Fashion Museum, Bath, 2017

The 2017 Elizabeth Hammond Conservation Grant was awarded to the Fashion Museum Bath for the conservation of three lace dresses displayed in the 2017 exhibition Lace in Fashion.

Report: Elly Summers, Exhibition Curator, Fashion Museum, Bath:

In January 2017 the three lace dresses were conserved by Julie Travis of Shephard Travis Textile Conservation Studio Ltd., and were mounted for display in the exhibition Lace in Fashion, which opened to the public on 4th February 2017 and will run until 1st January 2018. dresses being released in the run up to the opening of the exhibition. We are in the process of making these images available on line through on-line image library Bridgeman Images and in June 2018 they will also be available on the Bloomsbury Fashion Central website as part of the Berg Fashion Library.

We are thrilled to have been able to include these hitherto unseen lace dresses in the exhibition where they have made a stunning and striking contribution and have received a great deal of interest from visitors both to the museum and on line. Images of the three lace dresses have been used in Fashion Museum social media, with tweets of the The black machine-made Chantilly-style lace dress 1910 is the focus of one of the events in our Classes and Workshops programme for summer 2017 at the Fashion Museum; Penny Wheeler will be creating different lace effects using rigid heddle weaving in Weaving Lace Effects based on the lace design of this dress. The Queen Charlotte dress has received extensive media coverage, featuring in articles in both the Guardian and the Telegraph and was also the subject of a radio interview on Radio 4’s The Today Programme.

It has become a star object of the exhibition and we are currently in talks with Kew Palace to display the dress as part of their forthcomingexhibition to mark the bicentenary of Queen Charlotte’s death in 2018. We are so grateful to the Costume Society for the award of the Elizabeth Hammond Award, without which these beautiful and important dresses would still be in storage. The Three Lace Dresses have made such a fantastic contribution to the exhibition and it has been particularly exciting and a great privilege to be able to share the discovery of the Queen Charlotte dress. This dress may be the only surviving garment in the world belonging to Queen Charlotte, which, before conservation was a sad and crumpled object but has surfaced as one of the leading objects in the exhibition. We are looking forward to welcoming members of The Costume Society later this year for a curator-led tour of Lace in Fashion.

3 February 2017 Fashion Museum, Assembly Rooms,Bath: The opening night of the Fashion Museum’s Lace in Fashion exhibition offered the excitement of the first glimpses of the new exhibition (dodging round a lot of elbows) and even better, the first sight of the dresses which the Costume Society’s Elizabeth Hammond Award has helped conserve.

The caption boards read: Cream silk bobbin lace dress with train, about 1805 European bobbin lace, hand made net. This fine silk net and bobbin lace dress with a train, the height of fashion at the time, possibly belonged to Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. Gift of Mary Wells Conservation supported by The Costume Society/The Elizabeth Hammond Award

Cream chemical lace day dress (shown right) Louise Berges, New York about 1900 Chemical lace was pioneered in Germany and Switzerland in the 1880s and was used to imitate both bobbin and needle laces. Gift of Mrs Maconochie Conservation supported by The Costume Society/The Elizabeth Hammond Award