Past Events

Due to current restrictions, this event will now be a Zoom talk by Joe Knapper of fxbx films. He will talk about how they turn film designers' ideas into wearable costumes.

We were hoping to welcome you a talk by Connie Gray from Gray M.C.A. entitled "20th Century Fashion Illustration: A Genre Rediscovered”. However following advice on the current COVID situation it is with great regret that, yet again, we have had to cancel this event.

2019 is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria. Her birth heralded in a period of rapid change. Industrialisation and the expansion of Empire brought wealth, a growth in democracy and the expansion of the middle class affecting dress and fashion, and lace, that indicator of status and wealth, could now be made by machine and so was within the reach of many.

Speaker: Rosemary Harden

The Fashion Museum in Bath is custodian of one of the best collections of gloves in the world and over the last two years Rosemary Harden, curator of the museum, has worked with the Worshipful Company of Glovers of London to bring together this precious collection under one roof.

Preceded by mulled wine and mince pies!

Please note the change of venue

The freedom we have in the clothes we wear today really only came to fruition in the 1960s but the foundations, excuse the pun, were laid during the Victorian era. Born in 1819 and coming to the throne in 1837, as an cossetted eighteen year old, Victoria gave her name to a period which was complex and paradoxical. Wealth, power and innovation brought rapid change, which many women embraced, but change brings reaction and it took another century to really break free.

Please note the change of date; it was the 10th September and is now the 17th.

A get-yourself-there visit to Dents in Warminster with tour.

Please note that after the cancellation of the February AGM event, we will be holding a brief AGM during this study day. It will be in two parts: the first will be at the start of the day when the bulk of the AGM business will take place. The second part, immediately after lunch, will be the election of officers.

The history and meaning of colour is a fascinating one. Did you know that blue is the most common colour, think of all those blue jeans, It also has a calming effect and fashion consultants recommend wearing blue when going for an interview. It apparently symbolises loyalty and may be why it is used in so many uniforms.

What the English do well is the celebration of their history through the ritual surrounding their monarchy and this of course entails ‘dressing up’.

Shaun McCormack as a member of the Queen’s Bodyguard will tell us about this role, which will include the creation, recruitment, strength and state duties of The Guard but most importantly the state dress. He will bring along his uniform for close inspection and perhaps we can persuade him to put it on.

Today women’s fashionable clothing comes in all shapes, colours and sizes and even age doesn’t necessarily become a restraining factor, but it is not so easy for men. Despite the kilt and the sarong, men-in-skirts has not really caught on.

Victorian men in their three-piece suits set a trend of dullness and uniformity but it was not always so.

The current exhibition tells the story of two Killerton women who were on opposing sides of the Suffragette Movement and shows, how during the campaign from 1866 until 1928, women’s fashion changed and was exploited by the supporters of women’s suffrage.

Shelley Tobin, the curator, will tell us how the exhibition evolved and the history of the costume collection of Paulise de Bush.

Dr. Jill Sullivan, acting Assistant Keeper, will give us a conducted tour for one and a half hours starting in the exhibition spaces where she will tell us about the Theatre Collection history and the collections generally. There is a limited amount of display space and unfortunately the majority of costumes are stored off site, which is not available for tours. However, there will be a small exhibition on Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh showing some of his costumes and items belonging to Leigh. We will then tour the store-rooms and finish in the library/reading room where we will have the opportunity to sit down and look in details at the work of costume designers such as Julia Trevelyan Oman, David Walker, Deirdre Clancy, Alan Tagg and others. Some of you may remember Deirdre Clancy who holds Oscar and BAFTA awards for costume design and came to talk to us about her work and the history of theatre costume at the 2016 AGM.

By the time of the WECS Christmas Meeting the 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen will have already been celebrated or perhaps a better word is commemorated by her millions of fans, as she died at the very young age of 41. The places where she lived and died currently have numerous events about her work, as well as The Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library.

Fashionable dress did not feature much in her writing except where it served to enhance a character but she frequently wrote to her sister Cassandra about the latest fashions she saw in Bath or London. Neither did she include much about the politics of the day although her family were caught up in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and she lived through some dramatic times with fashionable dress also undergoing some dramatic changes.

Sarah Jane will take us through these revolutionary times when for a short period London replaced Paris as the centre of the fashionable world with designs inspired by classical democracy.

Sarah Jane Downing is a freelance writer with a special interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has written a number of books for the Shires Library as well as contributing to national magazines and newspapers.

Why not come in costume and really enter into the spirit of the age?

Clothing has the power to speak and convey meaning and never was this more visible than in the seventeenth century.

Join WECS for a get-yourself-there visit to the American Museum in Bath. This year’s special exhibition comes directly from The Fashion & Textiles Museum in London with over 100 fashionable objects from the 1920s, including flapper dresses, couture and ready-to-wear.

This get-yourself-there visit will include a guided tour of the costume collection held the museum. Each tour is limited to 7 people and, if required, they will do two tours on this date.
Note that this visit is a repeat of the one organised for Thursday 18th May.

This get-yourself-there visit will include a guided tour of the costume collection held the museum. Each tour is limited to 7 people and, if required, they will do two tours on this date.
Note that a second visit has been organised for Thursday 15th June.

Do you follow fashion? We probably all do in one way or another as our dress changes according to social norms and the image we want to present to the world. But, for a long time being fashion conscience was the privilege of an elite, usually very rich, sending visual messages to the world of their social position. In a world without printing ideas spread, through dolls dressed in miniature versions of the latest fashions, and travel brought ideas from different cultures. With printed images and text and an expanding reading public fashion communication flourished and in the early eighteenth century the emergence of the aristocratic society magazines presented changes in style, taste and models of female beauty. Early publications, although not magazines as we now know them today such as Nikolaus von Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion and Rudolph Ackermann’s Ackermann’s Repository contain exquisite hand-coloured fashion plates which are collector items in their own right.

WECS is extremely fortunate to have one of the best costume museums with a world-class collection on its doorstep. The museum staff has been very supportive of the society and is very generous in sharing their knowledge and expertise. The collection of over 100,000 objects means that some objects get little exposure so it is exciting when in the process of caring for the collection beautiful pieces are revealed.

For the WECS Christmas meeting this year we continue the theme of consuming fashion but now we move to Paris and slightly upmarket.

Perhaps structure and artifice is what fashionable dress is all about. Striving to make a statement, to be different or to be beautiful makes both men and women go to enormous lengths. A corset or a crinoline can give you a different silhouette but it is in the face and hair where we look to define someone as beautiful. An alabaster skin framed by and exquisite lace collar or a glorious head of hair topped with an eye-catching hat. Our speakers for this study day will explore how the face and head have been enhanced to create the illusion of beauty as defined by the fashions of the day.

A get yourself there visit to Wells for a look at the embroideries in the Cathedral followed by a tour of the embroidery exhibition “The Ornate, The Beautiful”.

Join WECS for a “get yourself there” visit to these two museums in Dorset.

Details of how to get there and the location of pay and display car parking will be sent on booking.

There is often some confusion between fabrics and fibres. Cotton, wool, silk and linen are classified as natural fibres and come from an animal or vegetable source, whilst nylon, polyester, acrylic, elastomeric and many others are artificially created starting from a chemical reaction of petroleum sourced chemicals, and are called synthetic fibres. Other synthetic fibres, artificially made from naturally occurring substances like cellulose and protein are called regenerated fibres and these include acetate, triacetate and casein.

We have so many talented people who have made their home in the west of England and it is always wonderful to discover someone new.

The nineteenth century brought a huge change to the way we bought our clothes and accessories from markets to Bazaars to Emporiums to Department Stores which we still have today.

The use of animal products in dress and costume is an enormous subject which can be studied from many different viewpoints. There is probably no culture that has not used skins and feathers for practical reasons or for decorative purposes. Our four speakers approach the subject from very different angles according to their specialism whether conservation, social hierarchy, photographic history or historical interpretation.

Our second ‘get-yourself-there’ visit to Pittards leather factory in Yeovil to see how they select, prepare and treat skins for use in the garment, luggage and other industries.

The tour will last approximately 75 minutes starting at 10.30 a.m. Each tour is limited to 10 places as this is a working factory and places will be located on a ‘first come’ basis for members only.

As a follow-on to our trip to Manchester in 2013, a residential visit to Leeds has been organised visiting various costume and textile collections in the area. Again this will be a “get-yourself-there” trip, staying at The Met Hotel (also known as the Metropole) in the heart of the city.

A ‘get-yourself-there’ trip has been arranged to visit Pittards leather factory in Yeovil to see how they select, prepare and treat skins for use in the garment, luggage and other industries.

The tour will last approximately 75 minutes starting at 10.30 a.m. Each tour is limited to 10 places as this is a working factory and places will be located on a ‘first come’ basis for members only.

The Georges are coming!

2014 is the three hundredth anniversary of the Hanoverian Dynasty. George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover was crowned King George I in 1714 and by 1830 Great Britain had had four kings named George. A little late in catching up with the celebrations WECS will look at the dress of this astonishing period of British history - from pannier to hoop, from breeches to pantaloons.

First we have the business of the West of England Costume Society’s AGM to get out of the way. The record for this is 25 minutes.

Then the fun bit with Iain R Web, author and award winning fashion journalist...
Although to many of us the 1980s do not seem to fall into the category of ‘fashion history’, looking back it was a very distinctive period. The magazine Blitz, a fashion and pop culture magazine, founded in 1980 by university students Carey Labovitch and Simon Tesler was one of a trio of British “style” magazines which established a broad following internationally. It was very much a magazine of its time and the recent exhibition at the V&A From Club to Catwalk showed the influence club culture (which the magazine drew on) exerted on the fashion scene.

Jonathan Faiers, who was to have given a talk entitled 'Tartan: The textile that changed the world', is unable to do so. Instead WECS is privileged to have such a prestigious fashion journalist to talk to us and we are so grateful for his stepping in at such short notice.

Unfortunately Dr Diane Waller is unable to join us for our Christmas meeting this year so the talk on the Textiles of the Balkans will be postponed.

WECS is frequently discovering the talent that it has within its membership and it is wonderful to welcome Judy Grant, a volunteer at the American Museum, who has researched American textiles and costume over a number of years. We tend to have an image of ‘settler dress’ that is gleaned from the movies or the iconic musicals such as ‘Oklahoma’ but how much different was it from European dress? Was there a lot of ‘recycling’ and just how connected was the ‘New World’ with the old? These are just some of the questions Judy may be able to answer as she gives us the inside story on the costume collection at the American Museum.

Inspired by the review of the Kaffe Fassett Exhibition in the last issue of WECS Wardrobe, this last minute, get-yourself-there visit will be an opportunity to see the exhibition without the crowds and also get up close to those wonderful quilts.

Be prepared to be absorbed into a world of colour and inspired to start a new knitting or stitching project.