of fourteen rooms in the palace. The clothing, from over 200 years of fashion, had been largely collected as textiles in a previous incarnation of the museum and was displayed on white Wacoal female mannequins (and custom matching male mannequins) styled with paper wigs drawn from corresponding visual sources. Within this survey of costume from the Baroque to the Belle Epoque were planned smaller displays themed around accessories (Arnold 1984: 378). Visitors could promenade through the series of rooms following the chronological displays, surrounded by the ghosts of Italian fashion past. More recently, LACMA’s long-term fashion history exhibit was titled A Century of Fashion, 1900–2000 (2000–2003), and featured mannequins grouped by decades: here, too, the arbitrary convention of dividing history by decades and centuries was underlined by the spatial layout of the objects on display.