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You are here: Home /  Discover North Herts /  Art, Museums and Heritage /  Hitchin Museum and Art Gallery /  Costume collection

Costume Collection

Hitchin Museum's costume collection comprises some 4000 items and is thought to be the largest collection of its kind in the county.

It includes men's, women's and children's clothes and accessories, household furnishings and needlework samplers. A large proportion of the items date to the Victorian period, but the collection includes items from the 18th century to the present day.

Among the wide range of garments are christening robes, wedding dresses and mourning clothes, evening gowns, wartime utility clothing, uniforms and modern high street clothing.

The textile collection includes examples of the many different craft skills which were particularly popular among ladies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are patchwork quilts, samplers, lace and embroidery. We also hold a large collection of fashion related material including fashion plates, magazines, shop and mail order catalogues, magazines, newspaper adverts and photographs. All of these are valuable as records of the clothes that people have worn and the way that they wore them.

We also have a collection of dolls from the eighteenth century to the 1990s, including elegant wooden, wax and china dolls, homely rag dolls to well known plastic figures like Barbie and Action Man.

Man's waistcoat circa 1840

Close up of waistcoat's fabric

A more extensive selection of images of items from the costume collection can be viewed online at the East of England Broadband Network's Gallery.

Cotton Stockingette bathing costume, 1920s	Beaded evening dress 1925.	Four piece dress (bodice, skirt, over- skirt, chemisette) in grey green silk with pagoda sleeves and bustle. 1870s
Yellow Georgette Beaded evening dress. 1925.	Printed cotton day dress with leg of mutton sleeves and hand-embroidered muslin accessories. 1834.	Silk and moire silk evening dress with long Magyar sleeves. 1912.