"I don't know why we bother with corsets. Men don't wear them and they look perfectly normal in their clothes" — Lady Sybil Crawley, Downton Abbey
“Dressing the Abbey features 35 beautiful costumes from the internationally acclaimed television series Downton Abbey. Each costume represents a moment in the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their staff, who lived on the Downton Abbey estate. This fictional series follows members of the household from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 through the first World War and into the summer of 1927.
The end of the Edwardian era, at the outset of the first World War, marks dramatic shifts in both the lives of the English aristocracy and the fashions they wore. By the end of the war years, the grand Yorkshire estate of Downton Abbey seemed like an old relic in the norm-busting era of the Roaring Twenties.
With societal change came new fashion, especially for the young women of Downton. Shorter hair and hemlines replaced corseted silhouettes and long skirts. Women began to engage in politics and social causes.
Inspired by period fashion plates, magazines, paintings, patterns, and photographs, the exhibition’s wardrobe is a mixture of old and new designs. Some costumes were custom made for the series. Others are original period pieces. A few costumes in the exhibition were created by the award-winning London-based costumiers, CosProp.”
The Charles Allis English Tudor-style mansion, designed by Alexander Eschweiler — a prominent local architect and completed in 1911, is at once elegant with its marble hall and staircase, functional with this cutting-edge lighting and plumbing, and whimsical with its basement bowling alley. I lived across the street from the museum for two years in the mid-1990s and never visited until last year. It’s certainly worth a tour even after the Dressing the Abbey exhibit closes after this weekend.
