The Bowes Museum’s Textiles collections

In July 2022 Felicia met with the Bowes’ new textiles’ curator, Rachel Whitworth. They wandered through the Bowes’ exciting collections and displays and discussed how the museum and project might collaborate to further the museum’s founders’, Josephine and John Bowes’ original mission of connecting the North East of England to the world through art, a vision still alive in the museum’s ambition to be “the North's Museum of Art, Fashion and Design and to enrich people's lives by promoting knowledge, understanding and enjoyment.”

Amongst its many riches, the Bowes’ is also home to a stunning collections of textiles, costumes, and fashions dating back hundreds of years, displayed in its redeveloped Fashion and Textile gallery. For an eighteenth-century historian, interested in global histories of consumption, trade, and technology transfer, this is a slice of heaven: French silks smuggled into Britain and made thanks to the techniques brought by Italian weavers a century earlier; Indian finely-woven, printed and painted cottons with Chinese-inspired designs that Europeans prized and whose intrinsic qualities they tried in vain to reproduce for more than 150 years; and fine woollens coloured with organic dyestuffs traded from the far corners of the world.

For more information on the museum’s textiles and fashions’ gallery click here https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/collection/fashion/

Read more about the history of the Bowes’ and the founders’ mission for bringing world-class Western art to the North East of England here: http://museums.eu/museum/details/417/the-bowes-museum