Not Only Dressed but Dressing: Clothing, Childhood, Creativity

A vibrant and lucrative part of the global fashion industry, children's dress is also harnessed extensively in museums, schools and heritage sites to bring histories, ideas and artefacts to life. The vociferous popular debates which regularly erupt in relation to specific outfits, practices, occasions or marketing decisions indicate that children's dress today is being taken more seriously than ever before. What children wear reveals fundamental adult assumptions about what children need or deserve, as well as key insights into children's lived experiences and attitudes.

Despite this, scholars and curators to date have given little sustained attention to children's dress and to how dress is used to communicate with children in museum settings. By bringing together academics, curators and creative practitioners at a series of three workshops, this network will galvanise understanding of both clothing and childhood. The workshops will explore:

1. Communication and Usage: How can children's dress be interpreted in fresh ways and used to stimulate creativity in museum and heritage settings?
2. Agency and Intergenerational Control: Across time, what have been the power dynamics between children and adults in relation to dress?
3. Creativity and Play: How can different dress-based practices enable children's self-expression and individuation?

This network has a distinctive focus on the relationship between children's clothing, design, agency and creativity, moving beyond the socio-historical evidence provided by children's dress. It not only brings together UK-based and international scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (including art and design, history, law, literary studies, sociology, and theatre and performance) with expertise in childhood and/or dress, but also seeks to foster dialogue between university researchers, museum professionals and artists in order to forge new methodologies.

Network participants will explore childhood and dress in relation to a range of concerns including gender and sexualisation, race and national identity, children's rights, and activism (e.g. climate protests against fast fashion). Taking place within or showcasing leading collections of children's costume at the V&A Museum of Childhood, the Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, and the Musée du textile et de la mode in Cholet, France, the workshops will explore (specific) garments as a key source but will also position these within and alongside a diverse range of textual, visual and other material sources including memoirs, oral histories, children's books, photographs, paintings, newspaper and magazine coverage, trade items, and ephemera. Network activity aims to generate subsequent collaborative research projects between participants, as well as new creative works inspired by children's clothing.

'Childhood, Clothing, Creativity' responds to changes at the V&A Museum of Childhood, which is currently seeking to redeploy its collection of children's costume as it aims to become the world's leading museum of design and creativity for children, families and young people, and to inspire curiosity and build creative confidence in future generations. Network findings and discussions are planned eventually to feed into education and/or display in the Museum's three new permanent galleries, slated to open in 2022.

The network also engages children collaboratively in the research. Network activity will begin with a collection visit at Worthing Museum where children respond to the clothing on display in creative ways (e.g. writing, drawing, video making), as well as to reflect on their own experiences of clothing. At the three network workshops, the children's responses will underpin the discussion. A final event, held after the grant's conclusion, will launch a section of the project website that archives the children's thoughts and creative work, allowing the children to see how their ideas shaped workshop discussion.

This network responds not only to scholarly concerns and preoccupations but also to pressing needs and debates issuing from beyond academia. It is designed to benefit the following key groups:

Practitioners in the museum and the heritage sector

The network aims to engage the dozens of UK museums with collections of children's costume. In addition to the collections in museums and galleries dedicated to childhood (e.g. V&A Museum of Childhood, Edinburgh Museum of Childhood) or fashion (e.g. Platt Hall), numerous regional museums have such collections, including considerable holdings that are not currently on show--in part because of the complex questions of display and interpretation that are the subject of this network. An even greater number of museums use costume and dress in their education programmes. The project partners have been selected for representing different museological contexts for children's dress: museums of childhood (V&A Museum of Childhood) and of fashion (Musée du textile choletais), and regional museums with significant costume collections (Worthing).

To impact museum and heritage organisations, the network will bring nationally and internationally renowned scholars, curators and artists to network events at project partners; involve curators as central network participants; and work closely with project partners to shape the parameters for the workshops. In addition to a specific workshop focused on innovative redisplay, all workshops will incorporate activities designed to engage with this issue. In particular, network activity responds to the planned redevelopment of the V&A Museum of Childhood and the methodological shift this redevelopment models, from a socio-historical model of childhood to a theoretical and practical engagement with children's creative potential and how this can be harnessed through dress/material culture.

Artists who take inspiration from children's dress

The particular interest in creativity aims to enhance the practice of artists whose work engages children's dress as a resource and point of inspiration (see Visual Evidence). This will take place through hands-on archival work in collections of children's costume but also through the dialogue established between participants who are creative practitioners, and those who are scholars or curators working in this area. The network hopes to inspire the artist participants to produce work engaging with the museum collections they visit; these works will be documented on the project website.

Children and their parents

In addition to being co-producers of knowledge about dress via the network, children and their parents are proposed beneficiaries of this research. This is intended to happen as insights from network discussions reshape how material culture is displayed and interpreted for children, and feed into museum learning aimed at children. The children who attend the initial event will be still more directly impacted, as their voices and testimony will both reshape the understandings of childhood, creativity and dress arising from this project, and influence the curatorial strategies of the heritage organisations involved in the network.

Policy-makers

Governmental interest in children's dress often focuses on commercialisation and sexualisation, as in the Bailey Review completed in 2011. The network seeks to change the policy discussion so that it considers children's dress not only through this (of course important) negative lens but also as a positive part of childhood experiences and a crucial tool for engaging children with heritage and design processes. Dissemination of the research findings to policy-makers will occur through established channels in the two interdisciplinary research centres to which the PI and Co-I belong: the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY) at Sussex, and the Centre for Childhood Cultures at Queen Mary/the V&A Museum of Childhood.