Fashion and Fancy Dress: The Messel Family Dress Collection, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
The Messel family motto, 'What we have, we hold', seems particularly appropriate for six generations of women who collected, preserved and treasured clothing and other personal paraphernalia over a period covering 140 years.
Fashion and Fancy Dress: The Messel Family Dress Collection 1865-2005 at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery is curated by Amy de la Haye, Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson, and features 55 garments on view to the public for the first time.
The artefacts range from international haute couture and ready-to-wear to fancy dress and customised items, and are all located in the recently renovated Fashion & Style Gallery.
An adjacent room contains Messel family photographs including intimate shots and glamorous studio portraits. The fine art gallery has a complementary show called Fashion, Portraiture and Fancy Dress.
In the Fashion & Style Gallery the exhibition is divided into two main sections, one for displaying the collection and one for study. The upper level with its raised catwalk located between the glass display cases presents the Messel family clothing and accessories, beginning with Marion Herapath's Victorian mourning bodice and ending with Anna, Lady Oxmanton's Chinese wedding dress of 2004.
The chronological ordering of exhibits is a logical solution, helping visitors to trace the genealogy of the family in relation to shifting trends in dress code and fashion styling.
Garments are displayed on 'invisible' mannequins, which gives them a unified presentation style and allows a variety of period body stances to be portrayed. The overall look of the exhibition is soft and feminine, with graphics in pastel colours featuring photographs of each family member alternating with floral motifs.
The deliberate gendering of the exhibition highlights the significance of the role of the Messel women as guardians of family history, memory and heritage, while references to the male line, which includes the stage designer Oliver Messell, Lord Snowdon and Viscount Linley, are marginal.
Information panels provide detail on topics that shed light on the design, making and consumption of the collection, such as the role of fashion designers, the significance of home-made clothing and fancy dress, and the influence of travel, gardens and the family houses.
In addition, object-specific and contextual labels are supplied with each garment and the clothing is set in a social context through the use of period photographs, family memorabilia and film footage.
The lower level of the gallery provides an interactive and study area with opportunities to dress up in Messel family style outfits, refer to reading material and use the touchscreen to access data about garments in the collection.
In this way the exhibition provides a range of different levels of interpretation, which is further supplemented by handling sessions, talks and tours.
Of the Messel women eulogised, it is Maud Messel and her daughter Anne, Countess of Rosse, who dominate the exhibition. Although not exactly a Pygmalion story, the Messels' rise in social status from respectable middle class to the upper echelons of the aristocracy can be attributed to the strategic marriages of Maud and Anne.
The latter married twice, in fact, and became a society beauty whose obsessive attention to her public image is revealed in a scrapbook containing numerous press reviews of her civic engagements and sartorial style.
That said, it is Anne's passion to preserve and control the dissemination of her family memory including the careful and sometimes whimsical cataloguing of the collection that breathes life into the displays.
It is impossible not to be intrigued by a hand-written label accompanying her green Jacqmar dress that states, 'Had a wonderful time in this, am ashamed to say - 1941!!', or to be moved by her observations about the fragility of garments, which she suggests contributes to their 'magic'.
Fashion and Fancy Dress taps into the popular fascination with the personal and particular as it relates to the 'upper' class and to celebrity lifestyle. But this is also a project at the forefront of dress curatorship that reflects a number of trends in museum interpretation and display.
The first of these trends is a focus on wardrobe-based collections and an interest in the role and motives of the collector. This can also be seen in Style & Splendour: Queen Maud of Norway's Wardrobe 1896-1938 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and in Material World at the Chertsey Museum, a temporary exhibition featuring clothes from the extensive collection of Olive Matthews (1887-1979).
The most significant theme of the Brighton exhibition is the analysis of garments as a repository of memory; the traces of past lives. This is apparent in the decision to break curatorial conventions and retain the bright pink lipstick stain on Anne's wedding dress of 1925 and to display her torn and damaged 'fan dress' of 1933.
The exhibition reflects a growing interest in the potential of objects to reveal their social biography. In the case of the Messel family, garments are treated as 'witnesses' to the different fashion codes and rituals required of each generation and acquire an almost metaphysical quality through contact with their previous owners.
Fashion and Fancy Dress will undoubtedly prove a hit with the public because of its winning combination of stunning garments and family chronicles set against a backdrop of social mobility and high society.
But this is more than a timely and artfully curated exhibition of family dress, it is a manifesto aimed at raising awareness of the cultural value of clothing.
In the accompanying catalogue, A Family of Fashion, The Messels: Six Generations of Dress, the curators make the case for the significance of a critical object-based approach to museum interpretation and historical study.
They argue that a close reading of artefacts, often missing in exhibitions, can help us 'touch the memories, emotions, aspirations, and sensitivities of their owners, characteristics which drive the world along'.
Nicky Ryan is a senior lecturer in visual culture and theory at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London
Project data
Cost: £130,000
Main funder: Esmeé Fairbairn Foundation
Curators: Amy de la Haye, Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson
Exhibition ends: 5 March 2006, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery; tours to Ulster Museum, Befast, 14 April-29 August 2006
The Messel family motto, 'What we have, we hold', seems particularly appropriate for six generations of women who collected, preserved and treasured clothing and other personal paraphernalia over a period covering 140 years.
Fashion and Fancy Dress: The Messel Family Dress Collection 1865-2005 at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery is curated by Amy de la Haye, Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson, and features 55 garments on view to the public for the first time.
The artefacts range from international haute couture and ready-to-wear to fancy dress and customised items, and are all located in the recently renovated Fashion & Style Gallery.
An adjacent room contains Messel family photographs including intimate shots and glamorous studio portraits. The fine art gallery has a complementary show called Fashion, Portraiture and Fancy Dress.
In the Fashion & Style Gallery the exhibition is divided into two main sections, one for displaying the collection and one for study. The upper level with its raised catwalk located between the glass display cases presents the Messel family clothing and accessories, beginning with Marion Herapath's Victorian mourning bodice and ending with Anna, Lady Oxmanton's Chinese wedding dress of 2004.
The chronological ordering of exhibits is a logical solution, helping visitors to trace the genealogy of the family in relation to shifting trends in dress code and fashion styling.
Garments are displayed on 'invisible' mannequins, which gives them a unified presentation style and allows a variety of period body stances to be portrayed. The overall look of the exhibition is soft and feminine, with graphics in pastel colours featuring photographs of each family member alternating with floral motifs.
The deliberate gendering of the exhibition highlights the significance of the role of the Messel women as guardians of family history, memory and heritage, while references to the male line, which includes the stage designer Oliver Messell, Lord Snowdon and Viscount Linley, are marginal.
Information panels provide detail on topics that shed light on the design, making and consumption of the collection, such as the role of fashion designers, the significance of home-made clothing and fancy dress, and the influence of travel, gardens and the family houses.
In addition, object-specific and contextual labels are supplied with each garment and the clothing is set in a social context through the use of period photographs, family memorabilia and film footage.
The lower level of the gallery provides an interactive and study area with opportunities to dress up in Messel family style outfits, refer to reading material and use the touchscreen to access data about garments in the collection.
In this way the exhibition provides a range of different levels of interpretation, which is further supplemented by handling sessions, talks and tours.
Of the Messel women eulogised, it is Maud Messel and her daughter Anne, Countess of Rosse, who dominate the exhibition. Although not exactly a Pygmalion story, the Messels' rise in social status from respectable middle class to the upper echelons of the aristocracy can be attributed to the strategic marriages of Maud and Anne.
The latter married twice, in fact, and became a society beauty whose obsessive attention to her public image is revealed in a scrapbook containing numerous press reviews of her civic engagements and sartorial style.
That said, it is Anne's passion to preserve and control the dissemination of her family memory including the careful and sometimes whimsical cataloguing of the collection that breathes life into the displays.
It is impossible not to be intrigued by a hand-written label accompanying her green Jacqmar dress that states, 'Had a wonderful time in this, am ashamed to say - 1941!!', or to be moved by her observations about the fragility of garments, which she suggests contributes to their 'magic'.
Fashion and Fancy Dress taps into the popular fascination with the personal and particular as it relates to the 'upper' class and to celebrity lifestyle. But this is also a project at the forefront of dress curatorship that reflects a number of trends in museum interpretation and display.
The first of these trends is a focus on wardrobe-based collections and an interest in the role and motives of the collector. This can also be seen in Style & Splendour: Queen Maud of Norway's Wardrobe 1896-1938 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and in Material World at the Chertsey Museum, a temporary exhibition featuring clothes from the extensive collection of Olive Matthews (1887-1979).
The most significant theme of the Brighton exhibition is the analysis of garments as a repository of memory; the traces of past lives. This is apparent in the decision to break curatorial conventions and retain the bright pink lipstick stain on Anne's wedding dress of 1925 and to display her torn and damaged 'fan dress' of 1933.
The exhibition reflects a growing interest in the potential of objects to reveal their social biography. In the case of the Messel family, garments are treated as 'witnesses' to the different fashion codes and rituals required of each generation and acquire an almost metaphysical quality through contact with their previous owners.
Fashion and Fancy Dress will undoubtedly prove a hit with the public because of its winning combination of stunning garments and family chronicles set against a backdrop of social mobility and high society.
But this is more than a timely and artfully curated exhibition of family dress, it is a manifesto aimed at raising awareness of the cultural value of clothing.
In the accompanying catalogue, A Family of Fashion, The Messels: Six Generations of Dress, the curators make the case for the significance of a critical object-based approach to museum interpretation and historical study.
They argue that a close reading of artefacts, often missing in exhibitions, can help us 'touch the memories, emotions, aspirations, and sensitivities of their owners, characteristics which drive the world along'.
Nicky Ryan is a senior lecturer in visual culture and theory at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London
Project data
Cost: £130,000
Main funder: Esmeé Fairbairn Foundation
Curators: Amy de la Haye, Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson
Exhibition ends: 5 March 2006, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery; tours to Ulster Museum, Befast, 14 April-29 August 2006
