Explore the archives at Blythe House from top to bottom at this one of a kind exhibition of definitions and dresses.
Blythe House, the commodious working store house for the Victoria and Albert Museum's art and design collections, sits imposing and overlooked, like a silent, watchful, many windowed menace on the corner, a cross between an asylum and a workhouse. The former headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Olympia, Blythe House is now the home of an unfathomable array of textiles, fashion, furniture and jewellery locked up in miles of glass cabinets and hidden away in rolling racks.
Over the next two months however, inconspicuously dotted throughout the archives, from the roof to the coal bunkers far below, garments both old and new are arranged in evocative, intriguing, even dictionary-defying ways. The Concise Dictionary of Dress, commissioned and produced by Artangel, sets out to reconfigure clothing as a series of definitions created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. And the eleven installations on show, designed by fashion curator Judith Clark are accordingly labelled as 'Armoured', 'Conformist', 'Comfortable', 'Pretentious', 'Tight', 'Measured', 'Essential', 'Fashionable', 'Plain', 'Loose' and 'Creased'.
The exhibition commences at the goods lift. Up on the roof, turned away from view stands the first exhibit: a spectacular, solitary resin figure, hauntingly looking out from a cupola. Defined as 'Armoured', the windswept figure glances away, and the deep, translucent folds of her dress look fragile and exposed, especially on this overcast, damp morning.
Wandering through locked room after locked room, switching on and off the lights as we enter and leave, my guide carrying a clanging bunch of keys, I start to feel a little unnerved but undeniably excited. Through a door, past a substantial iron contraption collecting cobwebs in the corner, you come to the sterile, clinical, white stacks of rolling racks, lined up side by side. We stop at a random one near to the end of a row, which is spun open to reveal the next two exhibits on this curious tour, 'Conformist' and 'Comfortable'. The cream Victorian dress of 'Conformist' is embellished with a beautiful hand embroidered flourish in the style of William Morris wallpaper. The green and blue hues, intricately stitched leaves, and clusters of beads are counterbalanced by the simple, 1910 night gown, 'Comfortable', with its translucent trail of fabric and ribbon-rouched sleeves.
After a short walk through a lab corridor with 'humidified area' signs and doors left ajar – enabling glimpses of people soldering things surrounded by conical flasks – you get to 'Tight'. The actual room itself is little more than a dark cupboard, a larder no less, filled with wooden storage boxes and is so constricted that you have to go in one at a time. Once aside, through the narrow gap in the storage crate, is a burgundy Victorian jacket with nothing but a projected erotic photograph of a naked woman bent over backwards for a skirt.
Next we come to my favourite room on the tour: the textiles store. Amid the endless wrapped rolls of old cloth, and ghostly shrouded garments is 'Fashionable', eight white mannequin heads wearing wigs of paper curls and feathers. Then, a few spools of fabric along, there's 'Plain', a covered group of gowns, poised waiting to be unveiled. The creases, wrinkles and billows of their Tyvek-draped coverings tease us into imagining the amazing creations that lie in wait below.
We end back outside, this time in the coal arches. Here, sheltering from the damp, propped up on a pile of conservation pillows, lies 'Creased' – a silver ruffled trail of fabric, positioned below a giant Petri dish to catch rainwater seeping through the bunker ceiling. A certain anxiety surrounds this dress, lying folded as it is locked behind the grating outside in a leaky archway. Of course it's meant to speak of, as all eleven exhibits do, the difficulties of conservation and how such exquisite archives are ultimately stored both behind glass museum cabinets and in the cupboards and lockers at Blythe. But then, definitions, problems, predicaments aside, The Concise Dictionary of Dress deals with beautiful objects and the rare opportunity to explore such a fantastic, largely unknown treasure trove.
The Concise Dictionary of Dress at Blythe House 28 April - 27 June. Tickets for tours must be bought in advance, visit the Artangel website for further information.
Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.
Image Courtesy: Armoured by Tas Kyprianou and Conformist by Julian Abrams.
Add an event
Frieze Art Fair to launch new section for young galleries in 2012
Frieze have today announced details for the 2012 edition, their tenth art fair in London. Taking place...