Costumes at Kensington Palace

One of the Curators at Kensington Palace, Isabella Coraca, was a mentor on the Open Palace Programme last year so she knew all about the types of places we had been to.

Isabella Coraca is a dress historian and she is in partly in charge of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection which consists of 12,000 items.

We got taken up to the room where the costume archive is. The room consisted of multiple boxes, each labelled with an identifier number and a photograph showing the contents of the box. 

She had laid out on the table 3 very precious items for us to look at. We were allowed to take photos of these but not publish them online. One was an 18th century men's court suit which was silk with very fine embroidery.

The next item was a costume designed by George IV for his coronation, which was worn by a man in the procession. George IV designed all the costumes for people to wear at his coronation in 1821.

The third item was the most special - it was a box containing multiple pairs of baby shoes that were worn by Queen Victoria and her children. 

After this, the other Curator Claudia Williams showed us around the current exhibition 'Victoria Reveiled' outlining the challenges she faced curating this exhibition. There were costumes worn by Queen Victoria, including one that she wore to her coronation (below) and also some dolls that she had when she was a child.

One of the challenges they face is that to preserve costumes, they are only supposed to display for 1 year at a time then they have to go back into storage. So they have to rotate the dresses and change which ones are on display.

Currently they are preparing for the 200 year anniversary of Victoria's birth, so they are looking for new objects to acquire.

We got taken downstairs and given a task to complete which was a fake auction, and in groups we were given an acquisition budget and 10 items to choose from. Each  group had to decide which items they would purchase with the money, then justify why this would be an important addition to the Royal Collection. My group chose a tartan dress worn by Princess Diana in 1982. The items weren't there, we were only given photos of each item. But we did see this tartan dress at Hampton Court Palace yesterday. Then we had time to look around Kensington Gardens.

In the evening we all went to the pub for drinks to say farewell to the Director of the Programme as she was going to be busy taking care of the 2nd program which started a few days ago.