Glamorous dresses, tailored suits and other outfits, all part of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, are going on display this week at Kensington Palace in London.
The exhibition, “Dress Codes,” showcases 34 pieces worn by royals such as Queen Victoria and Diana, Princess of Wales, along with clothing worn at court by debutantes, diplomats and others “to show the breadth of the collection,” said Matthew Storey, the exhibition’s curator. He is a collections curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, a charitable organization formed in 1998 that manages six palaces including Kensington and Hampton Court Palace, where the dress collection — with 9,925 objects including clothing, sketches, diaries and related materials — is stored.
The exhibition opens with a red silk beaded gown by Bruce Oldfield, made for Diana to wear during a 1987 state visit to Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Storey, sitting in the vestibule of the collection’s archive space, said the gown was chosen because it reflects the show’s theme. It “conforms to the rules of evening dress,” he said. “But she also wore it on a tour of the Middle East, so it speaks to that planning that goes into royal tours, and, with the long sleeves and high neckline, it was appropriate for Middle Eastern culture.”
Other pieces, however, broke with convention, such as the houndstooth tweed suit worn in the early 1930s by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor. The suit, Mr. Storey said, reflected a “relaxed style, wearing those brown soft country fabrics in town.”
And, he added, the trouser cuffs, called turnups in Britain, were “an act of youthful, fashionable rebellion” because the prince’s father, George V, “hated turnups.”
Some of the exhibits were recently acquired, such as the black polka-dot cotton draped gown and pink striped taffeta underdress that the British designer Vivienne Westwood wore to Buckingham Palace in 2006 when she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Newly acquired pieces can require treatment because they have not gone through any conservation process, said Libby Thompson, a textile treatment conservation supervisor for the collection.
Consider another newly acquired piece going on display for the first time: a 1920s gold lamé damask wedding dress, created by Elizabeth Handley-Seymour, a popular designer of the period in London, and worn by one of Queen Mary’s maids of honor. Its tiara headdress “was very crushed, so it needed reshaping and that took a bit of time, looking at source material to see what shape it should be,” Ms. Thompson said. Some of its floral petals, made of paraffin wax, even had to be reaffixed using adhesive applied with the tip of a pin.
For Mr. Storey, the most significant piece in the show is Queen Victoria’s black silk bodice from the late 1860s or early 1870s, in part because so little of her clothing has survived from the period around Prince Albert’s death in 1861 up to 1900.
Made from panels of black silk, with boning around the waist, “you start to get very familiar with what it would have been like to meet Queen Victoria,” he said, as “you get a sense of her size, her shape, the impact, especially when you put the clothes on a mannequin.”
Entrance to the exhibition, which runs through Nov. 30, is included in tickets to Kensington Palace, which have scheduled times and are available from the Historic Royal Palaces website. Prices vary, but an adult ticket is 24.70 pounds ($31.10).
