In The Fashion Store
In the basement of the Museum is a long white painted corridor. Behind what I remember as reinforced steel doors with their foundry’s name embossed on them, are a series of store rooms.
Inside the fashion store are some roller rack shelving units like those you now find in libraries and archives. Turning the wheel mechanism to part the stacks reveals full hangers and boxes one atop another. In the fashion store, as elsewhere in the Museum, there is that intriguing balance between objects of vernacular taste and artefacts that are seen to fall within the perimeters of high culture. Elephant collar Paisley shirts in limp synthetic fabrics of harsh hues hang not so very far away from the most delicate dresses of many centuries agoThe more precious items are contained in boxes and wrapped in tissue paper. It takes up to three weeks for garments to be readied to go into the stores, each item undergoing two processes of freezing to catch the moths.
I watched the Curator of Fashion, Martin Pell, and one of his colleague’s from Brighton University unwrapping a ‘sackback’ pleated court dress that had been loaned from another museum. Having put a neutral coloured protective cloth on a mannequin, the dress was lowered down over the dummy to give a sense of how the fabric would once have hung on a breathing body. As I leaned in to peer closely, I was able to see the incredible intricacy with which the silk had been brocaded and with which the finest of sprays of hooped silver had been dusted over the dress.
As I tried to find things to record, other than the roller rack shelves and the almost silent fabric steamer, Martin talked about the role of chintz in the industrial revolution, clothes and cloth in Empire and the fate of potentially historic garments that found themselves demoted to the costume chests of public school Drama Societies. As these stories unfolded, I realised again that with more time you could weave incredibly rich narratives around individual objects.
I did get some nice rustling of brocade and crinkling of tissue paper and, although I hadn’t been looking for it, some interesting conversation that might well work as part of the track in the Fashion and Style ‘hotspot’.
Throughout, of course, a prominent air conditioning unit hummed and grinded its time away.


