New exhibition to explore royal fashion

The Fashion Museum Bath is to celebrate fashion worn by successive generations of women in the Royal Family in a new exhibition, ‘Royal Women’ in 2018.

The family tree exhibition will include clothing worn by Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret, featuring items of dress from the Fashion Museum collection, as well as a major loan from the Royal Collection, lent by Her Majesty The Queen.

Open from February 3, 2018, to April 28, 2019, the exhibition will examine their sartorial lives, looking at each woman’s unique style, the role they played within the monarchy and how that was reflected in their choice of dress.

Highlights include the wedding dress of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, a dress and cape made by Hartnell worn by Queen Mary to the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, and a grey silk satin ball gown worn by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

There are also a number of Christian Dior dresses as worn by Princess Margaret including a ‘Rose Pompon’ strapless cream silk chiffon day dress worn to Royal Ascot and a strapless black lace evening dress worn to a performance of Guys and Dolls at the London Coliseum in 1953.

Elly Summers, the exhibition curator, said: “The Fashion Museum is one of the world’s great museum collections of historical fashionable dress and we are immensely fortunate that amongst its treasures it includes dress belonging to members of the Royal Family; we are equally fortunate in the loan of key pieces from the Royal Collection.”

Images: courtesy of Fashion Museum Bath