As the V&A's spectacular Wedding Dresses 1775-2014 exhibition comes to a close, the curator Edwina Ehrman discusses some of the highlights of the show and reveals what she wore to her own wedding.
Please describe
your wedding dress - did you wear a white dress?
I did - I got married in 1976 and, in the end, I wore a Liberty's wedding dress. It was a classic mid -'70's design – so, a high neck, a pin-tuck front, big
balloon transparent sleeves and quite a full skirt, plus a train. The bit that
made me really feel like a bride was the train. It changed me completely
- it was quite transforming.I had a headdress and a veil and I hated the headdress. It was very
much the era of the headdress and looking back, it was absolutely vile. Weddings now are very different, because the bride usually has complete control and often the groom, too, due to the financial aspect. A wedding is something that the bride and groom will plan
together now. I was
completely reliant on my parents to fund the wedding.
1970's Style: Chiffon velvet and machine-made lace 'Faye Dunaway' dress by Thea Porter. Designed for Susanne Trill when she married James Elliot in Lincoln on 21st March 1970 |
Wool dress with Celtic scrollwork designed by Jean Muir for Pamela Colin's marriage to Lord Harlech in 1969 |
Yes, it does look amazing. We wanted a big dress and he just
seemed the obvious choice. His colours are very subtle and it’s a kind of Flower Bomb on steroids. It's a very large version of his Flower Bomb design and it does make an
impact. I love the huge picture hat, it works so well.
'Flower Bomb' wedding dress and hat designed by Ian Stuart. Silk Dupion, silk taffeta, tulle, organza and metallic lace. From the Ian Stuart Revolution Rocks 2011 collection |
Margaret, Duchess of Argyll’s dress is also totally beautiful.
Yes, I think craftsmanship is very key to this exhibition and it’s
very key to the V&A’s archives. What we are looking for are designers who
are creative and innovative and really at the
cutting edge of design, but I think doing a wedding dress exhibition enables you to introduce dresses that you wouldn’t normally see in a V&A
exhibition, such as the working class
dresses downstairs. They are the type of thing we would normally have for
research purposes and not for display. So there is the lovely cotton printed
dress worn by the Lincolnshire farmer’s wife, which is very interesting because
the print is extremely up to date for 1841, whereas the actual style of the
dress is very outmoded. The bride continue to wear it probably
when she was pregnant, as she took out
the back by four inches, which is a lot. She lived 20 miles from the nearest
market town, so I’d imagine she bought the fabric from a travelling
salesman, who we know carried the latest fabrics, and then
probably made it herself, or had it made by a local dressmaker. And then we have the purple
lady's maid’s outfit from 1899, that she made for her own wedding. We also have the
purple lady's maid's cape coat, that enabled me to show a very upmarket department
store copy of a Paris model. So we have a home-made outfit and a very nice middle class
outfit from a dressmaker in Upper Norwood. And I think that gives you a good
spectrum of what styles where available to people in that particular
decade.
It's a nice touch that you've added photographs of the brides wearing their wedding dresses in the exhibition.
Every bride is special in her own way and that’s what we wanted to convey by including a snapshot of each outfit. We added high quality photographs of the brides and their dresses to the exhibition video. If we just had a snapshot, we took great care to put it by each bride’s dress.
Cotton-print wedding dress, 1841 (with later alterations), worn by Sarah Wright to her marriage to Daniel Neal, a farm labourer from Lincolnshire. Block-printed cotton, lined with linen |
Norman Hartnell's magnificent wedding dress for Margaret Whigham (Margaret, Duchess of Argyll), marriage in 1933, features a 3.6 meter train |
It's a nice touch that you've added photographs of the brides wearing their wedding dresses in the exhibition.
Every bride is special in her own way and that’s what we wanted to convey by including a snapshot of each outfit. We added high quality photographs of the brides and their dresses to the exhibition video. If we just had a snapshot, we took great care to put it by each bride’s dress.
Were there any special touches for luck, such as a drop of the seamstresses blood inside the dress, that you came across when you curated the exhibition?
Yes, in Dita Von Tees dress. She has one red- one
blue bow inside the bodice of her Vivienne Westwood Couture dress. It came from her agent in LA and we inspected it there before adding it to the exhibition.
Dita Von Teese's Christian Louboutin shoes created for her marriage to Marilyn Manson in 2005. Silk, plastic, diamante and suede |
How long did the
exhibition take to curate?
It took about five years, but that’s because it went on tour
first, which is unusual. So it took about 18 months to 2 years. I
took the exhibition over from someone who left and it’s a very different animal
to the exhibition originally conceived. You have to do what works for you. So I think
it took me about 18 months to two years to get everything to book publication stage
and then it went on tour for two years. It’s essentially a social history exhibition. I hope I have curated a successful blend of
social history and design. That’s my aim. My background is as a social history curator, but what I’ve
tried to do is combine design history and social history in a very low key way
to provide a most informative experience. I want the exhibition to get
people talking. I like exhibitions that do that
What’s your most
controversial piece in the exhibition?
I think the most controversial piece, at the time, was Lisa
Butcher’s wedding dress. It’s a sad story and it wasn’t a great choice for her marriage to celebrity chef Marco Pierre White in 1992. His face in the wedding photograph afterwards says it all – he looks absolutely desperate
and he genuinely looks upset and furious.
So that was a great shame.
Yes, it's interesting how a dress can have that power.
Back view of the Moss crepe wedding dress, with opulent beading detail, designed by Bruce Oldfield for model Lisa Butcher's wedding to celebrity chef Marco Pierre White in 1992 |
Yes, it's interesting how a dress can have that power.
Well, people often ask me what
should you think about when you plan your wedding dress. I do think you should think about the older generation,
to a certain extent, and your own family traditions and sensibilities and you
have to think about the groom. If your groom is expecting to see you come down
the aisle in a white wedding dress and he’s actually told you he can’t wait to
see you in a white wedding dress, I think you really do have to think about at
least trying on a white bridal gown.
Do you think it's important that the wedding photographs are timeless?
When I was doing research, I looked back at Nova magazine, which I
loved as a teenager. It seemed like another world when I was growing up where I
did. There was loads of very cynical stuff about marriage in Nova, but not much
about weddings. But there was a key article about weddings that said if
you are going to do it, do it properly in a traditional fashion - look feminine,
look romantic, because this is the way that people are going to remember you
for years to come. And that's very true.
You don’t want a wedding photograph that you’ll feel embarrassed about.
And when I look at my wedding photos I think, 'Oh, my God, what a bog standard,
typical dress, I wore.' But, on the other hand I look happy, I look like a bride
and it was of the time. It was a
fantastic wedding, great fun, very memorable and enjoyable.
How do you feel
when you walk around the exhibition?
Very proud, actually. I think the dresses look lovely and I really
enjoy the visual challenge of getting an exhibition together. It gives me great
pleasure and I’m sure I annoyed people by saying, ‘no, no, another inch!’ There
is that window dressing element. We’ve
got some wonderful vistas down cases and between mannequins, because I tend to
keep on walking round. The design is wonderful. The in-house design team has
been absolutely great and I think we’ve worked together very well as a team, so they
were very nice. I came up with things they also didn’t like and they came up with
things I didn’t like, so I think we’ve managed some very successfully compromises.
What was the last
exhibition you curated at the V&A?
I haven’t been at the V&A very long. This is my seventh year and my
big project that runs alongside this is The Clothworkers’ Centre, which is our
new fashion and textiles archiving study centre - for the Study and
Conservation of Textiles and Fashion at Blythe House in West Kensington. It is a massive project and I was the lead for that and we moved 104,000 items of textiles
and fashion. We have fabulous new stores and a wonderful seminar- and study
rooms for teaching and I’m immensely proud of that. Because although this is
great, and I love doing exhibitions, it’s always the icing on the cake, that
was my infrastructure. I’ve been working in museums for 25 years (previously at
The Museum of London) and I know how important infrastructure is. We have such
a wonderful and important collection at the V&A and it deserves the best storage we could
possibly have. And my job is to present this exhibition now and I hope that in
20 to 25 years from now another curator will do something on his or her own vision
of wedding dresses at the V&A, and I hope that the materials will be there in the archives.
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