Looking good in the 1950s meant following Dior's New Look, with its hand-span waists, boned bodices and full skirts. A decade later, women stopped dressing like their mothers, as the Hunt Museum's ambitious new exhibition shows, writes Deirdre McQuillan.
50s Chic, 60s Cheek, the ambitious exhibition of fashion and photography that opens today at the Hunt Museum in Limerick, features outfits by Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, Mary Quant, Sybil Connolly and Irene Gilbert, among others, including some from private Irish collections that have never been on public display before.
Fashion exhibitions in museums are a growing worldwide trend. Ever since the legendary Diana Vreeland staged a retrospective of the work of Yves Saint Laurent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1984, other august bodies have been quick to follow suit. Fashion exhibitions dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy, Yohji Yamamoto, Giorgio Armani and others have attracted huge public interest both in the US and in Europe. As a form of historic narrative, fashion's pulling power is in no doubt. In the UK, the Victoria and Albert Museum's Cutting Edge show, in l997, drew 230,000 visitors, double its average for a successful exhibition, while Philip Treacy's hats drew a record 43,000 people to the National Museum of Ireland - Decorative Arts & History, at Collins Barracks in Dublin, between November 2005 and February 2006.
The Hunt Museum has in its care the wide-ranging Sybil Connolly archive, which is unique in that it records the beginning of Ireland's international presence in fashion and interior design. Cataloguing the archive sowed the seeds of this new exhibition, which has been curated by Fiona Davern, Dorothy Redmond and the curatorial team at the museum. "We began to explore the changing image of women through fashion design in the l950s and l960s. This is the first time it has been done in Ireland, the first time that an institution has asked the question," says Virginia Teehan, the museum's director.
The two decades embraced by the exhibition were periods of sweeping change in Ireland. The harsh realities of the postwar austerity of the 1950s gave way to the youthful exuberance and optimism of the 1960s, and the clothes reflect the spirit of the time. The two decades are often portrayed as polar opposites, the one seen as conservative and formal, the other more individualist and radical, but many argue that the 1950s hid considerable vitality, energy and creativity that contrasted with the more exhibitionist and affluent decade that followed.
The fashions of the 1950s showed the power and impact of Dior's New Look, with silhouettes shaped by hand-span waists, boned bodices and full skirts. The 1960s, by contrast, was a time when the street dictated fashion for the first time, and couture was kicked out of the way. Women stopped dressing like their mothers. London rather than Paris became the fashion capital of the world, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy the faces of the decade.
Fashion photography, as always, recorded the new directions, and the static, elegant and rather aloof models of the 1950s gave way to freer, more energetic portrayals of women. Settings moved from the chateau to the sidewalk as the new wave of photographers made their mark, among them Terence Donovan, William Klein and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, examples of whose work features in the exhibition.
At a time when so much contemporary fashion is retrospective, and contemporary designers have been compared to scavengers rather than creators, it is interesting to see how modern some items remain 40 or 50 years later. Ib Jorgensen's green tweed coat from early in his career is a case in point. Visitors will see how important accessories such as hats and gloves were in the 1950s, or how hairstyles and make-up defined the 1960s as much as miniskirts and thigh-high boots.
As a way of understanding history through clothes, 50s Chic, 60s Cheek should attract a lot of attention, and the museum is expecting about 1,000 visitors a week. Fashion exhibitions bring in a new audience, says Teehan. "We have to find ways of understanding our role in society as society changes, and we need to open our doors to younger people who speak a visual language."
50s Chic, 60s Cheek is at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, until August 26th