Pick Of the Bunch – A celebration of Floral Frocks!
With Rosemary Harden at the Fashion Museum, Bath

25th July 2007

As a man principally interested in costume as a means for appreciating social history I had not even considered attending this event until the week beforehand. But recalling Rosemary’s enthusiastic talk at the AGM (wearing an early 1960’s dress she had fallen in love with at a Glasgow vintage shop and bought herself and loaning to the Fashion Museum) we had to make the long journey from Kent. We were not disappointed, and we were also able to appreciate the recent “make over” the Museum of Costume had undergone to make it more relevant to the large numbers of uninitiated visitors Bath receives, without in any way diminishing its prime role as a source of information for those studying costume and textiles. One effective change is to abandon strictly chronological displays so that the clothing and accessories from different are displayed together, challenging one to think more about their relationship not only with their own period but in the development of fashion.

Entering the Assembly Rooms ballroom we were confronted by a very long white screen, on which videos showing women in everyday situations wearing cotton frocks set the scene for the fifty Floral Frocks strikingly displayed behind it. These were vividly brought to life by Rosemary who described many of the dresses, the textiles and patterns, the makers and the wearers in great detail; she also fielded questions stretching along from the late twenties to the seventies. Particularly noticeable was the flowering from the austere wartime cottons and synthetics into the full shirt-waisters exemplified by Horrockses who combined fantastic cotton prints with talented designers, detailed workmanship and high profile marketing to dominate the fifties. (Unfortunately their belts not always surviving!)

We saw how floral prints tended to become bolder on the zip up shift styles developing in the sixties when marketing increasingly targeted teenagers with labels such as Linzi Line. Yet the ever youthful Margot Fonteyn could wear a beautiful tiny waisted dress passed on to her housekeeper and thence to the Fashion Museum. Most striking were enormous pink convolvulus blooms and leaves on white by the French designer J.Tiktiner, which was in complete contrast to a Liberty silk evening dress by Jean Muir in a design of small flowers, leaves and blackberries providing her customary blue effect. Seeing these 50 floral frocks side by side brought home their importance in twentieth century fashion.

For the majority of readers who were unable to visit the exhibition itself, I can heartily recommend the beautifully illustrated hardback book “Floral Frocks” by Rosemary Harden and Dr. Jo Turney published by the Antique Collectors Club (www.antiquecollectorsclub.com) at £25. The exhibition itself was the outcome of a three year project by the Bath School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University involving considerable research, and all concerned are to be congratulated.

Chris Godfrey