Corsets, Crinolines And Couture At The Royal Pump Room Museum

The V&A’s blockbuster exhibition, Wedding Dresses 1775 to 2014, featured dresses and ensembles from its incredible world-class costume collection along with handpicked designs from some of the UK’s most prominent, current designers. One such was Flowerbomb, a dress which was created by acclaimed, award winning designer, Ian Stuart and which the V&A itself described as ‘a real showstopper’.

A piece of pure theatre and the embodiment of the fairy-tale wedding dream, Flowerbomb is now one of the unmissable highlights of the Royal Pump Rooms’ current exhibition, aptly entitled, Wedding Dresses.

Spanning almost two centuries of fashion history, Wedding Dresses salutes the wedding dress’ steady ascent, as well as unpicking the aesthetic and social ideas sewn into its ruffles and flounces. For many women, a wedding dress is the most important and expensive garment they will purchase in their lifetime, yet after a single day in the limelight, most are folded away with their stories and memories – never to be worn again.

Thankfully, the Royal Pump Room Museum’s rare and inspirational collection of donated dresses ranging from the corsets and crinolines of the 1860s, featuring incomprehensibly tiny waists and shoulders, to the Hollywood glamour and elegance of the dresses of the 1930s, to noughties ‘statement’ dresses by the likes of Bruce Oldfield, offers a conduit for such dresses to exist and be appreciated beyond that one all-important day in the limelight.

The accompanying stories that sit alongside the garments also offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the women who wore them, their social circumstances and fashion choices – like the incongruously dyed bright blue dress from 1956, so created because the bride’s mother had recently died… or the astonishingly stylish Art Deco beige lace dress, researched and created by mother and daughter in 1935 to emulate the most up to the minute fashions of the moment.

One hopes that the dresses on display ended in ‘happily ever after’, however reminding us that this isn’t always the case are two striking creations by contemporary textile artist, Julia Triston. Complete with a retro bustle and created entirely out of old, faded, grey bras is the ‘We Fade to Grey’ Bra-rara dress. Alongside this magnificently hangs the cleverly and aptly entitled ‘To Know A Veil’, an antique 1930s wedding veil embroidered with entries from Julia’s own ‘divorce diary’ – get past the expletives and you uncover raw emotion and heartbreak in lines such as “I lost the man I once loved”.

Poignant, pertinent and beautiful, this fascinating exhibition reveals the art and the artistry behind fashion and the tradition of weddings.

Ends September 15. For further information visit: https://www.harrogate.gov.uk/weddingdresses