Dress of the Year

What will be considered the iconic dress of 2015? Join fashion experts Richard Lester and Rosemary Harden, with editor Matthew Freedman, to explore five decades of award-winning fashion, drawn from the stunning Dress of the Year collection at the Fashion Museum, Bath.

From Mary Quant in 1963 to Christopher Kane in 2013, the talk presents the designers and garments chosen by journalism’s foremost writers to represent definitive moments in international fashion in the last 50 years. The scheme, first started in 1963, requires a different fashion expert to choose the ensemble from the international fashion collections that they feel is the most exciting, or directional, or simply sums up the year in fashion. The announcement of each winner is widely covered in the British press, and the ensemble selected then becomes part of the Fashion Museum, Bath’s Dress of the Year collection, and a permanent record of the changes of fashion.

Among the extraordinary roll-call of design names are Mary Quant, Jean Muir, Ossie Clark, Biba, Calvin Klein, Karl Lagerfeld, Margaret Howell, Katharine Hamnett, Giorgio Armani, John Galliano, Paul Smith, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Ralph Lauren, Donatella Versace, Tom Ford, Marni, Prada, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss for Top Shop, Vivienne Westwood and Sarah Burton. The outfits have been selected by a Who’s Who of great style writers, including Felicity Green, Prudence Glynn, Beatrix Miller, Grace Coddington, Suzy Menkes, Colin McDowell, Liz Tilberis, Isabella Blow, Iain R. Webb, Alexandra Shulman, Hilary Alexander, Paula Reed and Hamish Bowles.

The talk will feature specially-commissioned new photography, unseen archive material and the discussion is followed by a book signing, and an opportunity to talk to the Dress of the Year team in person. Dress of the Year is available for purchase from the Fashion and Textile Museum exhibition shop.

Rosemary Harden is Curator of the Fashion Museum Bath.

Richard Lester is the author of Dress of the Year. He trained with Sotheby’s in the early 1990s, having worked for Osborne & Little and Liberty, and combines writing with running an online vintage fashion business. In 2004 he donated a large collection of designs by John Bates to the Fashion Museum, Bath and assisted in organising the designer’s retrospective exhibition at the museum in 2006.

Matthew Freedman is a writer and the commissioning editor of Dress of the Year.