Not Only Dressed but Dressing: Clothing, Childhood, Creativity

A vibrant and lucrative part of the global fashion industry, children's dress is also harnessed extensively in museums, schools and heritage sites to bring histories, ideas and artefacts to life. The vociferous popular debates which regularly erupt in relation to specific outfits, practices, occasions or marketing decisions indicate that children's dress today is being taken more seriously than ever before.

What children wear reveals fundamental adult assumptions about what children need or deserve, as well as key insights into children's lived experiences and attitudes.

Despite this, scholars and curators to date have given little sustained attention to children's dress and to how dress is used to communicate with children in museum settings. By bringing together academics, curators and creative practitioners at a series of three workshops, this network will galvanise understanding of both clothing and childhood. The workshops will explore:

1. Communication and Usage: How can children's dress be interpreted in fresh ways and used to stimulate creativity in museum and heritage settings?

2. Agency and Intergenerational Control: Across time, what have been the power dynamics between children and adults in relation to dress? 3. Creativity and Play: How can different dress-based practices enable children's self-expression and individuation?

This network has a distinctive focus on the relationship between children's clothing, design, agency and creativity, moving beyond the socio-historical evidence provided by children's dress. It not only brings together UK-based and international scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (including art and design, history, law, literary studies, sociology, and theatre and performance) with expertise in childhood and/or dress, but also seeks to foster dialogue between university researchers, museum professionals and artists in order to forge new methodologies.

Network participants will explore childhood and dress in relation to a range of concerns including gender and sexualisation, race and national identity, children's rights, and activism (e.g. climate protests against fast fashion). Taking place within or showcasing leading collections of children's costume at the V&A Museum of Childhood, the Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, and the Musée du textile et de la mode in Cholet, France, the workshops will explore (specific) garments as a key source but will also position these within and alongside a diverse range of textual, visual and other material sources including memoirs, oral histories, children's books, photographs, paintings, newspaper and magazine coverage, trade items, and ephemera.

Network activity aims to generate subsequent collaborative research projects between participants, as well as new creative works inspired by children's clothing.

'Childhood, Clothing, Creativity' responds to changes at the V&A Museum of Childhood, which is currently seeking to redeploy its collection of children's costume as it aims to become the world's leading museum of design and creativity for children, families and young people, and to inspire curiosity and build creative confidence in future generations. Network findings and discussions are planned eventually to feed into education and/or display in the Museum's three new permanent galleries, slated to open in 2022.

The network also engages children collaboratively in the research. Network activity will begin with a collection visit at Worthing Museum where children respond to the clothing on display in creative ways (e.g. writing, drawing, video making), as well as to reflect on their own experiences of clothing. At the three network workshops, the children's responses will underpin the discussion.

A final event, held after the grant's conclusion, will launch a section of the project website that archives the children's thoughts and creative work, allowing the children to see how their ideas shaped workshop discussion.