Let’s Get Digital: Welcome to the Fashion and Textile Museum Blog!

Although our building is currently closed, it is extremely important to us that we continue to share the joys of fashion and textiles with you all during these uncertain times. Museums around the world have been working incredibly hard, developing online content to ensure as many people as possible can access arts and culture from their homes. The Fashion and Textile Museum is no exception. Our small but dedicated team has …

Exhibition Archives: Riviera Style

Bathing Beauties: 1895 - 1919 As bathing became a recreational pastime in the mid-nineteenth century so specialised clothing was developed largely to preserve the wearer's modesty. Women were required to wear a bathing dress that completely covered the body: bloomers, an over-dress, stockings, headgear and boots. Initially beaches operated segregation of the sexes and men …

Botanical Inks: Nettle Dye Tutorial

In 2017, Babs Behan joined us at the Fashion and Textile Museum for a workshop teaching the basics of one of the oldest types of printmaking, as part of that year's Festival of Textiles. The following year she published her book, Botanical Inks, and we've enjoyed keeping up with her and her work ever since. …

Download: Draw Like a Designer 2

How to Draw Like a Fashion Designer is the best-selling book by Fashion and Textile Museum Curator and Head of Exhibitions, Dennis Nothdruft. This book also forms the basis of our popular workshop, Draw Like a Designer. While our workshops are currently postponed, we want budding designers to continue feeling inspired and to keep creating! …

Designers Guild: SS20 Inspirations

Designers Guild has always maintained its own interior design department, based at its stores in Chelsea and Marylebone. Each project responds to the requirements of an individual client and the architectural setting, whether in London, Paris, Manhattan or Tuscany. The Guild look can be found in a mews cottage or a rooftop pied-à-terre, or in period homes and country villas. Tricia Guild’s own homes have often been the first place for experimentation with …

Exhibition Archives: Missoni Art Colour

For Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, colour has always been at the very core of their design process and it has been the weave of their knits that has strongly defined both the form and function of their unique clothes. The Missoni’s approach to design is extremely tactile and their mixing of different colours, patterns and …

Volunteer Voices: Make Do and Mend

The combined forces of a global pandemic and the on-going climate change crisis have evoked a rush of wartime metaphors. There are many parallels to draw from and one that seems as relevant today is as it was during WWII is a small manifesto, printed for every household, calling ‘to make clothes last longer’. By …

Couture Inside Out: Chanel

One of our most popular and long-running workshops is Couture Inside Out. This workshop is the rare opportunity to join the Museum’s exhibitions team to view the ins and outs of couture construction; to take an up-close and intimate look at selected garments from the Fashion and Textile Museum Collection. While we can’t bring this …

Exhibition Archives: Artist Textiles Picasso to Warhol

Introduction: Curtain Up From the English artist, political theorist and textile designer William Morris onwards, many artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to make their work less elitist and more relevant to the lives of ordinary people. Like Morris, they came to see the concept of design as an appropriate way …

Isolation Inspiration: Sarah Campbell

In this latest installation of our Isolation Inspiration series we caught up with textile designer, master of pattern and colour and long-standing Fashion and Textile Museum friend and tutor, Sarah Campbell. Sarah is always busy creating collaborative commercial designs and private commissions, speaking, teaching, mentoring, authoring her own blog and maintaining her online shop. We …

Download: Colour Your Own NHS Uniforms

Earlier this week we discussed NHS uniforms through the 20th century. As we turn out each week to clap for carers and as rainbows and words of thanks adorn homes across the country, many of us feel superhero outfits would be more fitting ensembles for NHS workers than scrubs. With this in mind, we've created …