Museum Collection Receives Funding.

Worthing Museum & Art Gallery’s costume collection has received funding of £67,500 from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation under their Museum and Heritage Collections Funding Strand. The funding is for a 2 year project.

The money will support research and conservation work on this important collection. Containing some 30,000 objects, it is one of the largest outside London, and is significant locally, regionally and even nationally. 

As the curators work they will highlight any items of particular and outstanding importance. They will also look at the condition of the objects and identify any conservation work that needs to be carried out.

The collection is well known within the specialist community and institutions teaching fashion, visual culture and dress history courses. Information gathered from the project will provide them with more in-depth, accurate information, setting as many artefacts as possible in context. It will also help museum staff to manage research appointments and enquiries efficiently.

As the documentation system is updated, the museum plans to launch a public user collections database live on the internet. This will increase both national and international awareness of the costume collection, encouraging more museum visits both actually and virtually.  A resulting increase in high-profile loans to other museums will give wider access to the collections.

The museum’s Curator of Historic Collections, Kate Loubser, comments, “The costume & textiles collection at Worthing is both comprehensive and significant. Currently it is largely unknown except in specialist circles and this exciting project will finally enable us to put Worthing Museum and its special collection of costume & textiles on the map.” 

Lou Taylor, Professor of Costume at Brighton University, comments, “It is an astonishing treasure trove of European fashion and accessories. It includes rare and beautiful 17th century examples but also has a highly unusual and exceptionally useful reputation for collecting the clothes of ‘ordinary’ people.”

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