Dressed for History: Why Costume Collections Matter: Women’s Fashion 1750–2000

Dressed for History: Why Costume Collections Matter: Women’s Fashion 1750–2000 narrated 250 years of women’s fashion and dress through pieces loaned from four British Columbia-based fashion and costume collectors. Most came from the personal collection of fashion historian, curator, and educator Ivan Sayers, who in addition to maintaining a renowned practice as a private collector, served as Curator of History at the Museum of Vancouver from 1976 to 1990. Sayers was also the exhibition’s guest curator working with the museum’s curatorial and exhibition teams. Additional works were sourced from Vancouver-based costume historian Claus Jahnke, whose international interests span German and Austrian fashions; corsetiere Melanie Talkington, founder of Vancouver’s Antique Corset Museum; and members of the BC Society for the Museum of Original Costume (SMOC). Gallery labels for each object provided information on period aesthetics and how garment construction exemplified aesthetic preference and societal expectation of women’s comportment. Where possible, information was offered on materials, provenance, and conditions of making. Visual references from the period such as fashion plates, illustrations, catalog pages, or newspaper advertisements—each depicting an identical or similar design—provided additional context to the objects next to the written descriptions.

The exhibition was set up in a black-box exhibition gallery space partitioned into an S-shape with four corridors, with pieces and accessories mounted on dress forms or assembled in cases on either side of the corridors. Viewers’ movements from one corridor to the next were guided through the placement of sheer mesh curtains. While the curtains demarcated the four sections, their translucence allowed viewers to perceive the blurred outlines of pieces that one had just seen or the pieces that stood ahead, creating an ethereal, haunted effect that presented items from the historical past as relics and those from the future as apparitions. The exhibition was organized both chronologically and thematically, as a combination of historical periods and art aesthetics movements, often reflective of political and economic conditions or social mores. Two elaborate cream-colored dresses with petticoats, one robe à l’anglaise and another robe à la française from the late 1700s (Figure 1) stood at the entrance in an introductory section labeled “Mid 18th Century: The Rococo Period,” beside smaller cases that featured accessories and underpinnings. These immaculate dresses were the oldest in the exhibition and marked the late 1700s as its temporal starting point, representing the construction and the use of English and American silk in European fashion worn by noble or elite persons.

Figure 1 Robe à la française and petticoat, English or American, silk, ca. 1765–75. Ivan Sayers collection. Photo credit: Rebecca Blissett and Museum of Vancouver.

The first corridor inside the exhibition space featured women’s dresses from the nineteenth century with an emphasis on Victorian dress and the Gothic aesthetic. Examples of periods in the first section included “1815–1840 Introduction of Gothic Features,” “1840–1870 High Gothic Revival,” and “1870–1890 The Bustle Period.” Pieces exemplified a spectrum of elaborateness, from a simple (but nonetheless opulent) floor-length white cotton English dress (ca. 1810) to be worn over a shift, embroidered with silver-plated metal filaments, to an ornate bronze-toned, silk Irish evening dress (ca. 1830–35) with impressive puffed sleeves. Dresses in these sections were interspersed with accessories and intricate underpinnings, such as a Victorian-era corset (ca. 1890) mounted on a dress form labelled “Dr. Warner’s Coraline Corsets” (Figure 2). One dinner dress (ca. 1873), made for Susan Moulton McMaster, the wife of McMaster University’s founder, was remarkable for its emerald sheen, an example of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century use of arsenic-based formulas that achieved this special hue (Figure 3).¹ Information in the gallery labels also gave insights into their makers, whether these be high-end dressmakers or amateur sewers. For example, a cotton day dress from 1886 with complex draping was, the exhibition label stated, “made by a competent but unskilled sewer using a pattern illustrated in the Butterick Pattern Catalogue.”² The curators believed that the dress came from the O’Reilly home, now Point Ellice House Museum and Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia.

Figure 2 Corset, Spanish, silk, ca. 1890, and corset form, American, silk, cotton and formed cardboard, ca. 1890. Melanie Talkington collection. Photo credit: Rebecca Blissett and Museum of Vancouver.

Figure 3 Dinner dress, Canadian, silk, ca. 1873. Ivan Sayers collection. Photo credit: Rebecca Blissett and Museum of Vancouver.

The second and third corridors showcased examples of fashions that spanned the Edwardian period to the Great Depression and paid particular tribute to French Empire revival aesthetics and the modernist Art Deco movement. Section names included “1900–1909 The Later Belle Epoque and the Early Edwardian,” “1909–1912 Empire Revival,” “1910–1914 ‘Orientalism’ (The Imagined East),” “1914–1918 World War I,” “1925–1930 High Art Deco Period,” and “1930–1940 The Great Depression.” In these sections, Canadian dresswear was more predominant; “inexpensive and factory-made” day dresses (as described on an exhibition label) in fashionable vibrant printed cottons were juxtaposed with a silk lamé evening dress made by the dressmaker Donaldson’s Vancouver.³ One featured piece was an Austrian wool day coat (ca. 1925–29) from the Claus Jahnke collection. Striking in its intricate handwoven pattern of reds, blues, and creams, it had been crafted out of the Wiener Werkstätte avant-garde design school which ran from 1903 to 1932 (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Day coat, Austrian, wool, ca. 1925–29. Claus Jahnke collection. Photo credit: Rebecca Blissett and Museum of Vancouver.

The fourth and final corridor exhibited fashions from the World War II era to the end of the twentieth century. Section names here included “1939–1945 World War II,” “1947–1957 The New Look,” “1957–1968 Establishment of Counterculture,” “1968–1978 Flower Power,” “1976–1980s Punk and Counter-Counterculture,” “1980s Form and Function in Mainstream Fashion,” and “1990s Fashion as Art.” A cream-colored beaded evening dress with padded shoulders from Sam Sherkin in Toronto (ca. 1946) was shown as an example of wartime fashions alongside an English wool “going away suit” (ca. 1949) sold from the French Room of Vancouver’s Hudson’s Bay Store as a representative of Christian Dior’s New Look. Dior was later invoked in a hot pink strapless cocktail dress with a balloon skirt (ca. 1958–63), an imitation of the French style that was shown with exemplars of styles associated with the 1960s sexual revolution: a brown day dress and coat from Mary Quant’s Ginger Group (ca. 1965)—comparatively plain but striking in its short hemline—and a paisley-print chiffon cocktail dress (ca. 1965) with feather trim from the German designer Heinz Oestergaard, also from the Claus Jahnke collection (Figure 5). A handmade, printed, and embroidered hippie dress (ca. 1968) stood beside a trousers-and-top set with studded leather harness (ca. 1976) from the Vivienne Westwood label and her partnership with Malcolm McLaren. Power dressing was explored with muted silk and wool ensembles with immense shoulder pads from the Vancouver line LMW (the German-born Lore Maria Wiener), while fashion as art was realized in a late-1990s two-piece ecru skirt and top set in pleated, shimmering polyester and a deep brown draped tunic, both from Issey Miyake (Figure 6).

Figure 5 Whitney for I.MAGNIN & Co, cocktail dress, American, silk, ca. 1958–63. Ivan Sayers collection; Mary Quant’s Ginger Group, day dress and coat, English, wool, ca. 1965. Ivan Sayers collection; Heinz Oestergaard, Berlin, cocktail dress, German, silk, ca. 1965. Claus Jahnke collection. Photo Credit: Rebecca Blissett and Museum of Vancouver.

Figure 6 Issey Miyake, evening ensembles, Japanese, polyester, ca. 1998–2000. Ivan Sayers collection. Photo credit: Rebecca Blissett and Museum of Vancouver.

Press and online materials for the exhibition emphasized the semiotic potencies of clothing to communicate socioeconomic status, cultural identities, and personal expression.⁴ Clothing covered a multitude of occasions and social contexts and bore witness to shifting societal perceptions of women’s bodies: restricted or expanded waistlines and hemlines, and opulence versus austere restraint in fabric selection and volume. In showcasing clothes that were Canadian-made and/or sourced from Canadian wearers, in addition to hand-woven or sewn pieces from commercial patterns, alongside works by fashion’s celebrated masters, the exhibition offered space to a multitude of makers and making practices, responding to calls to incorporate “everyday” fashion into museum collections rather than limit fashion to iconic houses.⁵ But the element of fashion—which Julia Petrov differentiates from costume and dress as “the garments made within the fashion system of goods exchange and in accordance with its aesthetic and value systems”—was present in this exhibition as well.⁶ Each of the pieces exhibited had at some historical point in time entered the cultural and commercial marketplace, and there was an inherent thrill in seeing work from luminaries such as Quant, Westwood, and Miyake, all of whom had passed in recent months.

While the exhibition reflected the international interests of the collectors, it encapsulated fashion’s Eurocentric orientations. Pieces outlined routes of Western colonialist expansion, as demonstrated in materials such as Indian cotton and chintz, and mentions of markets’ reliance on the enslaved labor of Black and Brown bodies. Indigenous representation reflected Canadian colonial policies: a buckskin day jacket with prairie flower motifs (ca. 1903–09) was constructed using Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation techniques but adhered to trends for women’s coats, as illustrated in the T. Eaton Co. Ltd. Catalogue for Fall and Winter 1905–06. The final pieces in the exhibition were a set of three wool day suits from respected Haida fashion designer Dorothy Grant that integrate Haida motifs with a 1990s-era European suit construction.

The ambitious historical breadth necessitated attention to crucial moments in fashion and politics such that pieces became representative. However, the exhibition at times fell into the trap of “prescriptive representational displays” that address requisite moments but “shut down the opportunity for visitors to personally engage with the materiality of objects in a way that opens up space for speculation and alternative viewpoints.”⁷ The production team could perhaps have incorporated immersive or interactive elements such as touch screens, posters, or fabric swatches to provide additional information on provenance and construction or to present some of the visual references from the period on a larger scale. In one of the few uses of multimedia, in a short film entitled Marjorie’s Cape, Sayers explains the provenance of a luminous Art Deco cape worn by Ross Hamilton, a World War I-era drag performer in the Canadian military, which was donated from Donaldson’s after Hamilton sent it to be repaired and never retrieved it.⁸ The inclusion of the film and the presence of the cape itself revealed the potential of fashion exhibitions to fuse the visual with the material—matter—in a manner that can “reimagine and rematerialize political geographies and political subjectivities” and offer unexplored, in this instance queer, histories.⁹ The final section also included a 2010 Jeff Wall artwork titled “Authentication. Claus Jahnke, costume historian, examining a document relating to an item in his collection.” The artwork is comprised of four photographs that depict Jahnke examining the provenance of a men’s shirt by referencing a 1932 catalog of the Jewish manufacturer Nathan Israel with a photograph of Leni Riefenstahl on its cover. This artwork offered a potent demonstration of how unexpected, sometimes unsettling geopolitical resonances emerge from the work of cataloging garments and captured a rare perspective on the extensive work of one of the exhibition’s contributors. Three leather handbags from Jahnke’s collection were featured in a case in this same corridor: two German models shaped like automobiles, and a third that Edward, the Duke of Windsor, commissioned for Wallis Simpson. Although the exhibition label for the Jeff Wall artwork drew attention to Leni Riefenstahl on the catalog cover, implications of the Windsors’ documented associations with Nazi Germany remained unexplored and left for the viewer to muse on.

The exhibition was the result of a combination of efforts, or collaboration between four entities—three collectors and one curatorial association, with complementary and distinct priorities—and the result was richer, if not more diverse, for it. It likewise provoked reflection on collecting and preservation practices and revealed the sometime calculatedness or intentionality of acquisitions but also the element of chance. That curatorial choices were circumscribed by the contents of personal collections—aesthetic preferences, geographical areas of purview, and professional encounters—prompted reflection on how and why pieces are chosen and/or preserved in the first place, and the process of preservation itself as conditional. A more immersive staging would have permitted the public to explore in more somatic depth how costume matters, and indeed how costume persists and is preserved, and for whom.

REBECCA HALLIDAY
Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of English, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Notes

1 On the use of arsenic in Victorian dress, see Alison Matthews David, Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

2 Dressed for History: Why Costume Collections Matter: Women’s Fashion 1750–2000 (Vancouver: Museum of Vancouver, 2023).

3 Dressed for History.

4 “Dressed for History: Why Costume Collections Matter: Women’s Fashion 1750–2000,” Museum of Vancouver, <https://museumofvancouver.ca/dressed-for-history>.

5 See Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, “In Search of the Everyday: Museums, Collections, and Representations of Fashion in London and New York,” in Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites, and Practices, ed. Heike Jenss (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 25–41. The fact that pieces tended to come from well-off or prestigious Canadian makers and wearers reiterated how fashion’s curatorial practices still tend to privilege elite members of society.

6 Julia Petrov, Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 3.

7 Bethan Bide, “Signs of Wear: Encountering Memory in the Worn Materiality of a Museum Fashion Collection,” Fashion Theory 21, no. 4 (2017): 468.

8 The film is available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j73GpqMUi1A&t=118s>.

9 Delacey Tedesco, “Curating Political Subjects: Fashion Curation as Affective Methodology,” GeoHumanities 7, no. 1 (2021): 330.