Emilie Grigsby’s wardrobe at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: The challenges and opportunities of personal collections of dress for a museum of art and design

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of wardrobe studies exploring clothing accrued and worn by an individual over a lifetime. Stemming from multiple disciplines including fashion studies, sociology, anthropology, psychology and life-writing, these studies have revealed that wardrobes offer a vital resource for fashion history. This is something yet to be recognised in the UK’s national collection of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), where the great number of wardrobes in its collections remains a largely untapped resource.

My thesis examines the relationship between the V&A as a museum of art and design and these highly personal collections of dress through a case study of the wardrobe of the American socialite Emilie Grigsby (1876–1964), acquired in 1967. Through stretching its scope beyond the wardrobe’s use by the wearer into its ‘afterlife’ in the museum, this thesis considers why wardrobes such as Grigsby’s have historically been overlooked and points to their fuller potential. This is the first study to contextualise Grigsby’s wardrobe, comprising over 100 items of early twentieth-century clothing, against a backdrop of newspaper archives, photographs, census records, memoirs, oral history interviews, curatorial papers and institutional archives. This material sheds light not only on Grigsby’s wardrobe in relation to her life but also on the museum practices around collecting, archiving and exhibiting wardrobes. Highlighting the previously unexamined role of the institutions and curators that preserve wardrobes, my thesis expands the growing field of wardrobe studies and museology and reasserts the importance of Madeleine Ginsburg, the V&A’s first curator of dress. It reveals the institutional and curatorial agency that shapes wardrobes in museums and enables their survival, as well as the many kinds of loss that occur and what can be done to mitigate them. My examination of Grigsby’s clothing as a wardrobe enriches our knowledge of the wearer, her lifestyle, her bodily relationship to her clothes and her consumer practices, deepening our understanding of what wardrobes offer fashion history. Finally, it reveals the potential for wardrobes in the V&A today to disrupt dominant fashion narratives and provide a more polyphonic voice for the museum.

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