Cathie Dingwall, Deputy Head of Service Management, was interviewed earlier this month for an arts event in London, Streetstyle Exhibition: from Teddy Boys to Grime Kids, Curating Subcultures Today – celebrating 25 years since the original Streetstyle exhibition.
Cathie was a 20th Century dress curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London for nearly seven years. She curated the original ground breaking Street Style subcultural dress exhibition and had a book published off the back of it. Cathie tells us about the experience, and why it’s still important today.
“I spent three and a half years at the V&A collecting subcultural dress -directly from the people who actually wore it at the time. This involved some advertising, particularly for the older clothes – but I also sometimes spotted someone in the street or in a nightclub, and had to ask them if I could buy or borrow their outfit for the exhibition!
“We had some outfits donated by famous people. We used Bryan Ferry’s sequined biker jacket; and I went to the house of Jerry Dammers from The Specials to collect the two-tone suit he loaned to the exhibition. That was a strange experience!
“The V&A had previously only collected couture (high fashion) pieces. This was the first time that the importance of subcultural dress – and the effect it had on couture – had been recognised in the mainstream. Nobody had ever done this before – it was a seminal piece of work around something that nobody had considered important up until then. In the exhibition, we displayed examples of subcultural dress with the couture pieces that had picked up on it.
“Couture still uses subcultural dress as inspiration to this very day. The current Streetstyle Exhibition recognises this and has continued the collection, from where we stopped in 1994 up to current subcultural fashion such as Grime.”
The current Street Style exhibition is on at the Trinity Art Gallery, London, from 15 November to 7 December 2019.