Spring 2012 - Dress and Textile Specialists

was only in response to creating the Behind the Scenes gallery that we were able to remove all of the
19 th century shoes, make space and re-think the organisation of the store.
Shoes are a popular accessory to view at the Study Facilities and so we wanted to devise a quick,
easy way to organise and store them, without compromising the objects. Our shoes are stored, by
and large, on shoe trays on dexion shelving in chronological order. To make it easy to access the
shelves, our volunteer group from the West of England Costume Society, devised a series of Roman
blinds to protect the shoes from dust and light. The blinds have been a huge success and have
created a store environment that we now feel happy to show to our visitors.
As a result we are currently planning a different type of open access initiative for 2013, and will offer
pre-booked ‘store tours’ to small groups of people from next summer. The 45 minute tours will be
conducted by ourselves and Rosemary and will take a ‘back stairs’ route through our principle
storage area on the second floor level of the Assembly Rooms. We are in the planning stages of this
initiative at the moment and are discussing whether to timetable the tours as regular ‘Back Stairs
Tours’, or alternatively bill them as occasional ‘Pop-Up Tours’.
A possibility of a different type of personalised ‘Pop-Up Tour presented itself recently. A menswear
student from the Royal College of Art (mentored by Iain R. Webb, in his role as Professor at the
college) visited to look at examples of menswear. Rather than select pieces for him and take them to
the Study Facilities for study, the student spent the afternoon, with Iain in attendance in the
menswear store, which he found really inspiring. Following on from this, we would like to investigate
this ‘Professor’s Pick’ means of access for individual fashion and design students a little further in the
future.
Fashion Museum Study Facilities
The Fashion Museum is passionate about increasing access to its stored collections. We have a
positive attitude to opening up and making the collections available. The Study Facilities is the
principle form of access to the collection, for those pieces that are not on display in the galleries or
out on loan for special exhibition to other Accredited museums. We welcome everybody who wants
to learn more about objects in the museum collection by encouraging enquirers to book one of our
study tables available on a Thursday or Friday each week. Visitors typically book a two hour selfdirected
study appointment and then have the opportunity to examine objects from the stores at
close quarters and to browse our reference library of specialist fashion history texts and journals.
Visitors to the Study Facilities range from groups, for example the Regency period enthusiasts, who
visit each year as part of the Jane Austen Festival held in Bath, to individuals, including students,
fashion designers, re-enactors, historians, novelists, donors - the list goes on! Nobody is excluded –
and no letters of recommendation or references are required - whatever people’s interest, we will
accommodate them and pull a selection of pieces from the stores for them to examine. Although we
have no on-line catalogue for visitors to search, in practice, the issue of “how will I know what
you’ve got in the collection so I know what to request” does not present a problem. We encourage
people to talk to us and set up a dialogue with the museum about their interests and their research.
The Study Facilities were commended in Collections for People, a report published in 2008 by
University College London as a particular strength of the Museum and we were cited as one of the
top 36 museums in the UK who give access to collections not on display. The report considered
stored collections as a public resource and called for their more effective use, and this is something
that we have been keen to explore further as we review our storage needs and plan our exhibitions.
We recognise that the Fashion Museum collection is a public resource and we have an obligation to
make it publicly available
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