The wonderful Fashion Museum, Bath is located inside the speldid Assembly Rooms (another Austen locale). Take a look at these!

The chandeliers are fantastic!

 

Now to the museum:

Fashion Museum, Bath

This museum came highly recommended and it did not disappoint.  I would like to note that all my photos look really wonky! This is due to the use of uplight labels in front of most of the objects.

 

See? I wasn’t joking.

Fabric is really light sensitive and decays much faster than almost any other museum object. So this museum was actually underground and had special reduced lighting to minimise fading.

 

 

This collection was brought together by a fashion enthusiast. They have quotes around of her wise and witty words although they were hard to read. I liked how no nonsense they were.  It added a really nice personal story to the chronology of european fashion.

 

There are also mini collections throughout which are kept together on display. A really smart thing to do if they want to attract more collections! For example these brooches:

 

 

My favourite part was the collections storage displays! They talked about the logisitics of keeping and caring for a collection like this. They also showed off period style pieces with text panels that used quotes from literature to highlight fashion of the time and how it was talked about. Mum and I spent the most time in there.

 

 

You could even see the storage boxes behind the pieces on display! It’s a really smart strategy of curation.

This dress was designed by Worth and is stunning in person. Sigh.

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Rating: 4/5

Pros: Amazing collection, great curation, good for all ages, cute activities, nice shop, amazing building, lovely cafe, plenty of seating

Cons: bad for photos, hard to read the quotes from Dorothy Ann Moore, awkward corner where the labels don’t match the object in front of them