Scent Flask with Stopper, gilt-mounted mother-of-pearl, 19th Century, Castle Museum, York Museum Trust
Museums
The DMDA is a digital museum platform to create impact for research on dress accessories explored through a closer collaborative partnership with Fashion and Textile collections. The DMDA will not only enable museums to explore rich readings of their own objects, but will bring objects from different institutional collections into correspondence with each other in a meaningful and new way.
The current pilot version of the Digital Museum is the result of a collaboration between the DMDA, the York Castle Museum (York Museums Trust) and Leeds Museums and Galleries.
Both institutions have rich holdings of dress from the eighteenth century to the contemporary and include historic dress accessories. Dress accessories are rarely displayed, photographed or fully catalogued, yet with their embeddedness in the everyday they do not require an expertise or prior learning to bring the past alive. The DMDA aims to aid museum institutions in interpreting these objects sensitively and effectively to all audiences, especially people from under-represented groups.
We thank M. Faye Prior, Assistant Curator of Costume and Textiles at the York Castle Museum, and Natalie Raw, Curator of Dress and Textiles at Leeds Museums and Galleries, for their professional, intelligent, and committed support of this initiative.
The DMDA welcomes contact from other museums, institutions, collectors and the general audience in support of deepening our understanding of dress accessories and the wider stories they tell about health, technology, and the management of our bodies, in all their diversity.
Collectors
British Compact Collectors’ Society
The British Compact Collectors’ Society (BCCS) was established in 1995 and currently has in excess of 200 members, several from overseas, and growing all the time. Some members have been collecting for many years and have extensive collections of powder compacts, and others have only recently discovered the fascination of these vintage glamour accessories and maybe have just one or two.
The Society has three main aims – the first is to provide opportunities for its members to connect with other members to share their enjoyment of collecting compacts and learn from each other. Secondly, the BCCS want to promote the appreciation and conservation of powder compacts and all the many associated items, such as: powder boxes and bowls, vanity cases and carryalls, advertisements and other related vintage glamour items. The final aim is to promote a better understanding of the social history and the changing ‘faces’ and roles of women that these items epitomise.
The BCCS has a wealth of knowledge in its members and welcome assisting, advising and working with groups and organisations, so we are excited to be an affiliated society of the DMDA.