Let's continue the Scottish thread that started yesterday with a post about the current exhibition at the National Museum of Costume (New Abbey, Dumfries), "Off the Peg: Fashion from the '40s and '50s".
Organised in conjunction with the Fashion & Textile Museum in London (the exhibition first opened in London in 2010 under a similar title), the event focuses on the '40s-'50s decade, celebrating Horrockses Fashions Limited (as stated in yesterday's post, Alastair Morton used to design textiles for them).
The company was founded in 1946 as a subsidiary of a Preston-based textile manufacturer called Horrockses, Crewdson & Company Ltd.
John Horrockses actually built the first factory in 1792, adding two further mills in 1796 and 1797.
In the 1800s, the company already boasted the greatest number of spindles in the world, with something like 4,000 workers divided in different units – spinning, weaving, bleaching and calico printing.
Apparently, the early success of the company was also attributed to its extremely strict relations with its labour forces: the company extirpated any nascent trade union formation, prosecuted operatives for quitting work without notice or for other acts of indiscipline and was also into cutting rates of pay. In a nutshell, it anticipated in the management of its labour relations the rootless behaviour of many modern companies working for the fashion industry (though you will obviously rarely find such information in any exhibition about Horrockses and fashion in Britain in the '40s...).
Horrockses started producing printed cotton dresses, becoming one of the most successful off-the-peg labels between the '40s and the '50s.
The designs - for day, evening and leisure wear - were all made using high-quality custom-designed fabrics exclusively created for the company and became widely popular since they perfectly mixed functionality and glamour.
While the dresses were made with easy-care fabrics, they still looked stylish since in some cases they had a couture quality about them.
This was the main reason why they quickly became popular also among the Royals.
The designs were sold all over Great Britain and were accompanied by very successful advertising campaigns appearing in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
A cotton full-skirted summer dress ranged between £4 and £7, a week’s wages for many young women, so they were considered pretty expensive.
The Horrockses style became famous also thanks to Alastair Morton who introduced in the company's catalogue abstract patterns, but also modern florals.
Another important textile designer, Pat Albeck, who worked for Horrockses between 1953 and 1958, had a key role in the company. Some of the best patterns remains the ones created by artists William Gear, Eduardo Paolozzi (View this photo) and Graham Sutherland.
"Off the Peg" includes evening gowns, day dresses, beach wear and housecoats in innovative prints, but also photographic and archive material that contribute to tell the story of a company at the time considered as bridging the gap between couture and ready-to-wear fashions in the post-World War II decades.
If you missed the 2010 exhibition in London and if you think you may miss this one as well, you can still discover more about Horrockses in the volume Horrockses Fashions (V&A Publishing) by Christine Boydell, that tells the history of the company through interviews, magazine spreads, illustrations and adverts.
If instead you want to learn further about the textile industry in the UK and its relations with the workers, look for volumes about early cotton mills and cotton lords in Great Britain in the 1800s.
"Off the Peg: Fashion from the '40s and '50s" is at the National Museum of Costume, New Abbey, Dumfries, until 31st October 2012.
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