The School of Historical Dress	late sixteenth century loose-headed pins
This new school has a curriculum that will cover all aspects of the designing and making of historical costume for theatre, cinema and the living history movement; its unique approach will focus on developing the skills and understanding needed to create new generations of historical tailors, seamstresses and other specialists.
All teaching will be from practitioners who are actively working in various related areas of dress – cutters, tailors, sewers, designers and historians.
Our aim is to promote the study of historical dress and textiles by the students, both of the Western World and of other cultures, and to base such study on primary evidence, in particular, by studying and understanding surviving clothing supported by written sources and visual (portraits, sculptures etc). The school will encourage new research into historical dress and introduce students to the tools needed for this, such as how to study an object, identify its materials, cut, construction and historical context, and then how to document the object by pattern taking, drawing and photography. Students will then be taught to make such garments themselves.
The school will house the Janet Arnold Archive, including her unique and extensive colour slide collection of both surviving clothing and related images.
The Hopkins Collection of surviving garments and textiles from c.1700 to 1950 will bring further riches. This large collection, gathered over forty years by Alan and Vanessa Hopkins, includes examples of the dress of men and women from all social classes.
Together with other such resources, these collections will be actively used in the classroom. They will form the basis for projects and students will have the opportunity to handle objects as part of their studies.
The school is based in London and is running both general and specialised courses this year: introductory course : 18th century women's underpinnings. Images from previous courses
directors - Jenny Tiramani, Santina M. Levey, Vanessa Hopkins associate teachers - Luca Costigliolo, Alan Hopkins, Claire Thornton, Harriet Barsby to join our mailing list and receive updates on our events and courses please write to info@theschoolofhistoricaldress.org.uk The School of Historical Dress is a Registered Charity, Number 1142188