Expanding interview 2: Boel Ulfsdotter in conversation with Alexandra Palmer at Royal Ontario Museum, Canada

Summary

Boel Ulfsdotter [BU]: Hello Alexandra Palmer! You are the Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator, Global Fashion and Textiles and Chair of the Veronika Gervers Research Fellowship at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada. Our conversation will revolve around your method of using documentary footage in your fashion exhibitions. You introduced this film format in your very first exhibition, Elite Elegance: Couture Fashion in the 1950s, at ROM in 2002, when it was still a mainly pre-digital practice.

Alexandra Palmer [AP]: Yes, when I was writing my dissertation about 1950s couture in Canada, I became curious and wanted to find out what happened to these dresses when they left the design houses, and arrived in Canada, and who were the buyers, et cetera. I was desperate for information about the local documentation of fashion, so I went to the National Archives in Ottawa where they have a vast film collection. It was really interesting because the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, which started in the 1950s, have saved a lot of the early material. Posey Boxer was the first fashion reporter for television in our country and she reported from the fashion shows in Italy, commenting on the wonderful dresses coming down the Spanish Steps. CBC also interviewed Norman Hartnell when he came to Canada to introduce his clothes, sitting smoking in the studio and answering the male interviewer's questions about how it was to design clothes for women, including the Queen. This blackand- white footage caught my attention, especially the astonishing material in Eaton's archives, because this chain of department stores also had its own film and photography studio, since they were in operation well before television started. They made films for in-store fashion training and for their own public fashion shows. All in all, it was this fantastic material that got me interested in documentary footage of fashion because it gives you a visual record of fashion at the time. My interest in this type of transmission of fashion information made me watch a lot of archival footage, since I realised it was so different to more contemporary footage which brings you inside fashion shows and designer studios in a completely different way.