“Who Gives a Frock?” Valerie D. Mendes, Jean Muir and the Building of the National Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Abstract

This essay investigates the private and public responsibilities of building the national collection of textiles and fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Taking the British designer Jean Muir’s collection as a case study and drawing on previously unpublished oral history recordings by Dr Linda Sandino, it will interrogate the way in which Valerie D. Mendes, Assistant Keeper of Textiles (1975-1990) and Keeper of the Department of Textiles and Dress (1990-2001) developed the V&A’s fashion collection in the wake of Cecil Beaton’s seminal exhibition Fashion: an Anthology (1971). The essay takes the form of an historical narrative interwoven with extracts from the departmental archive and Mendes’ own commentaries. It is titled after her 1996 Courtauld Institute lecture, Who Gives a Frock?.