Each costume was carefully examined to ascertain its condition, treatment needs and suitability for display. Considering the fragility, age and delicacy of the fabrics; silk, lace, velvet, satin, linen and wool, the collection is in remarkable condition. Many pieces needed very little conservation before being on public display. Others required more intervention including lining, stabilisation of internal corsetry, reconstruction of degraded underarm sections and extensive stitching repairs of fragile embellishments.

In order for each of the fashion pieces to be on display it is important that the proper silhouette of each costume be achieved. Appropriate mannequins were carefully chosen for each individual piece and the costume was internally supported by underpinnings to ensure longevity within the NGV Fashion Collection

The NGV Conservation Department work in conjunction with the NGV’s Historical Underpinnings Specialist who created all the corsetry, panniers and petticoats for the historical costumes whilst on display. The more modern costumes are padded out, directly on the mannequin in order for them to be correctly supported for display.

Acquired by the NGV from 2015 with the support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty, in memory of her late husband Harold Campbell-Pretty, The Krystyna Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection is an acknowledgment of the growing importance of archival resources within museums today. Diverse in scope, the holdings comprise designer workbooks and sketches, studio drawings, collection guides, client books, documentary and editorial photographs, fashion publications, embroidery samples and press clippings, and highlights the way in which design is both a process and a system. Sketches and workbooks show the evolution of creative ideas and their execution, while the various forms of fashion media (illustration, photography and publishing) reveal the subsequent dissemination of imagery and information to audiences internationally. Housed under the auspices of the Gallery’s Shaw Research Library, The Krystyna Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection is a growing and significant resource for the NGV Fashion and Textiles collection and a fertile repository for all scholars of design history.

Design sketches and workbooks

As the primary record of the creative process, design sketches offer important insights into how ideas evolve and how they are executed. Within the Research Collection, ten workbooks of leading twentieth-century couturière Madame Grès, a series of gestural and expressive fashion illustrations by Yves Saint Laurent, and sketches from the couture houses of Marcelle Dormoy, Marcelle Chaumont, Mad Carpentier, Jacques Fath and Jacques Heim show the different working methods employed. They can also reveal the different views of the garment, item descriptions, costs, fabrics and suppliers, and the names of the seamstresses or vendeuses (saleswomen) allocated to the design. Compilations of studio drawings from the House of Lanvin, created after a garment’s completion, also how collections were communicated to clients or the press.

Photography

Fashion photography forms the most varied section of the Research Collection: the holdings comprise studio portraiture alongside documentary and editorial images from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. Included in this representation are images from the studios of Talbot, Félix, Dorvyne and Seeberger in addition to many more, yet uncredited, studio prints. Comprising a rich diversity of subjects and purposes, these images attest to the centrality of photography within the fashion system.

Publications

Runs of early French fashion serials, journals, artist books and international magazines are a highlight of the Research Collection, and chart the symbiotic relationship between fashion and fashion media. Documenting the circulation of fashion news and imagery from the early nineteenth century onwards, alongside developments in politics and society, and advances in science and technology, a spectrum of publications such as Journal des dames et des modes, Les modes, Comoedia Illustré, Modes et manières d’aujourd’hui, Gazette du bon ton, Chiffons, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, L’Officiel and The Face provide a rich visual record of changing aesthetics and attitudes towards dress.

View The Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection

The NGV Fashion and Textiles collection has now benefitted from the addition of more than 250 garments from Parisien haute couture and international fashion houses that have been generously gifted by leading philanthropist Krystyna Campbell-Pretty since 2015. Within the gift is a rare suite of Gabrielle Chanel’s little black dresses, an iconic ‘Hall of Mirrors’ jacket and evening dress from Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1938 Zodiac collection, the deftly draped haute couture gowns of Madame Grès and Yves Saint Laurent’s ground-breaking women’s tuxedo Le Smoking, suit from 1967, More tht 150 of these exceptional works are on display as part of the exhibition The Krystyna Campbell-Pretty Fashion Gift. The works have been generously purchased by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty for the NGV Collection in memory of her late husband, Harold Campbell-Pretty.

Charles Frederick Worth is renowned as the Englishman who radically shifted the concept of fashion production in the mid nineteenth century by assuming the role of designer and ‘signing’ his works as an artist would, but on a label. By the 1860s, Worth had begun marking the waistband of each dress with his name, positioning himself as a couturier and tastemaker. These two-piece ensembles display vast lengths of ornate textiles trimmed and fashioned into late nineteenth-century silhouettes.

Jeanne Paquin was one of the most influential and accomplished couturières of the early twentieth century and was celebrated for her personal glamour, mastery of colour and progressive designs. Paquin was particularly in tune with the contemporary mood and introduced designs that answered a growing desire for more practical clothing. In 1905, her Neoclassical, high-waisted gowns foreshadowed the abandonment of the corset and were a move away from the elaborate confections of the Edwardian era, while her elegant tailleurs (walking suits) of the 1910s provided a stylish daywear option for travel and leisure.

Raised in an orphanage and virtually self taught, Chanel was a milliner before she established her fashion house. With stores in Paris, Deauville, Biarritz and London, she was celebrated as much for her glamorous persona as for her impeccable designs. As early as 1919 she was widely praised in the press for her uncomplicated black outfits that women could wear from afternoon through to evening. The little black dress marked a shift in fashion from the ostentatious to the spare, and is emblematic of Chanel’s contribution to modernity; she championed the idea of ‘less is more’.

Sisters Sylvie Montegut and Baronne Jeanne d’Etreillis (nee Boué) opened their Parisian couture house in 1899 on the fashionable rue de la Paix. Advancing a distinctively romantic style, characterised by the use of fine laces, delicate embroidery and festoons of ribbon-work flowers, the sisters achieved great success internationally in the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, the house was known for its robe de style, an ultra-feminine, historicist design, that drew upon the eighteenth century as a source of inspiration. Low waisted and wide-skirted in silhouette, it was supported internally by pannier-like hoops.

Elsa Schiaparelli was born in Italy and moved to the United States in 1916. After working at a boutique in New York, she moved to Paris and began designing her own collections in 1927. She regularly collaborated with artists such as Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray and became known for her whimsical prints, large ornamental buttons and Surrealist design elements. In 1936, she designed ensembles for the Maurice Chevalier film Le Vagabond bien-aimé or The Beloved Vagabond of which one of her costume was adapted in pink satin with red ruffles at the hem for her summer 1936 collection.

‘Once one has found something of a personal and unique character, its execution must be exploited and pursued without stopping.’

Madame Gres

Formally trained as a sculptor, Madame Grès began producing high fashion clothing in the early 1930s, winning first prize for haute couture at the Paris Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in 1937 under her label Alix. Over the course of her long career, Gres perfected the art of pleating and draping, building from the simplicity and purity of Grecian classicism to more avant-garde expressions in her later years. This early example reduces meters of silk jersey to create a self-supporting and dramatic form-fitting gown.

Madeleine Vionnet’s pioneering innovations in design and construction introduced a language of modernity to fashion in the early decades of the twentieth century. Best known for her revoutionary use of the bias cut, Vionnet’s experiments with form and geometry, in combination with her technical ingenuity, reconceived femininity in new and progressive terms.

Rethinking the relationship between body and fabric, she prioritised movement and comfort in her designs, favouring materials such as silk jersey and crepe in plain colours which, when cut on the bias, delivered a greater elasticity and a close fit. Up until she closed her house in 1939, Vionnet’s sensuous bias-cut evening gowns and dresses defined the streamlined elegance of the 1930s.

On 4 January 1929, an advertisement appeared in American fashion bible Women’s Wear Daily announcing the arrival of a new Parisian couture house, Maggy Rouff. Espousing a design philosophy based on ‘modernism and distinction’, Rouff produced sophisticated collections of sharply tailored daywear and bias-cut evening gowns that were fêted in the pages of leading fashion magazines for their silver-screen glamour. Working directly onto a living mannequin in order to create the perfect architecture of line, Rouff brought a sensual quality to her work that was echoed in her use of luxuriant fabrics and exacting cutting.

Christian Dior was a designer, entrepreneur and visionary who made a lasting impact on mid twentieth-century fashion and culture. Founding his couture house at age forty-one in December 1946, and presenting his first collection in February 1947, Dior reinvigorated an ailing postwar French fashion industry. His ‘New Look’ transformed how women dressed, introducing a silhouette comprising rounded shoulders, exaggerated padded hips and full skirts made with an abundance of fabric. It is still one of the most recognisable styles in the history of fashion.

Spanish-born Cristóbal Balenciaga remains one of the most acclaimed couturiers of the mid twentieth century, famed for his exceptional tailoring skills and experimentation with form. During the 1950s and 1960s in particular, Balenciaga’s groundbreaking designs rethought the relationship between garment and body. Innovative with cut and construction, he created a lexicon of new sihouettes for women defined by abstraction and soft volume, among them the chemise, tunic, cocoon, sack and ‘baby-doll’ styles.

Yves Saint Laurent was only twenty-five years old when he left Christian Dior and launched his own couture house in partnership with Pierre Bergé in 1961. Yet throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his groundbreaking collections and revolutionary innovations in ready-to-wear made an enormous impact on contemporary fashion. Saint Laurent introduced a pioneering and modernist vocabulary to fashion, reinventing menswear for women and designing collections that were as beautiful as they were provocative. Inverting staples such as the pea coat, trench coat, safari suit and jumpsuit, in summer 1966 Saint Laurent created one of his most iconic designs, the Le Smoking tuxedo suit. At a time when it was still controversial for women to wear trousers in public, Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking was a radical proposition, completely in sympathy with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and a generation eager for greater social and aesthetic freedom.

Paco Rabanne revolutionised fashion with his unconventional use of materials. Rather than tailor cloth, Rabanne made garments from linked tiles in metal, plastic or leather that would move over the body like articulated medieval armour, referencing the historic scale-plating techniques of European and samurai armour. ‘My clothes are like weapons’, he said. ‘When you fasten them, you can almost hear the trigger of a revolver.’ This dress is a remarkable example of Rabanne’s innovative use of unlikely materials to create a new dress design.

Christian Lacroix opened his fashion house in 1987 and soon attracted critical attention for his opulent garments and signature treatments, including the short puffball skirt known as le pouf, rose prints and low décolletage. He referenced widely from other styles from fashion history (like the corset and the crinoline), folklore and traditional dress from many parts of the world, mixing his many references in a varied manner. Caramba, dress was previously owned by Hélène de Mortemart, the former head of haute couture at Christian Lacroix, and combines the wild colours that led Lacroix to be called the ‘colour couturier’.

Lee Alexander McQueen was one of the most provocative and original designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His exceptional technical artistry and paradoxical language of ‘sabotage and tradition’ redefined fashion conventions and challenged accepted standards of beauty. Often tackling unsettling subjects, McQueen’s narrative-driven and autobiographical collections were usually accompanied by spectacular runway presentations. Frequently drawing upon his Scottish heritage for inspiration, in 1995 McQueen presented the incendiary Highland Rape collection and in 2006, Widows of Culloden, a reference to the bloody battle and Jacobite defeat of 1746. For the latter, McQueen presented a suite of outfits in the distinctive black, red and yellow McQueen tartan alongside other signifiers of Scottish and Victorian-era dress.