Almost Overdressed: 2016

House Project | Visual Mindmap

So today was my first day back at college and I thought I should also get back to posting on here!

We were given a project to start researching over summer so I'm going to be updating you about the progress of that as well as a few other things I have lined up.

The summer project is called 'house' and the brief was to research a historic house or building as well as the dress the occupants wore at the time. I decided to choose Dunham Massey a stately home in Cheshire because I thought it had a few paths I could go down for research. The image above is the visual mind map I made for the start of the project with key images gathered from my research.

The house was built in the 1730s replacing the previous Dunham Castle. A lot of the rooms are decorated in an Edwardian interior style and I particularly like the prints on the wallpapers, ceramics and soft furnishings which I could develop prints from or use to inspire fabric samples.

At the moment an exhibition called 'Dunham's Lost Years' is on about the 7th Earl who married a circus performer. From this I looked into 1850s circus costumes and I love the contrast between these free flowing shapes and the stiff corsets and crinoline cages of the time.

A fine artist, Karen Le Roy Harris, had adapted rooms as part of the exhibition to reflect the neglect of Dunham during these 'lost years' and in one room had fashioned outfits for each of the five servants who still lived there.

I also looked at the house during World War One when it became a military hospital. The military and nurses uniform is another aspect which really interests me as well as the soldiers themselves and their stories whilst living at Dunham as many of them had never experienced such grandeur before.

Finally I visited the fashion and Freedom Exhibition in Manchester which looked at how women dressed before and after the war and ran along the theme of restraint and freedom. They'd got university students to design outfits from this theme as well as top designers like Vivienne Westwood. I felt really inspired by a lot of the concepts they'd come up with and the silhouettes they'd created.

I'm can't wait to do more research and start designing because I feel like there's so many styles I could explore! I'll make sure to keep you posted on the blog too.

Polly x