About the Museum
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Collaborations
Europeana Fashion
The European fashion database Europeana Fashion is made possible by 21 museums and archives.
Since March 2012, the Centraal Museum has joined forces with 21 other enthusiastic museums and private archives to create a European fashion database: Europeana Fashion. The first results of this collaboration can now be found at europeanafashion.eu. In addition to garments, you will find drawings, fashion photographs, catalogues, websites and blogs.
Fashion is increasingly valued as an integral part of our culture. Fashion reflects society on both a personal and social level, while fashion designs are also part of the artistic spectrum. For these reasons, European museums have been collecting garments and accessories since the beginning of the 20th century, allowing us today to draw on a rich international collection of fashion-related heritage. Europeana Fashion brings the growing number of collections together online and makes them accessible to an international audience.
Europeana Fashion and the Centraal Museum
In the fashion and costume collection, 18th-century silk gowns with floral motifs sit alongside conceptual fashion by Iris van Herpen or Viktor & Rolf. Costumes have formed part of the collection since its earliest years. An active collecting policy was established in 1921. The costume curator wrote to aristocratic families asking whether they had any “old clothes in the attic.” Thanks to these efforts—and those of her successors—the collection includes virtually every silhouette from the history of costume since 1750. Since the late 1990s, the collecting policy has focused more on conceptual and international fashion, preferably work that pushes the boundaries of its own discipline.
The Centraal Museum’s fashion and costume collection now comprises more than 10,000 objects, which are made accessible in a European context through Europeana Fashion. The collection includes more than just fashion designs: images of fashion exhibitions, brochures and fashion catalogues are also included in Europeana Fashion.