UK FASHION Exhibitions 2008~ Visit The Bath Museum

THE MUSEUM of COSTUME

Bath, Somerset, England

The Fashion Museum collection was started by Doris Langley Moore, a collector, costume designer and author. She gave her collection to the city of Bath in 1963, and Bath City Council used it to found the Museum of Costume. The collection is now three times its original size and the museum changed its name to the Fashion Museum in 2007.

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DRESSES from HISTORY 

from February 2008

Fourteen historic ensembles from the Fashion Museum’s world class collection of original dress are on display in the museum galleries from 16 February 2008.

Specialist textile conservators Julie Travis and Lindsay Shephard have prepared the dresses, which have been carefully selected for display. Different dresses require different conservation treatments. For example, a white muslin dress with pale blue embroidery which dates from 1815, was laid out full length on a washing table and gently cleaned to remove nearly 200 years of dust and grime.

The fashions in the new display date from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian periods. An extra feature of the display is the inclusion of one or two pieces associated with Royalty at the time, for example, the ceremonial ensemble worn by the Duke of St Albans as Hereditary Grand Falconer at the  Coronation of George IV (he was previously the Prince Regent) in 1821. 

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17th Century Gloves

22 September 2007 - 31 December 2008

Pair of cream leather man’s ceremonial gloves with 

silk gauntlet cuffs embroidered in silk and gold 

metal thread and seed pearls.

Early 17th century. ©The Gloves' Collections Trust

The Fashion Museum is delighted to announce that some of the oldest, rarest and most precious objects in their care will be shown in a new display at the end of September 2007. 

All of the gloves are on loan to the Fashion Museum from The Gloves' Collections Trust, a special body set up by the Worshipful Company of Glovers of London to care for what is possibly the finest collection of historic gloves in the world.

The display at the Fashion Museum includes twenty pairs of gloves from this outstanding collection, all intricately embroidered in a variety of materials from tiny seed pearls to sparkling metal thread. 

Some of the gloves are patterned, some show figures and animals (such as the mythological motif of the'pelican in her piety'); all are highly decorative, and all have to be seen to be believed.

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1977

Until December 31 2008 

Fashion is not just about couture, ready-to-wear and big name designers. It’s also about putting a look together, about style, about making a point, about belonging.

For a museum, it’s difficult to capture this phenomenon because by it is nature it is fleeting; it is here today and gone tomorrow. But one way to capture this is through photography.

Not just photographs taken for glossy fashion magazines but images produced for all sorts of other purposes, to be published in the music press, for example, in skate magazines, and even family snapshots. 

So in the re-vamped Fashion Museum we have set aside an area to display fashion through images. '1977' is the first of these displays. 

Thirty years ago this year, punk and new wave bands played music and wore clothes that expressed their identity and demanded attention. 

The images in this exhibition were taken by young, talented photographers all making their names by capturing the energetic and edgy cultural explosion known as punk. 

Their photographs were printed in the music press of the day -  NME, Melody Maker and Sounds - and helped both to record what was happening musically and to disseminate new ideas about dressing and behaving.

The display features photographs of the following punk and new wave bands:
The Clash, Johnny Rotten, Ari Up, The Jam, Debbie Harry, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, The Only Ones, Buzzcocks, The Ramones, The Rezillos, X-Ray Spex, Tom Robinson Band, Ian Dury, Hugh Cornwell, Elvis Costello, Gaye Advert, Don Letts, Siouxie and the Banshees, Paul Weller

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BIG CHANGES - The Museum of Costume BATH

The Museum of Costume is undergoing and extensive redisplay until Friday 22nd June 2007 to transform it into the FASHION MUSEUM.

The Museum of Costume focuses on fashionable dress for men, women and children from the late 16th century to the present day and has more than 30,000 objects in its collection.

Within the collection there are a number of individual collections of clothes and fashion accessories, such as the Dress of the Year collection and an important loan collection of decorative gloves belonging to the Worshipful Company of Glovers of London.

The Museum has been designated by MLA (the Council for Museums, Libraries and Archives) as an outstanding collection of national pre-eminence.


We display about only part of the collection at a time. The displays are changed regularly. Everything in the collection can be viewed - just contact us to book a study table.

The Museum of Costume was opened in the Bath Assembly Rooms in 1963. It was the creation of Doris Langley Moore, a designer, collector and historian, who gave her famous private collection of costume to the city.

CORSETS UNCOVERED


Understand more closely the life of your great great grandmother at the Museum of Costume’s new display and dressing-up opportunity CORSETS uncovered.

The gallery display includes a representative selection of historic corsets, displayed alongside images of real women in carte de visite photographs from the 19th century. The real experience comes with the replica corsets in the gallery, available for adults and for children to try on. This is the way to explore how corsets work, how they feel to wear and how they alter the way you stand and sit.

A hundred and fifty years ago, almost every woman wore a corset. A corset was an essential part of a woman’s dress, vital for achieving the shape necessary for the fashions of the day. To our eyes today, the corset appears an instrument of torture, a symbol of repression of the body, and about as far away from the modern way of dressing as you can get.

This new hands-on area at the Museum of Costume sets out to bridge the gap between then and now, between what happened in fashion in the past and our up-to-the moment perception of the modes of yesteryear.



The Museum is undergoing an extensive re-display between February and May 2007. Please check here for details of the areas that are open during these dates.