Tate & Fashion and textile history Museum

Last week I went to Tate Modern and I also visited fashion and textiles history museum. Around Tate I went into the exhibition of Anni Albers. Albers was an artist that studied in the art movement of Bauhaus. She did mainly designs of weaving which I was really inspired by. Her designs were simple but she demonstrated less is more until you looked closer. Also her designs are on a large scale which made her weaving design a lot more amazing as it was on such a large scale. My favourite piece I saw in the exhibition was called ‘wall hanging’. This piece was on a huge scale compared to me so from a far distant to when I saw it I could see a clear pattern. As I got closer I could see the under stitching and over stitching she had done and how the colours and tones change. I also liked how she displayed the smaller scaled creations with a white thick border as that the directed our eyes to the centre of the frame where her work was. After our visit to Tate Modern we had enough time to walk to the fashion and textile history museum. This is where you can look through the change of England fashion through the decades. It was a small museum but had many different styles of outfits in each era. I really like the scene of ‘ Somewhere Over The Rainbow ‘. It interwar years that saw the build up of cinemas, with old Egyptian, Grace-Roman and rocco extravaganzas giving way to ‘dream palaces’. There were 258 cinemas in London alone which offered luxury. From this setting people had to dress smart and dressed up.

There was also the silent films which gave way to ‘talkies’ that allowed more complicated narratives and deeper characterization. There were magazines where people could visually see their favourite film stars and copy their style, although sometimes resulted in problems for the fashion industry. As milliners demanded the recall of a photograph of Dorothy Lamour wearing a bandana as it prompted thousands of women to stop buying hats. Furthermore into the decade as film stars became the main fashion influencers, Hollywood and Paris colluded in providing what women wanted. Hollywood costume designers would first develop inspiration from Parisian style upping the glamour and increasing the detail.