Margaret Maynard, a prominent historian of dress in Australia, has criticised the marginalisation of dress in public collections. She argues that, ‘in comparison to other heritage items dress has an exceptionally poor standing at both a national and regional level’. This is matched by the ‘lack of serious published material’ on dress, which Maynard says is ‘regarded either as trivial, mundanely domestic or extraneous to the “real” interests of most galleries and museums’.[1] Indeed, the collections held by such repositories are skewed towards women’s high fashion and the decorative arts; working clothes, prisoners clothes and European-influenced Indigenous clothes are rare inclusions. Of course, this is related to the life cycle of the objects themselves: high fashion items are more likely to be worn just once, rather than be worn to pieces. However, it also reflects the complexities of dress in terms of class and gender, and its uncomfortably close association with the biological body and its functions.[2]

Links

The Museum for Textiles in Canada

American Textile History Museum collections page

National Museum of Australia has some convict clothing, leg irons and tickets of leave

The Melbourne Museum holds a significant collection of asylum clothing (the Psychiatric Services collection), from the 1950s.