Colleen Farr, former textiles lecturer

Listen to reminiscences about art and design in the Swinging Sixties, the legendary Long Acre campus and the politics of the merger of the two schools. Our Museum and Study Collection has recently acquired a set of recordings which provide fascinating insights into life at the Central School and St. Martins School of Art.

The recordings are of interviews with former students and staff undertaken between 2008 and 2009 by former Head of CSM Museum Sylvia Backemeyer for a research project. The interviews concentrate primarily on textile design, graphic design, book illustration, ceramic design and theatre design. A list of those interviewed is available from the Museum and Study Collection and visitors are welcome to come and listen to the recordings.

Email museum.collection@csm.arts.ac.uk to listen to the recordings
Find out more about CSM Museum and Collections

Ruth Harris, former textiles lecturer

Final year BA Fashion, History and Theory student Victoria Thompson writes:
In the summer of 2009 I received the Costume Society Museum Placement Award, to catalogue and archive a collection at the Central Saint Martin’s Museum.

The placement required me to catalogue and archive the Norah Waugh and Margaret Woodward collection. Norah Waugh was former tutor at Central College of Art and Design, who worked on the BA Theatre Design course. With the assistance of Margaret Woodward, they wrote three books on historical design, Corsets and Crinolines (1954), The Cut of Men’s Clothes 1600-1900 (1964), and The Cut of Women’s Clothes 1600-1930 (1968).
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I’ve always been interested in labels. Not so much the luxury-brand type of label as the old-school typographic clothing labels found in the shirts and tweed jackets that I like.

I guess I first began to notice these when I began collecting vintage shirts as a student. I remember the CC41 Utility labels from WW2 and that Hawkins of Preston had a very nice label design in their shirts. I’m not sure if I ever bought a piece of vintage clothing just because I liked the label. But, it was always a consideration.

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