Lady Lever Art Gallery to showcase new collection from the 1920s

A selection of glamorous evening wear dating from the 1920s to today will be shown at Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral.

Showcasing 20 outfits, Bedazzled (26 October 2024 to 26 January 2025) celebrates the enduring popularity of beaded garments and explores the skills involved in making them.

The exhibition also provides an opportunity for National Museums Liverpool to present recently acquired items from the wardrobe of Leila Potter (1935 – 2022) for the first time. Leila was a successful businesswoman, charity campaigner and local councillor who spent much of her life living in Wirral and Cheshire. She had a passion for dazzling, sequinned items of clothing, usually featuring the colour pink.

Pauline Rushton, Head of Lady Lever Art Gallery, said:

“Bedazzled is a riot of beads, sequins and sparkle – bringing a real dose of colour and glamour to the gallery over the festive period.

“We’re particularly excited to be showing some of Leila Potter’s 1980s items for the first time. Glitzy styles from this period were likely to have been influenced in part by popular American television programmes such as Dallas and Dynasty, where sequins and shoulder pads were synonymous with some of the leading female characters.”

The renewed appetite for dazzling evening wear in the 1980s followed the post-War period during which elaborate, beaded evening wear wasn’t part of mainstream fashion. It was still being made by the leading fashion houses, but wasn’t available or affordable to the majority of shoppers in the UK.

The exhibition looks back to the 1920s and early 1930s when glittering, beaded gowns were first made in large numbers. They represented not only a sharp contrast to the practical yet uninspiring clothing that had been a necessity during the First World War, but also a dramatic change in the cut of women’s garments. In a departure from the corseted, layered styles that were fashionable before the War, modern dresses in the 1920s were long and tubular in shape.

As well as being less constrictive to wear, the simplified forms and flat surfaces were ideal for decorating with sequins and beads. Bedazzled explores the production of glass ‘bugle’ beads, which were made in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the highly skilled French art of tambour embroidery as a method of hand-stitching beads and sequins onto the surface of a dress.

Through the costumes on show, Bedazzled charts the changes in the manufacture of beaded evening wear over the last century, from beaded dresses made in France during the 1920s, through to sequinned jackets which were decorated in Indian workshops during the 1980s. Visitors will see how societal changes and technological advancements have impacted on these developments.

Accompanying the items on show are some of the fascinating stories behind them, revealing who owned them and – in some cases – the important events to which they were first worn. The exhibition also features a selection of eye-catching, diamanté-embellished accessories.