Fashion Museum, Bath

Last updated

Fashion Museum
Fashion Museum and Assembly Rooms Bath.jpg
Somerset UK location map.svg
Red pog.svg
Location within Somerset and the United Kingdom
Established1963
Location Assembly Rooms, Bennett Street Bath, Somerset BA1 2QH
Coordinates 51°23′10″N2°21′45″W / 51.3862°N 2.3624°W / 51.3862; -2.3624
Website Official website

The Fashion Museum (known before 2007 as the Museum of Costume [1] ) was housed in the Assembly Rooms in Bath, Somerset, England.

Contents

The collection was started by Doris Langley Moore, who gave her collection of costumes to the city of Bath in 1963. The museum focuses on fashionable dress for men, women and children from the late 16th century to the present day and has more than 100,000 objects. [2] The earliest pieces are embroidered shirts and gloves from about 1600.[ citation needed ] The Museum receives about 100,000 visitors annually. [1]

Dress of the Year

Every year from its creation in 1963, an independent fashion expert has been asked to select a dress for entry into this part of the collection. The designers whose work is represented include: Mary Quant, John Bates, Ossie Clark, Jean Muir, Bill Gibb, Giorgio Armani, John Galliano, Ralph Lauren, Alexander McQueen, Donatella Versace and Alber Elbaz. [2]

Location

In 2019, the National Trust, who owns the Assembly Rooms, exercised a break clause in the museum's contract to make room for a new museum about Georgian Bath. [3] The museum announced that it would leave the Assembly Rooms in March 2023 and look for a new building. [4]

The new site chosen was the Old Post Office in Bath; whilst work was undertaken to ready the new location, the collection was temporarily housed and displayed at the headquarters of luxury glovemakers Dents in Warminster. [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metropolitan Museum of Art</span> Art museum in New York City

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. In 2022 it welcomed 3,208,832 visitors, ranking it the third most visited U.S museum, and eighth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bath, Somerset</span> City in Somerset, England

Bath is a city in the Bath and North East Somerset unitary area in the ceremonial county of Somerset, England, known for and named after its Roman-built baths. At the 2021 Census, the population was 101,557. Bath is in the valley of the River Avon, 97 miles (156 km) west of London and 11 miles (18 km) southeast of Bristol. The city became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and was later added to the transnational World Heritage Site known as the "Great Spa Towns of Europe" in 2021. Bath is also the largest city and settlement in Somerset.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victoria and Albert Museum</span> Art museum in London, England

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Dior</span> French fashion designer (1905–1957)

Christian Ernest Dior was a French fashion designer, best known as the founder of one of the world's top fashion houses, Christian Dior SE. His fashion houses are known all around the world, having gained prominence "on five continents in only a decade."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of London</span> Museum in London documenting its history

The Museum of London is a museum in London, covering the history of the city from prehistoric to modern times, with a particular focus on social history. It was formed in 1976 by amalgamating collections previously held by the City Corporation at the Guildhall Museum and of the London Museum. From 1976 to 2022, its main site was located in the City of London on London Wall, close to the Barbican Centre, as part of the Barbican complex of buildings created in the 1960s and '70s to redevelop a bomb-damaged area of the city. In March 2015, the museum revealed plans to move to the General Market Building at the nearby Smithfield site. Reasons for the proposed move included the claim that the current site was difficult for visitors to find, and that by expanding, from 17,000 square metres to 27,000, a greater proportion of the museum's collection could be placed on display. In December 2022, the museum permanently closed its site at London Wall in preparation for reopening in 2026 at Smithfield Market as the London Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fashion Institute of Technology</span> Fashion school of the State University of New York

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is a public college in New York City. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) and focuses on art, business, design, mass communication, and technology connected to the fashion industry. It was founded in 1944.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Lacroix</span> French fashion designer (born 1951)

Christian Marie Marc Lacroix is a French fashion designer. The name may also refer to the company he founded.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herschel Museum of Astronomy</span> Museum in Bath, England

The Herschel Museum of Astronomy at 19 New King Street, Bath, England, is a museum that was inaugurated in 1981. It is located in a town house that was formerly the home of William Herschel and his sister Caroline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ulster Museum</span> Part of the National Museum of Northern Ireland

The Ulster Museum, located in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast, has around 8,000 square metres of public display space, featuring material from the collections of fine art and applied art, archaeology, ethnography, treasures from the Spanish Armada, local history, numismatics, industrial archaeology, botany, zoology and geology. It is the largest museum in Northern Ireland, and one of the components of National Museums Northern Ireland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bath Assembly Rooms</span> Grade I listed building in Bath, England

The Bath Assembly Rooms, designed by John Wood the Younger in 1769, are a set of assembly rooms located in the heart of the World Heritage City of Bath in England which are now open to the public as a visitor attraction. They are designated as a Grade I listed building.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Museum of Costume</span>

The National Museum of Costume was located at Shambellie House, in New Abbey, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland and it formed part of the National Museums of Scotland. The museum started operating in 1982. The museum allowed a look at fashion and the lifestyle of the wealthy from the 1850s to the 1950s. The clothes were presented in lifelike room settings. In January 2013, National Museums Scotland announced that the National Museum of Costume was to close and the site would not reopen for 2013.

Bonnie Cashin was an American fashion designer. Considered a pioneer in the design of American sportswear, she created innovative, uncomplicated clothing that catered to the modern, independent woman beginning in the post-war era through to her retirement from the fashion world in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holburne Museum</span> Art gallery in Bath, England

The Holburne Museum is located in Sydney Pleasure Gardens, Bath, Somerset, England. The city's first public art gallery, the Grade I listed building, is home to fine and decorative arts built around the collection of Sir William Holburne. Artists in the collection include Gainsborough, Guardi, Stubbs, Ramsay and Zoffany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dress of the Year</span>

The Dress of the Year is an annual fashion award run by the Fashion Museum, Bath from 1963. Each year since 1963, the Museum has asked a fashion journalist to select a dress or outfit that best represents the most important new ideas in contemporary fashion. For 2010 the Museum broke with tradition by asking the milliner Stephen Jones, rather than a journalist, to choose an outfit; and again in 2014 when the fashion blogger, Susanna Lau of Style Bubble, was asked to choose an outfit for 2013. The outfit is then donated to the Fashion Museum along with an Adel Rootstein mannequin to represent that year's total look.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doris Langley Moore</span> British fashion historian (1902–1989)

Doris Langley Moore (1902–1989), also known as Doris Langley-Levy Moore, was one of the first important female fashion historians. She founded the Fashion Museum, Bath, in 1963. She was also a well-respected Lord Byron scholar, and author of a 1940s ballet, The Quest. As a result of these wide-ranging interests, she had many connections within fashionable, intellectual, artistic and theatrical circles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yeohlee Teng</span> American fashion designer

Yeohlee Teng is an American fashion designer originally from Malaysia and of Chinese heritage. She received the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for fashion design in 2004. Her work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Victoria & Albert, London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dents</span> British manufacturer of leather goods

Dents is a British company that crafts luxury leather gloves, handbags, small leather goods. Dents is known for its hand cutting, sewing, and stitching techniques, which are still practised today on some limited top-end products, most merchandise being purchased from third-party factories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Wintour Costume Center</span> Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, housing The Costume Institute

The Anna Wintour Costume Center is a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's main building in Manhattan that houses the collection of the Costume Institute, a branch of the museum focused on fashion and costume design. The center is named after Anna Wintour, the longtime and current editor-in-chief of Vogue, Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast, and chair of the museum's annual Met Gala since 1995. It was endowed by Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch. As of August 2017, the chief curator is Andrew Bolton.

Reed Crawford (1924-2006) was a British milliner of the 1950s and 1960s. He produced a series of high-fashion designs that matched the Swinging London mood of the 1960s, including helmet-style cloche hats and designs in unusual material combinations, such as plastic and fur. He became especially associated with couture, working with the designer John Cavanagh from 1959 and joining the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers as an associate member from 1961.

In America: An Anthology of Fashion is the 2022 high fashion art exhibition of the Anna Wintour Costume Center, a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) which houses the collection of the Costume Institute. It is the piece of a two-part exhibit that explores fashion in the United States. This exhibit highlights stylistic narratives and histories of the American Wing Period. Each immersive period rooms reflect America from the 1700s to the 1970s and captures men's and women's fashion. The rooms also display America's domestic life and the influences of cultures, politics, and style at each period.

References

  1. 1 2 "About". The Fashion Museum. Retrieved 3 March 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Fashion museum, Bath". 24 hour museum. Retrieved 5 November 2007.
  3. "Concern over future of Bath Fashion Museum which could be left homeless". Bath Echo. 17 May 2021. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  4. "Bath Fashion Museum may close for three years". BBC News. 15 May 2021. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  5. "Fashion Museum Bath moves collection to temporary home at Dents". Bath & North East Somerset Council . 9 March 2023. Retrieved 17 April 2023.