The working life of Museum of London

That was the general reaction when we tried out one of the dress objects for the pleasure garden display last week. The object is a so-called ‘skeleton suit’ from the late 1780s.

In 1839 Charles Dickens remembered the skeleton suit as ‘an ingenious contrivance for displaying the full symmetry of a boy’s figure, by fastening him into a very tight jacket, with an ornamental row of buttons over each shoulder, and then buttoning his trousers over it, so as to give his legs the appearance of being hooked on, just under the armpits.’

Well, our suit is not quite like that, but you can see his points about the buttons. If you look closely, you can see a boy wearing such a suit on the right of this painting. Our suit is made from printed cotton, which has now much faded, but originally might have looked a little bit like denim.

Before I go on, I should introduce myself. My name is Beatrice and I am one of two curators responsible for the Museum’s large fashion collection. For the last two years we have been working on preparing the 70 outfits and more than 150 accessories that will go on display in our new galleries. Most will be displayed on ‘cut-outs’ (more about that some other time) but for the pleasure garden we have decided to use full-figure mannequins.

Pleasure Gardens were a bit like amusement grounds today, and were particularly popular in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most famous gardens in London were Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

We will show 16 outfits from the 1740s to the 1840s in two cases in the new display. Of course you would never have seen them together originally, but we wanted to highlight particular gems from our collection. The main outfits, suits and dresses, will be original and so will be many of the accessories. To help us put together the right objects we invented a character for each figure. Our little boy is the three-year old Charles Winter, who has come to the gardens with his sister and father, Captain Winter.  Charles is very excited, has even suffered his hair to be curled because the gardens are so fun but is keen to get rid of his starched collar.

Speaking of which, we did not have an appropriate shirt for Charles in the collection, so we asked Amy, who is studying Costume Interpretation at Wimbledon School of Art to make us one. That’s what you see in the photo. It works perfectly and Charles will look even cuter once he is wearing his read shoes. In case you are wondering why he has a plastic bag over his head, we are worried the paint will scratch so are protecting it until installation.

Unfortunately we found that Charles’ arms were a little short (maybe not, what do you think?) so they have now gone back our mannequin makers for a quick fix. I will show you pictures of the finished Charles in a few weeks and I will write about some of the other figures we are working on.