London’s Garden Museum are curating an exhibition on Fashion and Gardens. From landscape architect Ken Smith’s ‘Chest Hair Maze’ to fashion designers that inspire gardens – the relation between landscape and fashion design is rich in history and potential. 

The exhibition opens in February with associated lectures, talks and events. Watch this space for more…

Fashion & Gardens is the first exhibition to explore the relationship between fashion and garden design, from the age of Queen Elizabeth I to the catwalks of London Fashion Week 2014. The exhibition, curated by writer, historian and Garden Museum Trustee Nicola Shulman, will identify and celebrate the many links and correspondences between gardening and fashion design. The connection has existed for centuries, but this exhibition is the first attempt to make it articulate.

We feature designers from Valentino and Alexander McQueen to Philip Treacy and Christopher Bailey who continue to be inspired by the garden. Of his Spring/Summer 2014 collection Bailey comments “I wanted this idea of an English rose garden. There are all these very dusky, gentle, soft colours and then all of a sudden you’ll see a spiky, very red rose in the middle of it.”

The Museum will provide an insight into the private gardens of our leading designers: we ask why so many garden designers make gardens from which they draw private inspiration.

We will examine how fashion and gardens have shared some of their most alluring decorative elements and the phenomena of particular flowers’ popularity at particular periods.

In the age of plant collectors such as John Tradescant, dresses at the royal court were embroidered with accurate botanical images of flowers from overseas, and garden designs began to inspire clothes – as in Lettice Newdigate aged two (top left), a portrait of a Jacobean heiress in a garden which will be exhibited in London for the first time since it was painted in 1606.

The exhibition features examples of the flower craze of camellias in the 1840s to sunflowers in the 1890s and daisies and Mary Quant in the 1960s, including a number of remarkable loans from the British Museum, National Gallery and several fashion houses. The V&A have made an exceptional contribution to the exhibition of three rare designs on silk by Anna-Maria Garthwaite.

The British Museum is loaning a rarely seen 1779 collage of the Common Corn Poppy by Mary Delany (1700 –1788.) Mary was an avid gardener and accomplished at needlework, drawing, painting, and cutting paper.

The preoccupation with floral decoration is brought right up to date with more recent examples and images of floral and garden themes in contemporary dress and accessories, like Yves St Laurent’s Haute Couture 1988 Iris and Sunflower jackets, after Van Gogh, embroidered by Lesage. Valentino’s exceptionally beautiful Spring/Summer  2013 couture collection achieves a new expression of the garden theme:  here entire parterres are scrolled out over evening dresses, and the wrought-iron arabesques of park gates appear re-imagined as evening cloaks and capes.

The exhibition asks the question ‘how did people dress to garden, or to visit gardens’? The invention of the landscape garden in 18C England led to a new style of clothing – which, ultimately, leads to the English outdoor style of today. When the garden was open to the wider landscape, a new style of informal, tailored clothing was created. There is an even more particularly English flavour to this aspect of the show. It will be seen that what is most distinct in English fashion has developed as a consequence of enthusiasm for outdoor life in general, and gardens in particular.

In England, we have been perfecting and adapting this look for more than two hundred and fifty years. Our exhibition will trace the line from the 18C “redingote” through the 19C “walking suit” devised by Redfern, and the “Tailormade” of the early 20C, through to its current manifestation in the type of careless country-house chic epitomised by beauties like Stella Tennant and photographed for fashion magazines.

Fashion & Gardens will analyse the way we deck out our gardens as we do our bodies, to magnify our sense of the four seasons: our ideal dress and our ideal garden amplify the impressions of the passing months and help us to experience our lives with more intensity.

“Fashion and gardens are an irresistible mix.  So many designers have been inspired by gardens through the centuries and this exhibition is a fascinating illustration of how nature has influenced both how our clothes have looked and how they have been worn over the years.”

– Alexandra Shulman, Editor, British Vogue (Media Partner)

For an exclusive insight into the exhibition why not join us for one of our Curator’s Tours. Find out more and book your tickets here. 

Or, join Curator Nicola Shulman for an indepth insight into the creation of the show with her lecture on 06/03/14. Book your tickets here. 

Exhibition opens to the public 07 February 2014 and closes on 27 April. For general viewing, you do not need to book in advance to see the exhibition. You can purchase your tickets on the door.

Image: Ken Smith, “Chest Hair Maze,” Hair Gardens, Max Fish Gallery, 1998. Photomontage. http://pruned.blogspot.co.uk/2006_06_01_archive.html