Europeana Fashion

I think many people already heard about this initiative, but it’s so great I wanted to share it here.

Europeana Fashion is a new website which aims to bring together the fashion collections of different European partners. Basically, it’s a very large online museum collection database of 22 collections, all catered to fashion and fashion history. The great thing is that everything is in one place, and that many of the collections were not digitally accessible before! There’s info on every item, and often also a link to the original museum website.

The exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag about which I wrote a while back included many dresses which were not in the online collection. So I was pleasantly surprised when I found that they were participating in the project, and many of the dresses in the exhibition are now indexed and online! I was also surprised to see how many more dresses they actually had in the collection. The exhibition was quite large, but I don’t think they displayed even a third of what they have. It’s a shame there’s no permanent exhibition! Because of the difficult searching, I saved many dresses from the museum to a pinterest board. Only the ones which are photographed well are included though, many dresses only have bad photo’s, taken on a hanger. Dresses which should be worn over a hoop and corset don’t do so well on the hanger…

The only downside to the website is that you can’t search by year, and that many key-words are in their original language. This makes searching a bit difficult. It’s a great place to just browse and be inspired though.

In this post, some of my favorite dresses from the Gemeentemuseum, in pretty professional pictures. (I’ll probably do some follow-up posts with my detail shots from the exhibition included!)

Evening gown, with gorgeous embroidery on the hem

Silk striped dress, the top of the skirt is pieced together, and the ribbon here hides a horizontal strip of fabric for the ‘waistband’. Saving fabric!

I’m in love with this dress. So many gorgeous details of lace, pintucks and inserts.

Photo’s don’t do this justice. It’s black, velvet and lace, with bright orange detailing and loads of shiny beading.

1830’s wedding dress. I’m usually not a fan of this period, but I actually really love this dress. All those pleats in the sleeves!

Pink silk and lace. There’s something so elegant about this.

The details in the beading in this dress are gorgeous.

This was one of my favorite dresses in the exhibition, and it’s such a shame that it wasn’t displayed so well. It was near the end of a display, with dresses surrounding it, making it difficult to see details.