Ask the curator

Interview with curator with Pauline Rushton

Transcript

I'm Pauline Rushton and I'm the curator of Costume and Textiles at National Museums Liverpool. I work in the decorative art department and look after a collection of costume and textiles that cover the period from about 1700 to the present day.

I look after a very big collection; it's about 20,000 items altogether. So it's a fantastically interesting job, I really enjoy the job! It means I get to do lots of interesting things like pulling together exhibitions. Collections management is a big part of the job in terms of looking after, on a daily basis, a huge collection. I also do things like answering enquiries from the public, so it can be a wide range of items and activities.

I'm often asked as well, what are my favourite items in the collection and it's difficult to say because it's a massive collection, we have over 20,000 items and to pick one from 20,000 would be very difficult! But one of my favourites is an evening dress from about 1925 that belonged to a Liverpool doctor's wife, Mrs Emily Tinne. And there's an exhibition about Mrs. Tinne on at the moment in fact, 'A Sweet Life', at Sudley House.

The Tinne family were Liverpool sugar merchants so they had quite a lot of money – they were millionaires in fact. The money that was coming from the sugar business went to pay for a huge collection of clothes owned by Mrs Tinne in the 1920s and 1930s.

And this particular dress, I love this dress because it's a beautiful beaded dress. It's a beaded, silk crepe dress that was made in France and imported into Liverpool. We don't know unfortunately which shop she bought it from in Liverpool. And these dresses were made in great numbers in France, probably in Paris, and then exported all over Europe. They were of fantastically popular fashion in the mid -1920s.

But the beauty of the dress is the weight of it and just the feel. And you can imagine how that would have felt to wear - it would have been very swingy and would have moved with you as wore it. So that's one of the reasons I think this is one of my favourite dresses.

Well some of the earliest garments that we have in the collection date from early 18th century. So we've got very interesting things like men's waistcoats from, say the 1720s onwards. And children's things as well - there's also a very interesting child's dress from about the 1730s. There are also garment accessories like stomacher front for a woman's dress that dates from the 1720s to about 1740.

We have a big range of material in the collection and it runs in date order from about 1700 to the present day. We try to represent all the periods of history, during that period, in terms of clothes and development of costume. Obviously there are gaps in that whole range of material and part of my job is to identify what the gaps are and to fill them in a variety of different ways.

One of the ways we can do that is by obviously purchasing things on the open market, either at auction or from private individuals. What we are sometimes looking for are the more quirky things, which are sometimes just offered. I'm made offers of gifts all the time, on a regular basis, every week! And if one of those offers fills one of the gaps in the collection then I would accept and if it doesn't then we obviously have to decline.

Well one of the questions I'm asked frequently is do I ever wear the costume. And although you might think it's very tempting to do that, the answer is no, we never wear the clothes in the collection! For one it would be unethical do that, but another very good reason is that we wouldn't fit into most of them because people in the past were quite considerably smaller than we are today. So they were very petite to our standards and modern people are much bigger than them. So we don't wear them, although yes it is very tempting sometimes, you think "What would this look like on?"

I'd just like to thank everyone for all the questions that they've sent in for me to answer. They were brilliant questions, very interesting.

If you'd like to see more about our collections you can go along and have a look at things on display at the moment in the craft and design gallery in the Walker Art Gallery. There is a nice display of 1950s dresses at the moment, which will be on for quite a long while.

You can also go and see more about Mrs Tinne at the 'A Sweet Life' exhibition, which is on at Sudley House until spring 2010. That exhibition covers evening, day wear and children's wear as well. It also explains a bit more about the Tinne family. Another exhibition I've just done is called 'Sound and Vision: Music and fashion photographed by Francesco Mellina, Liverpool, 1978-82' and that's on at the National Conservation Centre until the end of August. That exhibition covers photographs from the period 1978 -82.

So we've got great collections, we've got great variety and fantastic material. Come along and have a look at it on display at the moment.