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Petrov, Julia. "Foundation Garments: Precedents for Fashion History Exhibitions in Museums." Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 13–30. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350049024.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 12:48 UTC. Copyright © Julia Petrov 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 1 FOUNDATION GARMENTS: PRECEDENTS FOR FASHION HISTORY EXHIBITIONS IN MUSEUMS The public is fascinated with fashion and eager for content from authoritative sources such as museums. This has led to a surge in media around the subject. We may think that documentaries showing behind the scenes of dress displays like The First Monday in May (2012) are new, and yet that is not entirely true. Pathé newsreels featured the costume collections of New York museums as early as 1934 (“Caught by the Camera No. 14”) and later filmed historian and curator James Laver at the V&A (“Pathé Pictorial” 1952) and collector Doris Langley Moore’s private museum in Kent in the 1950s (“Ancient Models” 1955); the acquisition of socialite Heather Firbank’s wardrobe by the V&A was celebrated with a Board of Trade short film called Sixty Years of Fashion, which featured models wearing gowns from the museum’s and Doris Langley Moore’s collections in the galleries in 1960; New York television station WNDT devoted a half-hour of evening television in 1963 to visiting the MFA Boston exhibition She Walks in Splendor (“Television” 1963: 52); Diana Vreeland’s legendary exhibition The Eighteenth Century Woman was the subject of a 1982 documentary narrated by the top model (and granddaughter of designer Elsa Schiaparelli) Marisa Berenson. These rare glimpses show the development of fashion exhibitions over the twentieth century. However, the roots of these displays go back much further. This chapter explores the sociocultural circumstances surrounding the exhibiting of fashion in museums in Britain and North America. While the first permanent display of historical fashion in an English-language museum opened in 1911, historical dress had been displayed in various ways and venues since the late eighteenth century. From wax museums such as Salmon’s and Tussauds to effigies in royal robes in palaces across Europe, dress reform campaigns 14 FASHION, HISTORY, MUSEUMS (including the International Health Exhibition in 1884), and commercial exhibitions (notably, the Palais du Costume at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900), a brief overview of the venues and display techniques of these early exhibits reveals the foundations of many conventions used today, such as chronological display, realistic mannequins, authentic props and settings, and corporate sponsorship. The final section reviews the early discussions about principles and considerations for staging fashion exhibitions in museums and signposts perspectives that will be discussed further in this book. Prehistory of fashion exhibitions 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 FOUNDATION GARMENTS: PRECEDENTS FOR FASHION 15 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 16 FASHION, HISTORY, MUSEUMS 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. 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. FOUNDATION GARMENTS: PRECEDENTS FOR FASHION 17 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.

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