Yesterday the Crafty Chat was led by Pippa Lacey, our Vice-Chair, who has recently been to see the 'Costume Couture' exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey.  This celebrates 60 years of the famous costume house CosProp, and documents the foundation of the company by John Bright, as well as displaying an enormous number of famous costumes from films and TV.  We spent a lovely half hour trying to identify outfits from Great Expectations, A Room with a View, Out of Africa, Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey, amongst many others.  The clothes are sumptuous, and interestingly Pippa explained that with the advent of high-definition television, the detail and making of these costumes has now to be of a higher quality than ever before.  The exhibition is well-worth seeing, and is open until 8th March 2026.

For those interested in film and TV costumes, members also mentioned a good selection at the Bankfield Collection in Halifax, where you can find 'Gentleman Jack' Anne Lister's clothing as well as the famous shirt worn by Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice!

Last Saturday C&TA members gathered for our first in-person event of the year at the Town Close Auditorium at Norwich Castle to hear ex-Chair Joy Evitt deliver a wonderful talk about French fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet.

​Joy has been researching the life and work of Vionnet with great enthusiasm, and clearly feels that although she is not perhaps a household name in the same way as Chanel or Dior, she has been equally influential in her impact on fashion and indeed on social attitudes to the female form, and should be equally well-known.  

 She took us through a detailed outline of Vionnet's career, which started at the age of 11 working for a local dressmaker in Aubervilliers.  Her skill was recognised at an early age and she soon moved on to fashion houses in both England and Paris, spending time working on the lavish embroidery and antique lace favoured by Mme Gerber and her sisters at Callot Soeurs, before being poached from there in 1907 to work for Jacques Douçet.  However, by this time Vionnet, who had already experienced the collapse of an unhappy early marriage and loss of a child, was developing strong feelings about the female form, and refusing to use corsetry in her designs in the way Douçet demanded, she set up her own fashion house in 1912.

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​Vionnet was also very influential in improving the legal rights of fashion designers over their products, making use of clever photography to record her designs and only allowing very few licensed copies to be made of her garments.  This began the establishment of copyright for Haute Couture.  In addition, by launching a collection of 'repeated original' labels in New York in the late 1920s, Vionnet laid the foundations for the creation of quality ready-to-wear clothing.

Joy's admiration for Vionnet was very clear.  The designer's skill was phenomenal: Balenciaga, whom she mentored,  called her 'his master' and her fashion house at 50, Avenue Montaigne was known as 'The Temple of Fashion'.  Designs such as the 'Greek Vase Dress' and the stunning 'Carnival Dress' are now iconic, and her influence on the graphically shaped and draped clothing of modern designers such as Issey Miyake is obvious.  Joy is of the opinion that Madeleine Vionnet should be much more widely fêted, and after hearing her fascinating lecture, we are inclined to agree.

On Tuesday evening this week Sheffield-based fine artist Toni Buckby treated us to a fascinating talk on the beautiful blackwork embroidery of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Blackwork is a particularly skilful type of counted thread embroidery which has been practised for centuries, but had its heyday between 1530 and 1630, when it was particularly fashionable amongst the most wealthy members of the English aristocracy and royalty.  The main reason for its exclusivity was the incredible amount of skilled work involved in creating even smaller items such as coifs (close-fitting caps) and partlets (sleeveless garments covering the neck and shoulders, used to fill in low-cut necklines for modesty or warmth).  These were made from extremely fine linen - sometimes with as many as 80-100 threads per inch.  The embroidery used a wider range of stitches than that commonly found in modern blackwork, and was made with black thread on white, often also incorporating gold.  

​​Toni is an artist and maker with a wealth of practical experience of blackwork, and as well as explaining the changes in fashion and technique that she has documented, she was also able to give detailed insight into the way in which these designs were executed.  She finished with a description of the stunning 'Falkland Waistcoat', a rare extant garment now in the possession of the V&A, which is a particular focus of her research in an attempt to eventually be able to reproduce her own precise copy of it.  Her enthusiasm for this beautifully decorative embroidery shone through her talk, and kept us all enthralled!

if you wish to find out more about Toni's work, join her mailing list from her website here: blackworkembroidery.org