Exhibition review of 'Liberty, Art, Fashion and Fabrics' at Dovecot Gallery, Edinburgh.

It is rather extraordinary for a department store to promote an educational agenda, but in the mid 1880s that is precisely what Arthur Lansenby Liberty did with the establishment of the Costumes (also known as ‘Art Dress’) Department in his Liberty shop. According to the store’s earliest catalogues, dating from 1886, the department was ‘arranged for the study and execution of Costumes, embracing all periods of Historic Dress, together with such modification of really beautiful examples as may be adapted to the conventionalities of modern life, without rendering them eccentric or bizarre’. The legacy of the Costumes Department is clear to see throughout the ‘Liberty Art Fabrics & Fashion’ exhibition at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios, where more than a century’s worth of billowing sleeves and flowing skirts – not bizarre, but perhaps eccentric – are now on display.

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