V&A Online Hat Collection
The Victoria and Albert Museum, one of my favorite places in the world, has shared its extensive collection of hats online. Their significant hat collection is a revealing and exciting record of the changes in headwear over the past 17 centuries. It explores the practical to fanciful and mass-produced to bespoke, the myriad of shapes, styles, materials and sizes highlight that there is a hat for every occasion. Not merely an accessory, hats have the power to impart a message of authority, affiliation, individuality, propriety, rebellion and style.
The archive includes photos of individual hats or entire outfits, fabrics, or vintage illustrations to interviews and articles for designers like Balenciaga, Stephen Jones & the longstanding collaboration between Lee Alexander McQueen & Philip Treacy. A delightful way to explore their incredible collection from anywhere in the world.
Each image allows you to explore deeper and gives each piece's history and additional information about the designer—an invaluable resource for any hat lover.
The V&A is the world's leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects that span 5,000 years of human creativity. The museum holds many of the UK's national collections. It houses some of the most incredible resources for studying architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.
This history of the V&A is a story like no other Museum. It was founded in 1852 with a mission: to educate designers, manufacturers and the public in art and design. From its early beginnings as a Museum of Manufactures to the foundation stone laid by Queen Victoria in 1899 to today's state-of-the-art galleries, the museum has constantly evolved in its collecting and public interpretation of art and design. Its collections span 5,000 years of human creativity in virtually every medium, housed in one of the finest groups of Victorian and modern buildings in Britain. This philosophy has endured creating the richly varied set of buildings we see today. Each one now represents both a chapter of the V&A's story and a moment in British design history.
Millinery in Motion was held at the V&A to coincide with the exhibition 'Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones' The exhibition was a collaboration followed in the footsteps of the V&A’s very first fashion show in 1971, 'Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton'.
Henry Cole, the V&A's first Director, declared that the museum should be a "schoolroom for everyone". Its mission was to improve British industry standards by educating designers, manufacturers, and consumers in art and science. Acquiring and displaying the best examples of art and design contributed to this mission, but the 'schoolroom' itself was also intended to demonstrate exemplary design and decoration. The story of the design and construction of the V&A's buildings and of the personalities who guided this process is one of persistent vision and ingenuity amid the changing artistic, political and economic circumstances of the last 150 years.
Be sure to check out the other incredible V&A online exhibits:
McQueen's collaborators: Philip Treacy
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