Priorities, inclusions and exclusions: non-elite twentieth-century clothing in museum dress collections.

Non-elite twentieth-century clothing is an under-researched and under-collected area of dress history (Buckley and Clark, 2017; Ewing, 2001; Taylor, 2004; Worth, 2007) despite proliferation and dissemination of fashion to the masses being a defining feature of the twentieth-century (Buckley and Clark, 2017; Ewing, 2001; Worth, 2007). The importance of collecting elite fashion and high-end design is not disputed. However, the lack of non-elite clothing in collections makes it difficult to study the clothing of everyday people, dissemination of elite fashion/fashion design into non-elite clothing, the economic history of the clothing industry and the materiality of garments produced (Buckley and Clark, 2017; Styles, 2007; Petrov, 2014). My research questions are relevant to Museum dress collections today as they assess their holdings, justify their existence and navigate through a period of limited resources, cuts and austerity (Parry, 2018; Gilbert-Evans, 2016; Riegels Melchoir and Svensson, 2014; Wood, 2016).