'Downton' exhibit spotlights era's fashion

  • The fabulous fashions and financial perils of the aristocratic life on an English country estate underlie every episode of “Downton Abbey” on PBS.

    And now they take the spotlight in Richmond at “Dressing Downton: Changing Fashion for Changing Times,” which opens today at the Virginia Historical Society as the first traveling exhibit in the museum’s expanded and redesigned gallery space.

    The glamour of a bejeweled society comes through on the TV screen, but not the intricate detail of the costumes.

    A red satin dress, for instance, from the night Lady Mary scandalously romanced a Turkish diplomat, combines lace from a turn-of-the-century Spanish evening dress with pleated chiffon for delicate cap sleeves and trim. In back, where the camera would never show, chiffon rosettes make a statement at the waistline.

    A handful of the 36 costumes from Seasons 1-4 are entirely original to the years around World War I; several include details preserved from original dresses; and some are completely new but accurately reflect the period. All are beautiful.

    Richmond is the first place to display “Dressing Downton” exclusively in a gallery space. At Biltmore in Asheville, N.C., and the Paine Art Center in Oshkosh, Wis., the setting was a historic house.

    An earlier Downton Abbey show at Winterthur also included some of the same costumes, said Nancy Lawson, registrar/costume curator for the “Dressing Downton” team at Exhibits Development Group, which produced this exhibit. Lawson made choices for the new exhibit with a costumer’s eye, creating a presentation that dazzles as well as educates.

    Costumes for “Downton Abbey” were created by Cosprop, a London-based costume company known for both beauty and accuracy in films such as “Titanic,” “Lincoln” and “The King’s Speech.”

    While those fashions will get the greatest attention, the financial perils will also come to light in artifacts from Virginia House, an English country house rebuilt in Richmond in the 1920s.

    If the fictional Robert, Earl of Grantham, had failed in his moneymaking attempts at Downton Abbey after World War I, his ancestral family home might have met a similar fate. Without money to support the lifestyle and maintain the properties, owners had to sell their homes to people like Alexander and Virginia Weddell of Richmond.

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    “Until we had to piece these two themes together, it hadn’t occurred to me how the Weddells came to own the part of what became Virginia House,” said Andrew Talkov, vice president for programs at the Virginia Historical Society. “In 1925, the priory that makes up the central portion of Virginia House was sold to the Weddells in a demolition sale. This is a huge theme in ‘Downton Abbey,’ the decline of the aristocratic lifestyle in the early 20th century and the greater democratization of British culture. ...

    “The Weddells picked up on a theme and transferred the story to Virginia,” Talkov said.

    To further illuminate the intertwining themes, Virginia House will be open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the exhibition.

    The story of the Weddells could easily have been used for an episode of “Downton Abbey,” Talkov said.

    See photos of the fabulous fashions from "Downton Abbey" as they take the spotlight in Richmond at “Dressing Downton: Changing Fashion for Cha…

    Weddell was part of the diplomatic corps in Calcutta, where his future wife was visiting on an around-the-world trip with family friends. He was 47 and never married. She was a recent widow. Romance blossomed as they sailed back to the United States together, and they were married only four months after they met.

    Their deaths were “something out of a dramatic television series as well,” Talkov said. On their way to Arizona for the winter, the Weddells were killed on New Year’s Day in 1948 when their train collided with another in a bad snowstorm.

    The Weddells had already given Virginia House to the historical society in 1929, the year after it was completed. They had planned from the beginning for one wing to be used as a historical museum while they continued to live in the main portion of their elegant adaptation of aristocratic architecture.

    It’s not Downton Abbey, but it’s a pretty good substitute for this side of the Atlantic.

    “We’re really excited to be hosting this traveling exhibition,” Talkov said. “There are very few television series that I can think of that have such a devoted fan base over the course of the five seasons it’s been on. We’re really happy to host it during a period when the final season will start.

    “We’ll have a lot of Anglophile love here in the winter of 2015.”

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