Style never fades: The Manchester Gallery of Costume Reopens
‘Fashion fades, only Style remains the same’ – Chanel
Just behind the neon billboards of the Curry Mile, South Manchester’s answer to the Las Vegas Strip, lies a reinvigorated national treasure. Hidden behind a bus stop and opposite a car wash, The Manchester Gallery of Costume is a bizarrely located cultural gem. The Museum lives in a beautifully restored 18th Century Manor House, which once majestically stood over rolling rural fields, and is now overlooked by a tower of council flats.
The gallery prides itself on owning the nation’s second largest collection of fashion and costume, second only to London’s V&A Museum. The long awaited first exhibition since reopening is entitiled ‘Suffragettes to Supermodels’ and boasts a carefully selected collection; including Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Dior, Balenciaga and Mary Quant. The exhibition chronologically charts the role of Women through fashion, from the ‘Votes for Women’ sashes of the 1910s to the Power-Dressing business suits of the 1980s. The exhibition is exciting and beautiful, but is also spectaculalry anti-climactic. The Gallery’s prized possession, a Givenchy evening gowned owned by Audrey Hepburn, is pushed oddly into the corner next to the Staff Room door and an unneccessarily large amount of space is taken up by one of the nation’s largest collections of buttons. For a gallery with extraordinary and unusual assets and a very limited amount of space, one uninteresting cabinet containing a purse from Accessorize and a Kimono from Topshop, seemed a particulalry wasteful use of space.
The gallery’s most exciting exhibits were the unexpected cultural rarities. In the restored 1765 Dining Room, installation artist Susie MacMurray has created an awe-inspiring sculpture of 100,000 adamantine dress pins. The adjacent room is filled with the perfectly preserved 18th Century clothes worn by Sir Thomas Worsley in the very rooms that now house the exhibits. Most impressively, the exhibition remains distinctly Mancunion; one room charts the change in fashion of 18th Century silk to 19th Century cotton, which fuelled and funded Manchester’s industrial growth. Local artist, Annie Harrison, has created an installation piece comprised of folded bed linen wrapping beautifully around the Grand Staircase of Platt Hall, designed to reflect the hunderds of workers who gave their lives to Manchester’s textile industry.
My advice; don’t neglect this Gallery because of its bizarre location! This is one of our city’s greatest cultural assets. The gallery’s archives are also open to view on prior request; an amazing resource for students and members of the public alike.
