Hemmed in by dummies
1920S FASHION: EXTENSIVE BERNBERG COSTUME COLLECTION IS WELL WORTH A LOOK
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she visits Museum Africa.
T hese dummies don’t have heads. An already manic looking visage of a mannequin or dummy can discomfortingly be confused – by having on its head an ill-fitting plastic wig – with that of a psycho stalker.
I’ve been trying to track the Bernberg sisters’ costume or clothing collection from where it was in Forest Town in 2007. It turns out it’s been in a vault at the understaffed Museum Africa, without a fashion curator until very recently.
We’re surrounded by the dummies, or mannequins, dressed in fabulous 1920s dresses of exquisitely delicate fabrics, embellished way beyond any practicality.
Talking to the curator Pholoso More has me thinking about these clothes for the first time as a philosophic art collection rather than individual museum pieces.
I can consider comfortably some historic women’s fashion through someone else’s eyes, knowledge and experience.
Heather wants to visit the storeroom with more dummies and the rest of the Bernberg collection packed in plastic bags, but today workmen are busy there so she’ll have to return for that.
More maintains that this century-old fashion provided women with new freedom and comfort after the corseted strictures of Edwardian times had forced them into S-shapes of bosoms and hips. These women, he says, were free to move, wearing loose clothes, physically emancipated.
I know women then caused some of their own discomfort by bandaging their boobs so that the straight clothes of the new fashions hung better on them, but that is a detail.
Since clothes like these were presumably worn by a small section of society, I wonder how they appeared to the other sections.
In any case, this is about Mores’ comment about women’s symbolic freedom.
Musing, we amble through to a different space, where More has created another exhibition statement about a different kind of discomforting versus comforting power.
Here are 12 military jackets on torso mannequins, depicting might and victory in every symbolic metallic stitch.
He points out that one nippedwaist jacket is on a woman mannequin. I thought the prominent chest was that of an uncomfortably corseted, headless Italian general.
Bernberg Costume Collection – Museum Africa, 121 Lilian Ngoyi St, Newtown