The Museum of Fashion History is a museum in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 2004 by Jonathan Walford and Kenn Norman. The museum is a non-profit charitable organization.
History
Prior to founding the Museum of Fashion History, Jonathan Walford was the founding curator of the Bath Shoe Museum. Walford has been collecting historic fashion since the 1970s, finding items from auction houses, garage sales and even rescuing some pieces from the garbage. He has also written several books about fashion.
Wolford is currently the curator (director) of the museum. The museum’s other founder, Kenn Norman, who chairs the museum’s board, has a background in finance, project management, and design.
For its first ten years, the museum did not have a permanent gallery, so it created exhibitions that traveled across Canada and around the world, from Hong Kong to Bahrain. An experimental gallery in a shopping center in Cambridge, Ontario, in 2013 received nearly 8,000 visitors during the four and a half months the museum was open there.
In June 2015, the museum opened in a decommissioned three thousand square foot post office that opened in 1929 in the former town of Espler, now on the outskirts of Cambridge. The museum preserved and restored the original terrazzo floors and installed replicas of period fixtures for lighting. The project to restore the clock above the museum’s front doors was funded by the public. The city of Cambridge was once a center of textile manufacturing, making the museum fit the city’s history.
Collection
The museum has a collection of over 10,000 objects. These items range from what may be the oldest existing European shoe in North America (widely believed to have been worn in New Amsterdam and dating from around 1660), to dresses by Hollywood designer Adrian (Adolph Greenberg) to 1970s handbags made from cigarette packets.
Exhibitions
Before creating the current gallery space, the museum created traveling exhibitions and shows.