Encountering object and character: Visitor engagement with film costume in the exhibition ‘Hollywood Costume’

This study investigates how visitors perceived film costume in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) ‘Hollywood Costume’ exhibition. The findings are based on 296 survey responses gathered during the three-month run of the exhibition and eight ‘visitor storybooks’: sets of ten captioned photographs. In the following article, we outline the objective of the exhibition – to educate visitors on the role of the costume designer – and compare it both to issues in dress curation and to the two principal modes of visitor engagement with costume that arose from the data. Despite the exhibition’s emphasis on the role of the costume within the greater system of film, we saw that visitors engaged directly with costumes as objects or works of art in their own right, valued for their physical properties and as products of a material design process. They also appreciated costumes for their function of animating character and making absent figures present. The multimedia exhibition space as well as the context of the museum itself is shown to be essential to framing these modes of engagement. The questions and conclusions drawn by this article highlight the importance of understanding the nuances of visitor engagement with garments in the museum, especially in light of the popularity of exhibitions featuring dress and continued debates in the field.