The Textiles & Dress Collection
The Dress Collection
The Textiles & Dress Collection is a rich reference archive of garments, fabrics and associated materials, encompassing fashion and interiors textiles, commercial dress patterns, craft publications and more. Its holdings range from everyday underwear to dramatic opera capes, wallpaper samples to plastic macs, dancing shoes to delicately worked doilies.
The Collection charts the evolution of dress through time, preserving the design, cut, construction and material choices of clothing worn in ordinary lives as well as garments made for significant moments. By valuing the everyday alongside the exceptional, it illuminates how textiles shape our identities and our histories. Earliest examples include seventeenth-century lace, with dress and accessories spanning from the early 1800s to the present.
The archive also incorporates major specialist holdings gifted by private collectors, including The Men’s Bodywear Collection, The Ivy Leaf bespoke corsetry collection, The Shelagh Lovett Turner nineteenth-century dress archive, the Fletcher Lace Collection, and pieces linked to Cornwall accompanied by personal narratives from donors and wearers.
This remarkable resource offers inspiration and insight to researchers of textile and costume history, designers working in fashion or interiors, and anyone intrigued by the enduring cultural significance of clothing and cloth.
See behind the scenes of the Textiles and Dress Collections on Instagram.
Follow us on InstagramThe Devonshire Collection of Period Costume
Since 2025, Falmouth University is the proud home of The Devonshire Collection of Period Costume: a collection of over 40,000 garments dating back to the 1700s, making it one of the UK's largest private collections of unique vintage and historical dress.
Now, the collection has been installed in a new £25,000 climate-controlled facility and extensively catalogued. An inaugural exhibition showcased the first phase of exploration and sparked ideas for future research, collaboration and public engagement, involving staff, students and local businesses.
The history of The Collection
The Devonshire Collection of Period Costume was founded in 1967 by theatre enthusiasts Peter Clapham, Paula Morel and Annette Ingold, who combined their personal collections of historical garments. Over the years they built one of the largest privately owned dress and textile collections in the UK, displayed for decades in a dedicated museum in a Grade I listed house on Totnes High Street.
In 2025, as the museum’s lease came to an end, a charitable trust was created and arrangements made for Falmouth University to become custodians for the next five years after. Falmouth was chosen as the new home to keep the collection in the Southwest and benefit from the university’s expertise across fashion, technology and the creative industries.
How to visit
Materials from this Collection are housed in the Fashion & Textiles Institute, and are not currently open to the public. However, a selection may be viewed by appointment for research or scholarly activities.
Cataloguing on this collection is in progress. The catalogue can be searched here. Not all of our catalogue is currently available online, so if you are interested in a specific garment or item, please contact us.
For further information please contact: textilesanddresscollection@falmouth.ac.uk
The Wardrobe Store
The Fashion & Textiles Institute’s Wardrobe Store is a working costume house, with thousands of items for use in student and professional film and television production.
It stocks a wide range of men’s and women’s contemporary, everyday clothing, as well as sportswear, workwear, service uniforms, period, historical and national dress.
Items of dress from the Wardrobe Store are working items, and as such are able to be used in film, television, stage and immersive productions.
Costume donations
We are limited in our capacity to accept donations, and can not accept theatre costume at this time. However, we would welcome screen quality vintage, period, historic and national dress and accessories.
Visiting us
Students can access the Stores during term time, and by appointment. Members of the public can browse the Wardrobe Store’s costume rails by appointment. Please contact WardrobeStore@falmouth.ac.uk.
Explore the Wardrobe Store
Explore the Wardrobe Store, costume collection and other facilities on our virtual tour.
