A Museum of Uncollected Things

Context & Challenge
At a point when what belongs in museum fashion collections is increasingly scrutinised and debated, this project explores not what these collections contain, but what is absent from them: what is missing, lost, or was never acquired.
Dress is central to human experience, a medium through which individual and collective identities and histories are constructed and performed. Thus, museum clothing collections are sites through which multiple histories are communicated and defined. Yet these collections are only ever partial reflections of dress history; shaped by past collecting policies often predicated upon hegemonic and Eurocentric definitions of fashion, and changing understandings of what merits preservation. Thus, historic clothing collections are rarely reflective of the communities they now serve; a dissonance which can reduce engagement amongst communities underrepresented in museum collections and perpetuate ideas that fashionable historic dress was the preserve of the few.
As museums increasingly work to broaden and decolonise their collections through revised collecting policies (see, Museums Association’s Empowering Collections, 2019 and Decolonising Museums, 2022), historic dress presents a particular challenge, because the fragile and disposable nature of clothing means that uncollected historic garments often do not survive. Consequently, museums need novel approaches to the problem of uncollected and now uncollectible historic dress.
Aims & Benefits
Working with London Museum’s Dress and Textile Collection this project explores how absences inform the ways audiences and museum staff engage with, manage, and care for museum fashion collections. In turn, it asks how museums can address these absences without accessioning new objects and through that engage new and broader audiences. As such the project does not seek to replace or recreate absent garments, but instead asks how making visible what cannot and never will be...