1. Project Overview

2Against this backdrop, the authors of this article established “Not Only Dressed but Dressing: Clothing, Childhood, Creativity”, a research network funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) that brought together scholars, curators, and creative practitioners to explore this rich subject. Breaking down barriers between academic fields and between universities and museums, “Not Only Dressed” mobilized a range of scholarly approaches and museological and creative practices in order to better understand how children dress and are dressed, the dress practices—real and imaginary—with which they engage, and how all of this has changed over time. We created fresh perspectives on the role of dressing in childhood, placed childhood studies and fashion theory in conceptual dialogue with one another, and centralized dressing in the wider field of childhood studies. We were especially interested in questions of agency, as the title of the network reflects: children are both dressed and dressing—at once subject to forces of coercion and compulsion, and agents of self-construction, in a way that heightens the tension that is also present for older fashionable consumers.

3Network activity was vitally informed by the contribution of three museum partners in the UK and France—the V&A Museum of Childhood (now Young V&A) in London, the Worthing Museum on Britain’s South Coast, and the Musée du textile et de la mode de Cholet in the Pays de la Loire region of western France—all of which have significant collections of children’s clothing in their stores and exhibition spaces. Indeed, the different focuses of these museums show the taxonomic questions children’s dress can raise. Perhaps children’s clothing belongs in museums of fashion and textiles, like Cholet? Perhaps it should be housed in a museum dedicated to childhood, like Young V&A? But then, in regional museum collections which focus on everyday life, children’s clothing is also highly likely to feature. Indeed, Gerry Connelly, head of museums and exhibitions at Worthing, noted that his home institution was instructed by its municipal funders to acquire everyday clothes (including children’s clothes) because a neighbouring museum chose their remit first and opted to preserve couture! Thinking these complexities through, the network sought to explore new models of engagement with childhood clothing in museum spaces and to inform curatorial practices for future exhibitions on children’s dress.

2. Activities and Outcomes

4The main project activities took place between April and September 2022 and consisted of three one-day workshops hosted by our museum partners. The workshop themes were creativity and play (Worthing workshop), agency and control (V&A workshop), and display and usage (Cholet workshop). Prior to this we also worked with the education team at Worthing to devise and deliver a session for children that explored strategies for engaging them with historic dress collections, including making their own costumes and fashion-inspired objects, such as paper dolls.

5At the scholarly workshops, papers were presented by speakers approaching children’s clothing from a diverse range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds. As well as fashion and childhood studies specialists, such as Jennifer Farley Gordon, Aude Le Guennec, and Clare Rose, we were joined by lawyers, sociologists, curators, textile practitioners, and even an archaeologist of ancient Egypt. It was particularly important, at a time when pandemic-related restrictions had only recently been lifted, that participants had direct access to designated exhibitions/exhibition spaces and/or handling sessions in the partner museums in addition to the presentations delivered by network participants. These opportunities to touch as well as look and listen were intensely fascinating and enjoyable as well as essential in the development of our methodological objectives, which were about rethinking the display of children’s clothing.

3. Findings

4. After the Network

10The critical mass that children’s clothing now has as a topic of public and scholarly interest can be demonstrated by what has happened in new European venues and at our museum partners since the formal programme of activities and outputs for “Not Only Dressed” concluded. Network participants continue to exchange and collaborate on a variety of projects and endeavours. New ventures with new international partners are also on the horizon. Following on from a highly successful international conference in March 2024 (Material Girls and Boys: Narrated Fashion in Children’s Media), organized by Iris Schäfer at the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung at the Goethe Universität in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London’s Centre for Childhood Cultures, 2027 will see both a seminar series and exhibition co-organised by the Institut and TU Darmstadt’s Fashion & Aesthetics Section, which likewise bring together disciplinary perspectives to understand the highly charged subject of children’s hair. An exhibition on the subject will draw on this work and be held at the Struwwelpeter Museum in Frankfurt. With respect to the “Not Only Dressed” museum partners, Worthing Museum displayed Helen Hancocks’s illustrations for her children’s book Why Do We Wear Clothes? (2019), putting the intersection between childhood and clothing in the spotlight in an exhibition that ran between April and August 2023. Prompted by the acquisition of a further 800 children’s garments, the Musée du textile et de la mode in Cholet has mounted a major exhibition Couleurs d’enfance (December 2025-August 2026) which explores the significance of colour and pattern in childrenswear. Interpretation within this exhibition clearly shows the influence of the multi-source, holistic approach to children’s lives and dress which we developed in the network, with the colour green linked in text panels and the accompanying exhibition catalogue to important figures in the children’s literary universe (namely, Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar and Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, see fig. 1).

11Equally excitingly, the V&A Museum of Childhood has reopened as Young V&A: a museum of childhood creativity as opposed to a museum of the history of childhood. One of the most immediately apparent aspects of Young V&A is the pleasure and fun (and power and importance) it allows children and young people by way of dress. The heart of the museum’s Imagine Gallery is a stage which gives young visitors and their carers opportunities to see people performing roles and to try on beautiful costumes—to be feted and admired, but also to experiment. Upstairs, the Design Gallery underlines the power and possibilities of child-centred clothing design. Adjacent to designated spaces for drawing and making, garments are not just objects to admire and learn about but also springboards, prompts to creativity, and sources of imagination. If Young V&A is anything to go by, the creative potential of children’s clothing is endless. The new museum, declared Art Fund Museum of the Year 2024, also echoes the ideas underpinning our network as it shifts the emphasis from a socio-historical model of childhood to a theoretical and practical engagement with children’s creative potential and how this can be harnessed through dress and material culture.