Establishing Dress History

This book, the sister publication toThe Study of Dress History, is the first to detail the history of the collection, exhibition and museum interpretation of dress of all kinds. It examines the earliest European developments in dress history from the mid sixteenth century onwards, and explains the interest in dress collection and display both privately and in museums in Britain, France, the USA and Eastern Europe. Lou Taylor argues that only when women were permitted to be curators of dress within museums did the collection of all kinds of dress find its proper place in our museums of decorative arts, social history and ethnography. Chapters cover the current debates related to dress collecting in such institutions, including discussion of the return of sacred objects, the place of contemporary fashion within museums and issues of the commodification of collections and displays.