Putting textiles on show requires time, effort and careful thought. Even in a sealed showcase and under low light, they will inevitably deteriorate while on display.
Textiles can be flat, such as a carpet, flag or piece of lace, or three-dimensional, such as dress, accessories or upholstered furniture. Ideally each would be displayed as they would originally have been used or worn, but this is not always possible.
“Right from the start, the exhibition curator should begin a dialogue with the conservator, assess the risks and be flexible,” says Amy George, the curator of textiles and wallpaper at the Whitworth in Manchester. “We all want to achieve what’s right in terms of showing the object to its best advantage, telling its story, and of course preserving it for the long term.”
There are mixed views about textiles on open display. Sometimes this is a practical or financial necessity when a case is too cumbersome or expensive.
“On open display you might think items are more accessible,” says Suzanne Smith, the manager of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s (V&A) Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion in London.
“But they have to be placed further away out of reach, beyond a barrier. With a textile in a showcase, visitors can see the detail really close up.”
Dressed to impress
Whether or not behind glass, putting clothing on show is particularly labour-intensive and time-consuming. Over the past 20 years dress mounting has become much more of a specialist skill.
“It’s a kind of alchemy,” says Rosemary Harden, the manager of the Fashion Museum in Bath. “You’re turning what looks like a rumpled-up sheet into a gown that visitors instantly recognise as belonging to Jane Austen’s world.”
Conservators recommend Stockman dress stands, if the budget allows, to which arms and heads can be attached. The torsos can be padded out with inert materials to achieve the correct silhouette.
“It’s the opposite of dressmaking,” says Harden. ”Make the body fit the dress rather than the other way round. Where money is tight, the simplest and cheapest way is to pad out a coat hanger and use net to create the skirt shape you need.”
Mounts for clothing accessories and other smaller items can be created from Fosshape, an inert polyester felt that is moulded or sewn and fixed into permanent shape with heat.
Bespoke solutions
Textiles can be so large, heavy or fragile that more elaborate display fittings are required.
The American Museum in Britain, outside Bath, has a collection of more than 250 historic quilts. “We want to show as many as possible, but we’re in a listed building with limited room sizes,” explains the museum’s chief curator, Kate Hebert.
“We recently raised money to update our specially-engineered hinged system. The quilts are mounted in large Perspex frames, which visitors turn like the pages of a book. This enables us to display more than 40 items in a fraction of the space.”
An engineering solution also enables William Morris’s much-admired 1889 Bullerswood carpet to be permanently displayed in the V&A’s British Galleries. Because of its size – 7.5 metres long - only half the carpet can be shown at any one time.
“There were concerns about differential fading between the exposed and protected sections,” explains V&A conservator Roisin Morris. “A steel roller system was designed with engineers Borley Brothers specifically for the carpet.”
It was recently unrolled, examined for any changes, and turned so that the other end of the carpet is on display.
Exposure to light was one of the concerns for conservators when the restored 1590 Sheldon tapestry map of Worcestershire went on display in the foyer of the Weston Library, part of the Oxford’s Bodleian Library, in 2015.
Incorporated into the purpose-built showcase are roller blinds lowered electronically to cover the tapestry to limit exposure when necessary during the foyer’s extended opening hours.
Digital access
Only a fraction of textile collections worldwide are on display at any one time, but new technology is bridging the gap through online access.
Digitisation and online catalogues make textiles available to all, and significantly reduce the need to handle the originals.
High-resolution images allow close-up study of the detail on an item of clothing, tapestry or embroidery. The emerging field of visual stylometry will also potentially allow visual rather than text-based searches of textile collections.
Textiles can be flat, such as a carpet, flag or piece of lace, or three-dimensional, such as dress, accessories or upholstered furniture. Ideally each would be displayed as they would originally have been used or worn, but this is not always possible.
“Right from the start, the exhibition curator should begin a dialogue with the conservator, assess the risks and be flexible,” says Amy George, the curator of textiles and wallpaper at the Whitworth in Manchester. “We all want to achieve what’s right in terms of showing the object to its best advantage, telling its story, and of course preserving it for the long term.”
There are mixed views about textiles on open display. Sometimes this is a practical or financial necessity when a case is too cumbersome or expensive.
“On open display you might think items are more accessible,” says Suzanne Smith, the manager of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s (V&A) Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion in London.
“But they have to be placed further away out of reach, beyond a barrier. With a textile in a showcase, visitors can see the detail really close up.”
Dressed to impress
Whether or not behind glass, putting clothing on show is particularly labour-intensive and time-consuming. Over the past 20 years dress mounting has become much more of a specialist skill.
“It’s a kind of alchemy,” says Rosemary Harden, the manager of the Fashion Museum in Bath. “You’re turning what looks like a rumpled-up sheet into a gown that visitors instantly recognise as belonging to Jane Austen’s world.”
Conservators recommend Stockman dress stands, if the budget allows, to which arms and heads can be attached. The torsos can be padded out with inert materials to achieve the correct silhouette.
“It’s the opposite of dressmaking,” says Harden. ”Make the body fit the dress rather than the other way round. Where money is tight, the simplest and cheapest way is to pad out a coat hanger and use net to create the skirt shape you need.”
Mounts for clothing accessories and other smaller items can be created from Fosshape, an inert polyester felt that is moulded or sewn and fixed into permanent shape with heat.
Bespoke solutions
Textiles can be so large, heavy or fragile that more elaborate display fittings are required.
The American Museum in Britain, outside Bath, has a collection of more than 250 historic quilts. “We want to show as many as possible, but we’re in a listed building with limited room sizes,” explains the museum’s chief curator, Kate Hebert.
“We recently raised money to update our specially-engineered hinged system. The quilts are mounted in large Perspex frames, which visitors turn like the pages of a book. This enables us to display more than 40 items in a fraction of the space.”
An engineering solution also enables William Morris’s much-admired 1889 Bullerswood carpet to be permanently displayed in the V&A’s British Galleries. Because of its size – 7.5 metres long - only half the carpet can be shown at any one time.
“There were concerns about differential fading between the exposed and protected sections,” explains V&A conservator Roisin Morris. “A steel roller system was designed with engineers Borley Brothers specifically for the carpet.”
It was recently unrolled, examined for any changes, and turned so that the other end of the carpet is on display.
Exposure to light was one of the concerns for conservators when the restored 1590 Sheldon tapestry map of Worcestershire went on display in the foyer of the Weston Library, part of the Oxford’s Bodleian Library, in 2015.
Incorporated into the purpose-built showcase are roller blinds lowered electronically to cover the tapestry to limit exposure when necessary during the foyer’s extended opening hours.
Digital access
Only a fraction of textile collections worldwide are on display at any one time, but new technology is bridging the gap through online access.
Digitisation and online catalogues make textiles available to all, and significantly reduce the need to handle the originals.
High-resolution images allow close-up study of the detail on an item of clothing, tapestry or embroidery. The emerging field of visual stylometry will also potentially allow visual rather than text-based searches of textile collections.
