One of the benefits of being home for the Easter holidays is being able to do things with my Mum. While the overlap of our interests is small we still manage to find things today, and yesterday I chose to see a collection of Vivienne Westwood's work which is being displayed at the English Heritage site of Danson House, only a 10 minute walk from my house.
The majority of the items are on loan from the V&A. If you're not familiar with the way museums work, the collections which you see on display are often only a tiny fraction of what is held, restored and maintained by them. So while the Victoria and Albert does have a case of Westwood's designs on show in the fashion and costume room on permanent display, they will have many more pieces of hers in storage, which is where these items will have come from.
The collection shown here was wonderful. I've already studied Westwood enough times to be familiar with her work, but I've never seen any of it up close as this show allowed me to. There were a good selection of pieces, from the iconic Sex Pistols 70's punk Seditionaries, through T-Shirts and corsets to huge gowns. Being a primarily local exhibition space meant that the traffic they were expecting through was fairly small, so a number of items were just out in the room standing on plinths rather than behind perspex. This allowed me to get up close and personal, seeing details which otherwise would have been lost.
The information boards they had out were surprisingly un-wooly, containing quotes from Westwood about each piece about her inspirations, why the pieces were successful and so on. I also appreciated the graphic way in which these boards were presented. If I had one criticism it would be the female bias; I feel as though there could have been more menswear, which is a common issue in fashion exhibitions.
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| How cool is this candle holder? |
The setting of the exhibition in Danson House was also been inspiring, having been restored to its original state in the mid 1800's from old records. No, it's hardly Versailles, but then it's not meant to be. Seeing how wealthy non-aristocrats lived is quite a rare thing, often money is only put into the restoration of stately manors which are inhabited by distant relations of the royal family, so to see the setting in which the wealthy merchants lived was very interesting.
Another lure is that Danson is only a 5 minute walk away from the Red House of William Morris, so you could give the trip a double purpose. I would highly recommend making the trip to see this if you live in the South East, it's open until October 2015, and especially as a fashion student it's such an important part of British Fashion History that you can't afford not to go.
Tickets are £8 or £6 concessions (incl. students with valid student card)
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