The gallery upstairs holds about 300 garments at any one time. The store below holds a little over 40,000, in flat drawers and on padded hangers, in a room with no daylight, humidity held between 45 and 55 per cent, and a smell somewhere between old paper and lanolin. It is, by a wide margin, the more interesting room.
Why so little can be shown
Light is the constraint. Textile dyes fade cumulatively and irreversibly, and the damage is a function of total exposure — so a garment shown for six months at gallery light levels has spent a meaningful fraction of its displayable life. Most pieces here are on a rotation that allows display for a few months every several years. Some cannot be shown at all.
Provenance is the quiet crisis in the drawers. A garment with no record of who wore it, when, or where it was bought is enormously less useful to a researcher, and a significant proportion of what arrives by donation comes with nothing but a surname. The department now interviews donors before accepting anything.
Storage is more skilled than it looks. Every fold is padded so the fabric never creases against itself, hangers are built up to the exact shoulder of the garment, and anything with beading or heavy embellishment is stored flat because its own weight will eventually tear it apart on a hanger. All of this is done by a team of four.
“We are not keeping these for you. We are keeping them for somebody in 2140.”
A textile conservator
What gets collected now
The collecting policy has shifted noticeably towards the ordinary. Twentieth-century collections are heavy on couture and light on what most people actually wore, which makes them a poor record of anything except the top of the market. The current acquisitions list includes supermarket clothing, workwear and school uniform, which will be far more useful in a century.
Synthetics are the coming crisis and the department is candid about it. Many mid-century plastics and elastanes degrade in ways nobody yet knows how to arrest — they go brittle, sticky or simply disintegrate — and a significant portion of what has been collected since 1960 may not survive to be studied at all.
What gets thrown away
Museums decline far more than they accept, and the criteria are less about quality than about gaps. A beautiful couture piece from a decade already well represented is likely to be refused; a supermarket coat from 2009 with a receipt and a photograph of it being worn may not be. Two conservators described the same frustration, which is that donors offer their best things and the collection needs their ordinary ones.
There is no realistic prospect of collecting comprehensively, and everybody involved knows it. What they are actually doing is sampling — trying to ensure that a researcher in a century has at least a few examples of each category rather than a thousand examples of one. That makes each decision consequential in a way that a gallery visitor, looking at three hundred beautiful objects, has no reason to suspect.
If you have something you think belongs in a collection, the advice from all four conservators was identical and slightly counterintuitive. Do not clean it. Do not repair it. Do write down who wore it, when, where it was bought and what for, and keep that with the garment. The information is very often the part that cannot be replaced, and it is the part most commonly lost.
Almost none of this is visible from the gallery, where the labels give a designer, a date and a donor. The more interesting information — why this survived, how, and what it cost to keep — is downstairs, and there is no exhibition about it.
