fashion and dress
Manchester Art Gallery’s dress collection is inextricably entwined in the history of Platt Hall which was, for 70 years, the world’s first dedicated museum of dress.
The collection, comprising over 25,000 garments and accessories, plus a substantial archive and library, is one of the most significant resources for the study of dress history in the country. It is currently the subject of a major project to create a new study centre at our north Manchester Queens Park Conservation Centre and has a dedicated Fashion Gallery at Manchester Art Gallery. Currently, most of the collection is still at Platt Hall, but over the next year or so, this will change as it moves to its new home. However, a selection of items will remain at Platt Hall, a reminder of its long history as The Gallery of Costume.
The Gallery of English Costume (as it was then called) was created in 1947 to house the newly acquired Cunnington Collection of 4,000 items of historic dress. Drs Willett and Phillis Cunnington had amassed a significant collection of 19th century women’s dress and related material as well as a huge research library of fashion plates, magazines and shop catalogues. The Cunnington collection was intended to illustrate socio-cultural patterns of dress and clothing, rather than high fashion or ‘good design’. It was a social history collection, contextualised by magazines, journals, prints, fashion plates and photographs of dress in everyday life.
It provided the foundation for a collection which has since focused primarily on clothes worn or made in Britain, including home-made, occupational and high-street clothing but which has more recently also included designer and couture items. Much of this has been donated as small-scale gifts of family or personal items of clothing, alongside a few significant large acquisitions including a collection of catwalk fashion garments from the Cotton Board in the 1950s, the Filmer collection of 60 items of 17th century dress in 2004, and the Meredith Collection of over 100,000 buttons in 2008. During the 1990s, a small amount of South Asian dress was acquired, reflecting the cultures of the neighbourhoods around Platt Hall. And in recent years the clothes of major British and European designers have been actively collected, with substantial National Heritage Lottery Fund from 2015 for the acquisition of 50 major couture items, by designers ranging from Charles Frederick Worth, Poiret, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Dior, to YSL, Lacroix, McQueen and Galliano.
Alongside the garments themselves, there is a complementary collection of objects relating to dress care, dress making and appearance, collectively known as ‘objects of personal use and adornment’ or OPUA, and a substantial archive of photographs including studio portraits, cartes-de-visites and family albums, that show how dress was worn.
