Two costumes from Suffragette are on display at The Design Museum.
The exhibition, Women, Fashion Power, opens tomorrow.
I popped in earlier to finish dressing the stands and was pleased to see that our costumes are standing beside an authentic suffragette's bodice which belongs to Meg Andrews.
It's a dead good exhibition, well worth a visit.

An Amazing Photogrpahic Discovery - Spitalfields Life.

When I emerge blinking into the sunlight on the other side of this intense and busy patch which I am currently deep down inside, I will do a proper post about Silk and Rope Vintage House and while I'm at it I will take some decent, in-focus photographs.
Enrique and Estefi's collection is fantastic. They are always a pleasure to hook up with and easy to do business with, on top of that the collection is inspiring and well cared for.
As soon as they launch their (coming soon) website I will attach details, until then it's Spitalfields on Thursday mornings.

I found these early 20th century mens shoes in Angels just before Christmas.

It was hard to capture the exaggerated shapes clearly in a photo but the full toecap is similar to the Bulldog Toes I blogged about previously and a point on the outside edge of the welt is something I've not seen before.
The shoes are tiny, maybe that's why they were able to survive in such perfect condition,

Some great turn of the last century mugshots from Tyne and Wear police archives.
Found here, on Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse's Flickr page.

The Antique and Vintage Dress Gallery

I love the details on this boating dress from The Antique and Vintage Dress Gallery.
I especially like antique clothing galleries which keep sold items on display, always a good source of reference material.

Found Photographs

I have a collection of workwear and theatrical photographs I've picked up over the years in junk shops and markets, I thought I'd start sharing them.

The top picture is a postcard dated 1st Feb 1908, it reads -
'The group on the obverse played 'The Bobby's Courtship'. The gentleman with the beard apologizes for not weariing shoes.'
So that one isn't workwear but costume - a double whammy.

The girls at the bottom are munitions factory workers, printed in Coventry it reads -
'From your sister Florrie, to Gladys.'

Stories

For me, this is the job in a visual nutshell.
Stories of a life, character, episode or event, shown in a garment.

Costume Designers, story tellers in their own right, give an audience clues to where a person comes from geographically, the period they inhabit, their history, class, profession, perhaps their emotional state and where they may be heading to or from at the moment we see them, through their clothing.

The garments they wear hold and exhibit tales through wear and tear and crisp newness alike. Mostly I love the wear and tear.

This is an original skirt, C1900, see the tiny hand stitching behind the repair, the fading and the fraying.
The skills of a good Breaking Down Artist are never to be underestimated, replicating these stories is a highly skilled technique.