V&A and Met collection searches

I wanted to make sure you are all aware of the immense store of costume (and other research) available from The Victoria and Albert Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection websites. I myself spend hours searching and saving costume photos.

source

 V&A Collections website
I prefer the search format of the V&A's site. If you click on "more search options" a group of fields will appear that help you narrow down your search quite nicely. I would search say "dress" from 1910-1919 to get the dresses of the 1910s. I also always click "only records with images" because it does me no good to see 25 pages of "no image available". The results will usually span a larger time period than you typed in as you can see. Because the V&A has an extensive Eastern clothing collection a lot of articles from outside of Europe will also appear, but I don't mind this.

What I really love about the V&A collection database is the descriptions of the articles and the fact that most have multiple views of the garment that you can enlarge and save. Let's take this beautiful little day dress that I may or may not be in love with and use in a show later in my career...

V&A page

The dress' page as 18 views which is wonderful! Not all garments have this many, but lots do, and later garments might even have accompanying photographs of the owner wearing them. Reading the "Summary" of the garments usually will either describe the garment in detail and/or the person who donated and/or wore it, giving a lovely glimpse into personal and specific history. I especially love the summaries for the wedding dresses (which are easily found by searching "wedding dress").

Fun fact, the "museum number" or accession number is the number that tells the museum what they specifically want to know by looking at it. In most cases it includes numbered or lettered codes that usually tell what department it's kept in or the category of item if you have a collection of only something like clothes, the donor, and the year in which it was donated. There is no standard order or way all museum's use, but once you know the basics you can pretty much guess what the museum/accession numbers mean.  For example, this day dress' museum number is T.17-1960. From its website we can see that "T" is for the Textile and Fashion Collection, that 1960 is the year it was donated and by reading the summary we could guess that 17 is the number assigned to Heather Firbank (her credit line).  Fun? I think so...

source

Now, the Met also has a great costume collection, they have a huge gala for it every year that celebrities and fashion world giants attend and the pictures always end up in Vogue.  Their collections search site I do not like as much as the V&A's, or much at all. It used to be much more like the V&A's, but has since changed to its current incarnation, much to my chagrin.

You still type in "dress" to get dresses. As you can see the results are displayed nicely, but narrowing down the results is obnoxious. Where we could search within any amount of time at the V&A, the Met restricts us to what categories they think we would like. Under "Who" it gives us possible designers, which is fine if we have one specifically in mind. I usually don't use this tab. "What" can help sometimes, I usually choose "Costume" because the other options don't tend to make sense if I just want dresses from a certain time. "Where" is actually nice because when you type "Europe" into "Place of origin" on the V&A site nothing comes up, bc I assume they want something more like "England". On the Met site clicking "Europe" under "Where" is rather helpful and narrows down the results very nicely, however you can't choose say "Europe" and "North and Central America". The tab that really gets my goat is "When" because it only offers centuries. An ENTIRE CENTURY?! Good grief, that's efficient. Blerg. The "In The Museum" tab give you options of different categories of the museum collections and in some searches give you the option of some the Met's off-campus locales. I suppose if you have a very specific item in mind that you'd like to find the Met would help you get there very easily, but for as a research tool it gets rather cumbersome.

zoom in on this one!

The garment descriptions can be very good, but some are almost nonexistant. The photography is much more consistent than the V&A and the garment photo is very large to begin with and zoom is available which is very nice, but not as many views are offered. When we compare numbers The Met has 4,329 result for "dress" from 1900-present with pictures while the V&A has only 742 under the same search parameters. If we take out the pictures only clause the V&A has 1065 results, the Met still has 4,329. I'm pretty sure this means the Met has a better online collection, but I sure wish it was easier to use!

Well, whether or not this was an interesting or a fun entry for you to read, I had fun writing it!

Project: V&A Lucile 1910s dress

Do you remember this little number that I'm in LOVE with?

Well, on 11 November Cecile Pelous (page 6), the former first draper at Dior during the best Galliano years, came back to BYU for her third year. She stops by because she's friends with one of my costume professors and she works with students who bring in sketches of what they want to drape. In general if you bring in a really interesting sketch (or in my case my soulmate dress) she'll basically drape it for you. With this dress she had a lot fun (I hope) figuring out the bodice. She went on about how you should really drape in jersey for a dress like this, but it worked out. I learned a lot from watching her and she would have us pin and mark when she went to help other students.

starting with the skirt

the bodice and "sash" are in one piece, the CF really takes a drastic turn to make this happen

Sadly we had to drape on a size bigger than myself because that's the only form we have an arm for.

I did drape the back skirt, so hard, I know.

absolutely every detail needs to be marked bc it's a big fat mess once you take it off the form

DEV is French for CF (center front)

so gratifying and artsy

I have taken the muslin off the form and done the pattern for the bodice and sleeve. It is still a big fat mess. I'm anticipating needing to redrape once the general shape is cut out. I'll post another entry about patterning. I also just got back from the L.A. area and purchased two jerseys from Michael Levine's to do a "mock up" and a final dress. I figure I'll make a dress from the pattern I get then see about scaling it down for my size. Right now I'm just going to make a cocktail length dress bc everything is on the bias and I'm anticipating needing 8-10 yds just for a short dress. Plus, I'm going to struggle to find an occasion to wear it short, where would I ever wear it long? My wedding? yes, but that's awhile off still.

oh 1910s, how I love thee aka thanks for the wedding dress idea

When I tell people I sew, and that I design, and that I like to design wedding dresses and plan to sew my own wedding dress most assume I already know what it's going to look like. False. A wedding dress depends on groom, venue, season etc and since I have none of these things I have very little idea what my wedding dress is going to look like, but I recently found a dress that is definitely on the short list.

I give you this silk crepe by Lucile circa 1910-12. It's currently in storage at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ug, I just love it. Of course I'd make it in an ivory or ecru. It could also work for an evening gown in dark teal or merlot. In case you are having trouble imagining it as a wedding dress, here is a rendering I did of someone with my body type and hair in the dress with the groom in a super nice three piece that he can wear later :)

It'd work so great for a fall or winter wedding and it meets all the Mormon modesty standards. You just can't beat extant dresses for modest ingenuity. It's 10x harder to design a pretty dress with sleeves, anyone can design something strapless. Stretch yourself people!

Anyway, there you go.