Wealth of dress exhibitions this summer!

Babes and Bathers – the history of the swimsuit at Vancouver Maritime Museum

There’s a wonderful selection of dress and textiles exhibitions on display this summer in Toronto, Ontario and beyond!  The Royal Ontario Museum has just opened Fashion Follows Form: Design for Sitting which explores the fascinating and challenging issue of designing clothing for wheelchair users and reveals the history of functional design that grounds this work.  Also on display are early Islamic Textiles in the exhibition Cairo Under Wraps.

The Bata Shoe Museum presents Fashion Victims – the Perils and Pleasures of Dress in the 19th century which examines the darker side of fashionable dress in the Victorian age, from arsenic dresses to shoe shine boys, and asks us to consider the true cost of fashion.

Over at the Textile Museum the ancient and the futuristic are both on offer in The Eternity Code: Archaeology, Textiles and Preservation and Fashioning the Intangible: The conceptual clothing of Ying Gao. These are accompanied by a rich programme of talks and events. 

And it’s not as if all the fashion fun is in Toronto.  Waterloo Region Museum in conjuction with the Fashion History Museum presents Street Style, an exhibition which charts the connections between women’s fashion and architecture, with material drawn from the rich and beautiful collections of the Fashion History Museum.

Finally for all those headed to the west coat the Maritime Museum of Vancouver offers an appropriately water based exhibition for the summer in Babes & Bathers: a History of the Swimsuit.

For further details of these events and links to the different museums visit our exhibitions and events pages.

Whatever takes your fancy, there’s more than enough dress and textiles exhibition this summer to appeal to all – take the plunge and dip your toes (and more!) into a museum this summer.