Absolutely Fabulous Fashion

Claire Saul joins curator Grace Evans as she prepares for the latest fashion exhibition at Chertsey Museum.

This year has been one favoured with high profile shows of vintage fashion, but for the highest quality exhibits and expertise any week, head to Chertsey Museum, where the nationally significant Olive Matthews Collection of Costume offers a glimpse of fashionable dress embracing over four centuries.

Following the Victorian passion for self-improving hobbies, 12-year-old, London-born Olive was given a weekly allowance to encourage her collecting of antique fashion and accessories. Over the next four decades she amassed around 3,000 pieces, many of them exceptional and rare, plus textiles, silver, ceramics and more, ranging from 1600 to the early Victorian period.

“Olive became very knowledgeable and she had a very good eye,” says Grace Evans, Keeper of Costume at Chertsey Museum.

“For example, she once found a very rare 17th century man’s nightcap at a market stall in Camden Town. She was told that it was a Victorian smoking cap and managed to purchase it at a bargain price. Today it is one of the treasures of our collection.”

NEW BEGINNINGS

Three decades after her move to Virginia Water at the outbreak of the Second World War, the elderly Miss Matthews found the perfect home for her collection in Chertsey Museum, where it arrived after the formation of the Olive Matthews Collection Trust in 1969. Items from the collection went on display in a special fashion gallery when the museum opened on Windsor Street in 1972. Olive sadly passed away in 1979 aged 92, leaving behind not only her incredible legacy, but also a number of pieces of correspondence advising on its care and display.