Costume Society News Editor Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews the costumes on show at The National Maritime Museum’s Pirates exhibition.
Pirates has opened at London’s National Maritime Museum. The extensive exhibition explores our fascination with piracy and their changing depictions in popular culture from eighteenth century literature to 1980s fashion. Taking a global perspective and featuring piracy from the South China Sea to the coast of North Africa, the exhibition analyses the many myths associated with pirates and how these have been perpetuated through representations in childhood comics, film, as well as on stage and the runway, and compares the myths with the harsh realities of pirate life.
“Pirates have always been a source of fascination, particularly in Britain and they are always a very popular subject with our audiences. Today, they seem to be symbols of freedom, transgression and rebellion, as much as they are seen as violent criminals, and we wanted to explore how this image has been constructed. We realised that as a museum it had been a long time since we had done a large-scale exhibition or display that focused on pirates,” Sophie Nibbs, Curator of Exhibitions and Interpretation at Royal Museums Greenwich said.
Representations of swashbuckling adventurers are shown in film, theatre and fashion with approximately 230 objects on display including around 70 loans from the National Archives, the V&A and the BFI.
“We started with the question, ‘Why do we love pirates?’ and explored how popular culture has shaped a celebrated character with a strong visual identity. This led us to examine literature, with an early edition of Treasure Island; film, through poster loans from the BFI archive and a costume from Pirates of the Caribbean; and fashion, focusing on Vivienne Westwood’s 1981 Pirate collection and a Jean Paul Gaultier pirate motif shawl.
We wanted to contrast these representations with the reality of piracy, which is where Royal Museums Greenwich’s vast collection provided us with exciting opportunities to look at pirate life. This includes ship models, weapons, paintings and archive materials. With a subject as broad of pirates, it can be difficult to narrow down what you select for display, but we tried to focus on what was the most relevant, impactful and in some cases, fun!” Nibbs said.
The exhibition is spread across three key sections starting with ‘The Pirate Image’ which explores our enduring cultural fascination with pirates. Whether lovable comical characters such as Captain Pugwash, villains like Captain Hook and Long John Silver or anti-heroes like Captain Jack Sparrow, the pirate image is one of bearded outlaws dressed in seventeenth century fashion sporting a tricorn hat. Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, Treasure Island, popularised these images and many other myths such as the ubiquitous pirate’s pet parrot, that are explored, and frequently debunked, in the exhibition.
Although the key focus of the exhibition is not on fashion or costume, there are a range of costume highlights on show. “We were really keen to show theatrical costume, film costume and also fashion items, and were really pleased with the selection we got, which includes a replica of the costume worn in the first stage production of Peter Pan. They show how the realities of pirate dress have been combined with more theatrical representations to create a strong and highly-stylised pirate aesthetic that has persisted over many hundreds of years,” Nibbs said.
A particular costume highlight included in the exhibition is a Vivienne Westwood ensemble from her 1981 Pirate collection. The collection celebrated the rebellious reputation of pirates and was perfectly in tune with the New Romantic era sweeping fashion and music at the time. A copy of a May 1981 The Face magazine features Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin on the cover dressed as a Vivienne Westwood Pirate, and the exhibition features a 2008 Jean Paul Gaultier shawl adorned in pirate motifs such as skulls, bones and weapons.
A costume worn by Orlando Bloom as his Will Turner character in the first of the Pirates of the Caribbean films The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) film is on show and we learn how costume designer Penny Rose created the costumes for all five Pirates of the Caribbean films, drawing inspiration from illustrator Howard Pyle’s iconic colourful and romanticised illustrations.
Pirates on stage are explored throughout the exhibition. Notably, in the nineteenth century violent pirate villains appeared in action-packed stage productions, while the 1879 operetta The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan takes a more comical turn. An 1880 print of famed actor Richard Temple as the Pirate King is on show, next to a more recent 2015 costume design for an unrealised production by set and costume designer Lez Brotherston.
A replica Captain James Hook 2023 costume made by Ninya Mikhaila, who has published in the Costume Society’s journal Costume, is on show. This is a replica of the one worn by Gerald du Maurier in the original 1904 performances of Peter Pan.
“There are two objects I like that speak to each other. We have an 1886 edition of the first Treasure Island, which includes the map that Robert Louis Stevenson originally created with his nephew, that was the inspiration for the story. Treasure Island has been published numerous times, made into countless films and gone on to inspire so many other versions of the pirate story in popular culture. This is reflected in Anna Milke’s 1978 poster for the polish release of John Hough’s Treasure Island (1978) starring Orson Welles, on loan from the BFI. which has a really striking design and is an image I really love,” Nibbs said.
In this area, an interactive oversized book is printed with sections from Treasure Island which is a particular highlight of the exhibition’s design. The exhibition was designed by RMG Design Studio and DesignMap.
The next section, ‘Real Pirates’ delves into tales of specific pirates from the golden age of piracy from the 1680s to the 1720s, especially the influence of American illustrator and author Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates. Pyle produced images and stories for various magazines, and following his death, these were collected and published in 1921. His distinctive way of depicting pirates – borrowing elements from French fashion and stereotypical Romani dress – had an immediate influence on Hollywood.
The final section, ‘Global Pirates’ has a sample of an 1816 roller-printed textile, and a particular textile highlight is a momentous hanging captured in 1849 from a junk in the fleet of the Chinese pirate Shap Ng-tsai, who was active in the mid-nineteenth century. Originally thought to be a flag, it depicts Ziwei Dadi, a Cantonese deity, and is now believed to have been used in a shrine on board the ship dedicated to T’ien Hou, regarded as a calmer of storms and protectoress of marine commerce, fishermen and sailors. Shap Ng-tsai’s fleet of 27 junks was destroyed in a joint action by an Anglo-Chinese squadron under Captain John Charles Dalrymple Hay and Major General Hwáng on 20 October 1849. Shap Ng-tsai succeeded in escaping, although his ship and its flag were burned in this action.
As well as these costume and textile highlights, there are an excellent range of objects including pirate treasure, weaponry and artworks. And just for fun, the exhibition encourages you to learn to talk pirate!
The curation team from Royal Museums Greenwich included Dr Robert Blyth and Sophie Nibbs, and the Consultant Curator for National Maritime Museum Cornwall was Dr Eric Kentley.
The exhibition runs until 4th January 2026.
