'The habit of their age': English genre painters, dress collecting, and museums, 1910-1914

Fashion, History, Museums Inventing the Display of Dress

“…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,…”

“…Decorative arts museums and collections in particular, such as the V&A, were dedicated to the gospel of "honest labour," produced by hand by craftsmen before the advent of the aesthetically and morally dishonest machine age (see Eastlake 1868; Morris 1882a, b). In 1913, the department store Harrods donated the historical dress collection of genre painter Talbot Hughes to the museum (Petrov 2008), with the hope that "the collection would stimulate the imagination of the present and the future, and would help in the scheme of colour and design, which was so necessary to the dressmaker" ("Old English Dress" 1913: n.p. ).…”

“…By the early twentieth century, artists felt that they could make a unique and valuable contribution to the study of history through material culture. Painters like Talbot Hughes, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Seymour Lucas (Petrov 2008) (Figure 4.1) would complete the circle of the antiquarian tradition by donating the original artifacts to museums. In his 1999 book Vision and Accident, author Anthony Burton provides a plausible reason for the eventual change in the V&A's collecting policy to include fashionable dress.…”

“…Just as in Early Modern costume books, the look of the historical fashion on display was an illusion of an objective reality, constructed through a series of stylistic decisions not always based on historical "fact." For example, the Hughes/Harrods donation of historical fashion to the V&A in 1913 was formed out of the aesthetic preferences of its painter-collector (Petrov 2008) and later presented in theatrical contexts. While initially displayed on the department store premises, the dresses were exhibited in "period surroundings" ("Collection About Which" 1913: 66).…”

“…One hundred years later, fashion exhibitions began to break museum visitor attendance records-not just for that category of display but for any kind of exhibition. Fashion first gained independent recognition of its status as a museum-worthy object in England and America just before the First World War (Petrov 2008), and the greatest growth of fashion history collections in museums across Britain and North America occurred between the 1930s and 1960s (Taylor 2004). Along the way, fashion's inherent conventions have come up against better-established museum conventions of display and discussion.…”