Exhibit explores ocean travel

Museum celebrates golden era of posh trans-Atlantic liners

SALEM, Mass. — This was the golden era for ocean travel: when ladies wore floor-length ball gowns, sometimes with parasols in hand, and gents donned flared frock-coats that gave them an hourglass figure, a style inspired by Prince Albert.

Opulence and beauty were paramount for the cruise liner.

Fans can now relive this bygone era through some telltale relics on display at a new exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. The Salem museum partnered with London’s Victoria and Albert museum for the show, which opened this month and runs through Oct. 9.

The exhibit, called “Ocean Liners: Glamor, Speed, and Style,” tells a narrative of society’s love of ocean travel and how these ships evolved over the 100 years they ruled the seas.

“Ocean liners conveyed ideas, they were this special place where anything was possible,” said Daniel Finamore, a curator for the museum’s exhibit.

Indeed, glamour, speed and style were ideas with which ocean liners were associated. The public was most fascinated by speed. “The latest ship had to be the fastest,” Finamore said.

There are more than 200 works from the 19th and 20th centuries on display, including textiles, furniture, models, photographs and fashion.

Of course, any visual story about ocean liners wouldn’t be complete without some artifacts from the “unsinkable” Titanic, which broke apart and sank in 1912 after the ship’s captain ignored warnings and ran the boat into an iceberg.

From the Titanic, there is a wooden deckchair with broken caning and a piece of hand carved wooded archway, the largest surviving piece of woodwork from the Titanic. Both the deckchair and archway piece were found floating in the water near where the ship sank.