Uniform Freak

New Uniforms for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines by Mart Visser, launched Autumn 2009/Spring 2010. Image courtesy KLM Corporate Communications.

Am currently in the midst of researching and writing an article on new developments in fashion curation. One of the strands I am looking into is the development of the Internet as a tool for fashion researchers and curators. As I have written about briefly before, the websites of museums and galleries are now being looked at as a way for general members of the public, and scholars, to access archives, sometimes purely as a ''quick reference'' guide, and some with more detailed descriptions of artefacts and close-up pictures. Both the British Museum in London and the Museum at FIT in New York are examples of this. In taking this to the next stage, however, using the website as an exhibition site or gallery space, as with my own Fashion Souvenirs project, is perhaps the next stage in this development.

Surprisingly, most museums and galleries seem to utilise their website purely for promotional purposes. One example that differs from this though is Uniform Freak, a collection of air stewardess uniforms collected by Cliff Muskiet, an airline and uniform enthusiast, so much so, in fact, he even works for KLM. In the same spirit as my own project, the Uniform Freak site is both an exhibition and a valuable archive of a particular, niche type of clothing, one that is overlooked by more main-stream collectors of clothing or dress. Uniform Freak's collection is certainly extensive and impressive, with 921 uniforms from 383 airlines (and growing!), from from big-name national carriers like BA, KLM, Lufthansa and Quantas, to small regional and charter airlines, to new low-cost carriers, like Martinair, Easyjet, Tyrolean and Azzura Air. Several 'extinct' airlines are also represented, like Sabena, Cross Air, BOAC and Pan AM, a valuable resource in the presentation of the glamour of air travel, as represented by the air stewardess, in past eras. The photographing of each uniform on the same mannequin provides a symmetry and cohesion to the overall display. Understandably, Muskiet is very protective of his collection, so images of the uniforms are not downloadable directly from the website, but it certainly offers a valuable visual reference of an overlooked aspect of uniforms and dress, and perhaps provides a clue as to how fashion curators can develop and make best use of the website as a viable exhibition or archive space.

To view the Uniform Freak collection visit: http://www.uniformfreak.com

For those interested in other travel-related/flight attendent blogs the following are highly recommend for their informative and entertaining content:

http://www.stuckattheairport.com - Check out the Souvenir Sunday rubrique!

http://hpoole.wordpress.com/ - Heather Poole's Another Flight Attendant Writing, one of the best and original FA blogs

http://anotherpassportstamp.blogspot.com/ - Tales from inside and outside the cabin of a Frankfurt-based FA

http://www.theflyingpinto.com/ - For everything you ever wanted to know about being an FA

Blythe House Archive Visit

As I was talking over with someone only the other day, one of the truly amazing things about living in a city as vast and infinite as London is that, however many years you live here, or however many visits to the city you make, you never really get to know it all. Friday last week proved this well enough again when I had the opportunity to visit Blythe House, hidden behind the behemoth of Olympia and the Earl’s Court exhibition centre. Having never stayed in a hotel in the city, Earl’s Court has always remained something of a mystery for me. Earl’s Court oddly remains one of London’s prime tourist hotspots, despite the area not being particularly central, or cool, and having the advantage of only being on a direct tube line to Heathrow. Since the MA students in our department are working on a project to do with archives and personal biographies, we also had the opportunity to accompany them on a visit to this mystery corner of London, and to visit the textiles archives of the British Museum.

Beginning life as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, today Blythe House is a humungous space acting as a repository of artefacts from the British Museum, the V&A and the Science Museum. One of series of recently astonishingly sunny days, it seemed oddly incongruous to enter a building whose every window seemed shuttered with blinds to keep out the light, hazardous to protecting delicate artefacts. After negotiating our way around the labyrinth of corridors and stairs, passing a room piled high with crates, and boxes, we entered the study area of the British Museums textile archive. Collection Manager Helen Wolff had laid out for us on a table a sample selection of cloths and garments from the archive, and proceeded to give us an introductory talk about the chosen artefacts and the role and activities of the museum’s textile collection. Amongst them were a beautiful and intricately embroidered loose gown made by the Miao people of China, a richly decorated jacket from Palestine, a bark textile from the Oceania region, and some ‘modern’ textiles from South America and West Africa. She also introduced us to a sample of textile artefacts collected from the desert coastal regions of Peru, some of which had originally been used as totems to accompany the dead into the afterlife. Since they had been buried deep underground in such an arid landscape, this had helped to preserve both their form and colour. Following on from this, Helen guided us around the main store area, with textiles kept either in crates on shelves, or for more delicate items, laid out flat in aluminium drawer units. Many other textiles were kept rolled up in acid-free tissue paper and calico, which were then placed on racks on pull-out screens. This we were told was one of the best ways in which to keep textile lengths, rather than folding them up, which had often been done in the past.

One of the key aims of the museum is make their collection as accessible to textile researchers and other interested parties as possible. To this end Helen and her colleagues are working towards photographing and cataloguing the museums entire textile collection. Much of this is now available to view online through the British Museum’s own website, via their dedicated research section on the website, viewable here: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database

While my own practice in fashion research is more about the present day workings and developments of the fashion industry, the visit to the archives at Blythe House opened up the possibilities that the collections of ‘ethnographic’ institutions can offer. While we can all enjoy and wonder at the splendour of blockbuster exhibitions showcasing the work of famed and fabled designers, the seemingly more ‘humble’, and intrinsically humanistic work of textile producers remain equally fascinating. In conjunction with my own recent (re)visit to the Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum) in Amsterdam, it is surprising how overlooked the development and processes of textiles are in the realm of curated exhibitions on fashion and textiles. Yet at the same time, institutions, like the British Museum and the Tropenmuseum, can offer an intriguing and significant insight into broadening the scope and depth of fashion and textiles research.

In a further intriguing development in opening up the archive as an exhibition space, fashion curator Judith Clark, together with her partner Adam Phillips, have put together an exhibition at Blythe House. Opening shortly, the exhibition is called A Concise Dictionary of Dress, and has been devised in conjunction with the experimental arts agency Artangel, famed for their collaborations with Rachel Whitread, Roni Horn and Roger Hiorns. The exhibition itself is set to take place in the V&A’s section of Blythe House, in which is located their repository of clothing, furniture and ceramics. Further information can be found at: http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress