Spring Newsletter 2020
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Spring Newsletter 2020 1 Contents Page DATS Conference 3-11 Alice Power, Collecting Pride T-shirts 3 Jane Hattrick, Queering Extant Costume Collections: 4-6 The Case of Norman Hartnell’s Sequinned Pyjamas Martin Pel, Queer Looks: Creating a Collection 6 Ruth Battersby Tooke, Frayed: Textiles on the Edge. 6-7 Curating an exhibition of therapeutic textiles Danielle Sprecher, The Westminster Menswear Archive: 7-8 Building a Collection Rebecca Quinton, Researching the Legacies of Slavery 8 in Glasgow Museums’ Collections Rachel Heminway Hurst, Fashioning Africa; Post-colonial 8-9 collecting in collaboration with communities Rebecca Shawcross, I Stand Corrected? New Perspectives 9 on Orthopaedic Footwear Rachael Lee, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Up 9-10 Georgina Ripley, Body Beautiful: Diversity on the Catwalk 10-11 News 11-13 Exhibitions and Events 13-25 Books 25-25 Editor: Sarah Jane Stevens, AMA Contact: [email protected] Front cover image: The Survival of Glamour. Photo by Michael Alexander, Staverton © Totnes Fashion and Textiles Museum. 2 DATS Conference November 2019 Redressing Diversity: Making hidden histories visible This two-day conference explored how dress and textiles can be used to make hidden histories more visible and accessible within museums. Museums are increasingly looking to diversify their collections, audiences and outputs. The conference looked at what part dress and textile collections play in trying to represent BME, Deaf, disabled, LGBTQIA+ and other hidden histories. It revealed how curators, co-curators and community collaborators discovered stories within existing collections and undertook new collecting? Queer Stories Alice Power, Collecting Pride T-shirts Abstract In recent years, it has become common place for high street and online retailers across Europe to release apparel lines to tie in with Pride celebrations each summer. Questions over who profits from the sale of these items and the ethics of their production has garnered much criticism around this practice. Nonetheless, these product ranges continue to be produced and sold, some with the support of major LGBTQ organisations. From small scale screen printing to globally distribute fast fashion, Pride t-shirts can reveal much about the lived experiences of their contemporary queer communities. It is an item of apparel that can both form the focus of an ensemble, but also can be easily concealed under layers. As a generally low-cost item, it can be purchased for a single occasion or campaign and rarely worn thereafter, allowing the wearer to take risks in queer visibility that they may not with other items of clothing. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a modest selection of Pride t-shirts from the early 1980’s to the early 2000’s in its fashion and textiles collection. Looking at these objects and their associated acquisition material unveils rarely recorded details of pre-Internet age queer consumerism, where such t-shirts were bought at stalls, specialist shops or through mail order. My paper looked at what the consumption and production of Pride t-shirts can tell us about queer communities that engage with them. I used the museum’s collection to form the basis of this paper but also looked at contemporary examples of Pride t-shirts, such as those produced by DIY communities and through small production market style sites like etsy that tend to cater to lesser represented groups and intersectional LGBTQ identities, as well as the large high street brands that lean more toward the mass market. It highlighted the importance of collecting pride t-shirts in museums and archives as an indicator of diverse and changing queer communities. Biography Alice Power is Assistant Curator of the Design, Architecture and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She works across the department, in particular with the Rapid Response Collecting gallery and contemporary collecting strand. She is also co-chair of the Museums LGBTQ Working Group. 3 Jane Hattrick, Queering Extant Costume Collections: The Case of Norman Hartnell’s Sequinned Pyjamas Abstract Extant collections of dress and textiles in museums today are categorised according to binary, gender and sexual norms, reflecting social practice at the time of their accession. Clothing, however, can be worn to reproduce an individual’s internalised gender which may not correspond with their sex. According to Judith Butler’s, complex, ‘gender crossings’, we also understand that gender identity is not a predictor of sexual orientation, yet the stories of clothing that appear to us feminine or masculine, might be assumed to correspond with heterosexual identities and disappeared into museum collections; the alternative biographies of these garments erased. To queer (as method) a museum collection is to transgress, disrupt or unsettle these established categories. My case study took place in the large, privately held collection of dress designed by the London couturier, Norman Hartnell, whose fashion house was active during 1923-1979. The collection comprises model-gowns, kept as representative of his house style, using signature embroideries and fabrics in his favoured colour palate. Of all the couture garments in Hartnall’s archive, a pastel blue lace pyjama suit embroidered with pink sequins and matching beaded sandals dating from the 1950s seemed incongruous. In comparison with the model gowns, the ensemble is quite tatty, clumsily mended and not very clean. Considerably larger in terms of measurements, it is not tailored to a feminine figure and the satin sandals are very large with no heel. Hesitant, I boxed these silent garments. Returning to undertake a material culture analysis of this ensemble through a queer lens I was able to challenge my initial belief that the ensemble had been worn by a larger, female client, hypothesising that the size nine sandals indicated perhaps the client been male. As curator Valerie Steele has written, there is ‘nothing shameful about variant sexuality’. The paper explored ways in which, in this age of self-identification, we can use an interdisciplinary, case study approach to items of clothing in collections to uncover what might be wider, hidden cultural practices of those who lived out their LGBTQ+ lives pre-liberation. Paper Conclusion Of all the couture garments in the Norman Hartnell archive, a pastel blue lace pyjama suit embroidered with pink sequins and matching beaded sandals seemed incongruous. In comparison with the selection of model gowns in the collection, the ensemble is quite tatty, clumsily mended, not very clean and rather smelly. Larger in terms of measurements than the model gowns, although for a person of reasonably slender waist and long leg, the suit jacket is not tailored to a female figure and the satin sandals are very large with no heel. Initially baffled, these garments remained silently boxed up. Extant collections of dress and textiles in museums today are categorised according to binary, gender and sexual norms, reflecting social practice at the time of their accession. Garments are categorised as either designed and made for and worn by men or women and accessioned as such. Clothing and textiles, however, can be worn on the body to represent the individual’s internalised gender which may not correspond with their sex. In the context of Judith Butler’s, complex, ‘gender crossings’, we also understand that gender identity is not a predictor of sexual orientation (Butler, 2004, 80), yet the stories of clothing that appear to us feminine or masculine, might be assumed to 4 correspond with heterosexual identities, disappeared into museum collections, and the alternative biographies of these garments could be lost. Returning to undertake a material culture analysis of this ensemble through a queer lens, I was able to challenge my initial belief that the ensemble had been worn by a larger, female client, hypothesising that the size nine sandals indicated perhaps the client been male. With the later discovery of a snapshots of Hartnell in a similar pyjama suit taken in 1953 along with personal interviews with workroom staff, who had produced similar outfits for Hartnell, it became clear over time that this suit was made for his personal use. A gay man and lifetime cross-dresser, Hartnell expressed his sexual subjectivity through the performance of an internalised femininity, which involved the wearing of ultra-feminine garments and accessories associated with normative femininity of the day. These garments, designed by Hartnell for his personal and very private use represent his taste in colours and embellishments but also for textiles and textures – the feel of sequins and silk net against his skin. In a draft version of his memoir, published in 1955, and in various other forms of life writing and personal letters in the archive, Hartnell had expressed some anxiety about his perceived effeminacy and sexuality, which continued to be problematic for a life lived under the spotlight. These references were edited out of his finished book, considered unpublishable by his editor at the time. He also admitted to loathing ‘manure coloured tweed’ for ‘work-a-day’ clothes, and preferring the silks, satins and velvets and designing the evening-wear for his collections. Nevertheless, he chose to wear tweed jackets in public, and self-presented as both debutante (in private after 1923) and dandy in tailored menswear from the top Savile Row tailors and suppliers, albeit with a touch of dandy, coded ‘glamour’ associated with homosexuality, with his well-oiled, wavy hair and long, manicured fingernails. Wearing tweed by day and silk net dresses embroidered with sequins by night, Hartnell performed his gender-crossing, public and private persona; avoiding detection was essential. As a gay man, he walked what Richard Dyer has described as ‘the thin line between passing and flaunting’ (2002: 64), either passing as heterosexual or visibly flaunting his queer sexuality according to the context in which he found himself in. Norman Hartnell’s alternative sexuality and gender expression informs his identity and practice…it is impossible to take his queerness out of his life.