In Costume
17 February 2022
Historical fashion - who buys it and why?
Amy de la Haye
Professor Amy de la Haye is a curator, writer and tutor. She is Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Dress History & Curatorship and Joint Director of the Research Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, UAL.
Mademoiselle Chanel's own couture striped knitted jersey day dress, late 1950s, bearing défilé label -'Jakie-C5-Paulette', and 'Chanel vente chez Christie's 2 decembre, 1978' label, bust 86cm. Sold for £3,800 in December 2019 at Kerry Taylor Auctions, lot 137.
Image courtesy Kerry Taylor Auctions.
Alas, for a very long time fashion occupied a lowly position in the established and historically patriarchal hierarchy of creative expression, a world in which fine art has traditionally reigned supreme. While fashion meets many definitions of art and craft, it is primarily a global industry and one which has – until recent years – been female focused. Further, as fashion is inherently ephemeral it has often been dismissed as having little lasting value, financial or otherwise. Certainly, fashion being thought of as art and being something that people collected, was largely unheard of until the 1970s and meteoric surges in price have only been witnessed this century. In other words, collecting vintage fashion and costume is a fairly modern thing.
We all know of people who have extensive collections of Christian Dior shoes or 1980s Armani suits – which are having a real moment, by the way – but what about fashion prior to that? The V&A, our national museum of art and design was established in 1852 but it didn’t employ a specialist fashion curator until the 1950s. Even then, when costume was collected, it was primarily for its significance in terms of textiles and trimmings, rather than its cut and styling. Fast forward to the 21st century and fashion from all periods is hugely popular. So much so, that the income generated from ‘blockbuster’ events, like the Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which marks the opening of the museum’s annual fashion exhibition, often contribute greatly to keeping museums afloat financially. But prejudices linger – I don’t remember ever hearing a fashion curator described as a connoisseur, with much seriousness anyway.
When I was Curator of 20th Century Fashion at the V&A in the 1990s, designers were only too willing to donate items from their collections, especially current pieces if they were to be exhibited. Today, acquiring pieces can be much harder for museums – even new generation designers recognise the cultural and financial capital of their ‘heritage’ and, like more established brands and fashion houses, they all treasure their archives. At auction, large fashion houses will pay huge sums to acquire items of historical significance that bear their label for marketing purposes and also to inspire current designers. Private museums have also entered the market and can usually outbid state funded institutions .
Within the academic discipline of ‘collections studies’ there is an interesting school of thought that claims an object can only be collected when it no longer serves its original use value (a teapot displayed in a cabinet, for example, comprises a collected object; one that comes out on a tray with some scones at half four does not). However, many people who regard themselves as fashion collectors do in fact wear the clothes they buy, but these tend to be fashions dating from the 1950s onwards. Today, only a few private buyers – the occasional eccentric dresser and costume houses – purchase historical dress for wear. Mostly it is simply too fragile – and now financially precious – to risk damaging.
Queen Victoria's Mourning Dress, a very good late 19th Century Mourning Dress & Outfit, of black satin and silk. Sold for €3400 in September 2021 at Fonsie Mealy’s.
Image courtesy Fonsie Mealy’s.
It is also the case, sadly, that time hasn’t been kind to costume. From the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s a vogue for ‘fancy’ balls created a surge in the demand for ‘authentic’ eighteenth century male and female dress. So great was this interwar enthusiasm that very few unaltered garments from the period exist within museum collections. Such pieces do of course fetch the highest prices at auction. They tend to be sourced from private estates such as the recent Howth Castle sale, which saw 800 years of history, including many ‘textiles’ go under the hammer. In not dissimilar circumstances, back in 2019, a remarkable trunk of nineteenth century menswear was auctioned by Trevanion after being happened upon at a family home. It included a fine marled lavender coloured wool frock coat with pierced silvered metal buttons and cream wool waistcoat dating c1790s which sold for £2,900.
It should be noted that collecting costume isn’t just the preserve of the wealthy. Some items of historical dress seem to sell for perhaps surprisingly low prices: for example, men’s decorative waistcoats from the nineteenth century can often be purchased for a hammer price of around £400. Collecting buttons is another good way to get started. Buttons have been in use since the thirteenth century and are widely collected. As they employ almost every material and making technique, prices vary tremendously. In 2015 the Les Arts Décoratifs (Paris) staged the exhibition Déboutonner, a 3,000 strong collection compiled by Loïc Allio.
Historically, fancy fans (some painted by famous artists) have commanded meteoric prices. Lace (often very costly and collected by royalty and aristocrats such as Empress Eugenie, Queen Charlotte and Baroness Edmond de Rothschild) has also been immensely popular at points but in recent years, it has fallen out of favour slightly. Satin, on the other hand – not a fabric by the way, but ‘a weave structure’ – is having a moment. London based Kerry Taylor Auctions (est. 2003) is the world’s leading fashion focused auction house. Kerry’s sales tend to attract global attention and in 2019 a grand habit de cour (a formal French court gown of pink silk satin with silver lace dating 1760-70) reached £42,000. The wearer was not known; if it had belonged to someone famous it might have sold for many times this sum. In 2018, I was guest editor of a special issue of the journal Fashion Theory, which explored the specificities of collectors, practices of collecting and collections of dress. In the course of my research I asked Kerry Taylor what were the most desirable items that she sold. She replied, ‘garments that have been worn by a celebrity that are also important fashion statements are today’s holy relics…celebrities leave their DNA; it is all about the aura and people worshipping at the altar of fame.’ That said, it was perhaps surprising that some rare mourning dress worn by Queen Victoria, sold at the previously mentioned Howth Castle sale, classified under ‘Carpets and Textiles’, sold for just £3,400.
A fine and rare Gabrielle Chanel embroidered evening coat, 1918-1920, yellow on black woven Gabrielle Chanel label, chest approx 102cm. Sold for £90,000 in December 2019, at Kerry Taylor Auctions, lot 108.
Image courtesy Kerry Taylor Auctions.
Would-be buyers beware, though. Historical fashion is particularly awkward to care for and to accommodate. As the pioneer fashion collector and curator (and founder of Bath Fashion Museum) Doris Langley Moore observed in 1955, ‘for four very good reasons, private collectors of costume are somewhat rare: they occupy a great deal of space, they need perpetual care, are liable to deteriorate in several disconcerting ways, and are expensive and difficult to display.’ Dress is either stored hanging or flat, ideally supported by a polyester wadding padded calico (the latter washed only in water to strip it of any chemicals) surrogate body form or flat supported by layers of acid free tissue wads and ‘sausages’: as with all objects dress is supported rather than wrapped. The wooden cupboards of Victorian museums have mostly been replaced by inert metal storage, in climate-controlled spaces which ensure that temperatures do not fluctuate too much. But even the most meticulously stored dress from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can deteriorate without being touched. As silk was originally sold by weight, canny traders added metal salts to increase their profits. These cut into the silk causing vertical striations – it is a process that conservators describe as inherent vice. And all that before we mention that devilish species, first described by Swiss entomologist, Arvid David Hummel, back in 1823, the common clothes moth.
Man’s silk-embroidered court coat, 1780s, altered for a lady in the late 19th century.
Image courtesy of Cora Ginsburg LLC.
More from the Magazine
