The Victoria and Albert Museum

At the Victoria and Albert Museum, I noticed the most evident elements of identity as Tradition, Power and Class.
      Tradition because of London's influence on fashion throughout time, evident in the several rooms of fabric patterns and clothing displays.
One thing I learned was that Mary Quant created the mini dress! Well, "famed for popularizing, if not inventing, the mini skirt", around the 1950's.  (www.vam.ac.uk)
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   Power and class mostly seen in earlier fashions, because being able to have multiple yards of fabric in your dress meant you were quite wealthy.  Also, the more affluent people are the ones that kept with the fashion and trends of the time, as well as started new ones.  The fashions of the time required being wealthy enough to purchase the items and/or have them created for you.  As you can see with the dresses on the right, usually the fashions for women required rather a lot of material and therefore required the wearer to be wealthy enough to afford this material.  Power is evident because people such as the queen usually dictated how the rest of the people could dress; you couldn't look better than the queen or be more embellished than her.

This is "The Great Bed of Ware"!! Woo hoo!! Just seeing this enormous bed made me really miss by bed at home.  I think one of the top things I miss that isn't a living, breathing thing is a real bed!!! waah.  Anyway, we learned that back in the times--this bed dates back to 1596 (atleast)-- what you had in your home to show off your wealth was your bed!  An inn supposedly made it to attract customers and became famous. So famous, in fact, that Shakespeare actually refers to the bed in his play Twelfth Night in 1601.  A direct quote from the plaque next to the bed will be able to explain better: "Beds were usually the most valuable items recorded in domestic inventories, with elaborate textile hangings in wealthier households..."

      Connecting the fashion to Class and Power even further, a great examples is swords as fashionable accessories.  The ornament and how elaborately decorated the sword was showed the wealth and class of the wearer. 

    What was really cool was the blown glass chandelier that happened to be hanging at the entrance of the museum, a Dave Chihuly!  This was so random and cool to me because Dave Chihuly is an American glass sculptor and I have been to one of his shows at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix! Small world, OR the importance of the guy was grossly underestimated by muah.

     Below are some more photos to show the extent of how London has influence fashion , which is likely to a further extent than you have realized. I know that was the case for me.  I thought this museum was very cool because of all the fashions displayed throughout the past several decades and centuries. 

Saucy...




Adios!

-Abby