One morning in February this year, I opened my laptop to find an email with an all-caps subject line: TOP SECRET. Being a fashion editor can be exciting but state secrets are not generally my beat, so I was intrigued. Sure enough, it was a thrill: an invitation from the Fashion Museum Bath to choose their Dress of the Year for 2025.
Dress of the Year began in 1963, the brainchild of the museum’s founder Doris Langley Moore, as a way of keeping a static collection perpetually current. Each year a fashion expert picks an outfit or outfits that capture the year just gone, and these become part of the permanent collection. There is a Mary Quant dress and a Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirt, Ossie Clark chiffon and Ralph Lauren pinstripes.
There is sublime beauty from the catwalks of Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel and John Galliano, and pieces of cultural history: McQueen’s bumsters, Jennifer Lopez’s internet-breaking green Versace Grammy dress, Dior’s “We Should All Be Feminists” slogan, Naomi Campbell’s pandemic hazmat suit, a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and the dress worn by the Duchess of Sussex for her Oprah interview in 2021. The Bath museum is currently mid-revamp, having closed its doors in 2022, with construction soon to start on a new museum set to open in the city’s old post office in 2030. Meanwhile the collection is stored in Wiltshire and can be seen online.
The roll call of previous selectors is formidable. All the front row grand dames are present and correct. There are Vogue editors and Fleet Street’s most feared critics.
Legendary stylists, including Grace Coddington and the late Isabella Blow, iconic retailer Joan Burstein and beloved London milliner Stephen Jones. The protocol of Dress of the Year is singular, in that the museum chooses the chooser, who then has complete freedom. The thought of my fashion verdict being preserved on a pedestal in a glass case forevermore, rather than printed on the proverbial fish and chip paper, was daunting.
I experienced a swift emotional gear change from “chuffed” to “mildly panicked”. Plus the schedule – decision made in spring, selector announcement in summer, and DOTY revealed in October – gave me well over a month to make my choice, a timeframe which my daily-deadline-institutionalised brain found more overwhelming than liberating. But I knew what I wanted to do.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
