The Museum of Savage Beauty: The 'Bell Jar' dress

Senior Costume Mounting Specialist Lara Flecker describes mounting the Alexander McQueen 'Bell Jar' dress. Natural Dis-tinction, Un-Natural Selection, Spring/Summer 2009. http://www.vam.ac.uk/museumofsavagebeauty/ Transcript: I work in textile conservation and I was responsible for mounting this dress for photography and also for the exhibition afterwards. It’s probably the most sparkly costume we’ve ever had in our studio at the V&A; it literally hurts your eyes. Not only that but it’s also one of the heaviest costumes we’ve had and for this reason we needed to take a lot of care both handling and mounting it on a mannequin. You would think that actually dressing clothes on mannequins is quite straight forward but actually it’s much more complicated than it looks. In this case, the dress is meant to look like a Victorian bell jar so we had to help create that shape, and we do this by applying padding to the torso of the dress stand that it was going on to help create the bodice and support the bodice and then also an additional skirt support that helps create that amazing bell jar skirt. The dress is covered in Swarovski crystals, which is why it’s so heavy and we were extremely lucky that it didn’t actually require any conservation because often beaded things you find that some of the beads are coming off and have gone missing but in this case we were very lucky that it was in very good nick.